Since when has the administration National Theatre turned against the people who work in the theater, therefore against the theater, and then, in the next instance, against culture in a broader sense, Željko Hubač, a playwright at the National Theatre, is very precise in his public addresses. At the same time, he does not miss the opportunity to put every event and every name he mentions in the context that determines this and that speech. We talk about the National Theatre, about culture and especially non-culture, about principles and compromises, about the student and civic movement, and finally about our own responsibility for what happens to us.
"WEATHER" How would you describe the current state of the National Theatre? (and around it)?
ŽELJO HUBAČ: The National Theater should, by its essence, be the most conservative and the most avant-garde theater in the country, it should have good working conditions and provide quality artistic results. This theater has shown that it can produce quality. And now I should talk about a situation that has been brought to the point of absurdity that you have Dragoslav Bokan, a man whose ethical worldview goes so far as to consider the civil war as an excellent opportunity for the purification of the people. That man is today the president of the Board of Directors of the National Theater. So you have people - some of whom I would argue are excellent bar musicians - who run the theater, deal with administration and produce some kind of papers in which they restrict freedom of speech, freedom of thought and even freedom of movement. And Bokan did not come alone to the National Theater, Dragoljub Bajić did not come alone to the position of manager. The Ministry of Culture, Nikola Selaković, is responsible for that.
And that is absurd....
And that of the first kind. The Minister of Culture should recognize certain qualities and improve them. What capacity does the Minister of Culture have behind him to act in that direction? The capacity with which he managed to produce the paper, it is actually a notice on the website, which illegally closes the theater building. The National Theater started its season on the first of October, and "finished" on the third. It was said then that advice was received from the MUP and the inspection to close the theater. I went to the MUP to look for the paper on the basis of which the theater was closed. They told me that they don't have that paper. Then I asked for a confirmation that they don't have such a paper, they told me that they don't issue that type of certificate. And it's a high-speed circuit. They closed the theater on the day of our warning strike. How and when the theater closes - that is prescribed by the law, but they do not pay attention to small things like the law. They closed the theater on the website, they communicate with the artists through the website and letters. For the first time in my life, I saw that the manager lowers his head when he sees an employee at the National Theater. These are resellers of morals, in the south they say it - matrapazis, hoarders who buy cheap and sell more expensive, and they have taken over this area.
What does Dragoslav Bokan symbolize?
Bokan symbolizes the impotence of this regime. You have a man who graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, department - film direction, who has not made a single feature film. This is the man who led some kind of paramilitary formation "White Eagles" on the battlefields and battlefields of the 1990s. Among other things, Bokan was once accused of extorting money, so that is outdated, which logically led to the fact that today he is the most common figure in the SNS radical narrative. The progressives came to power presenting themselves as some proto-Europeans, I don't know what they are in the ideological sense, but I know how they function at all levels. The commissioner of SNS in the local community where I work bought a bag full of potatoes and they untied it at the cash register, and inside, in the middle, there is also garlic. I say - I don't understand, what is this?, and people answer me - so we know it; he buys a little more potatoes and hides garlic inside because it is more expensive. So, their principle is "steal wherever you can", so who gets as far as they can - some to the garlic, some to the white ship.
To my?
We are not innocent in this. We resist in the National Theater, but it's like the Stalinist method - you sign one sentence at a time and at the end you sign that you are guilty, that's the method that works here. And people are slowly getting used to lower and lower standards. And now it may happen that the city secretary for culture comes up with the idea that theaters should not be financed for production, but only for salaries and building maintenance costs. At the same time, your own income has been abolished, whatever you earn at the treasury, you cannot dispose of it outside the treasury. Tell me where in the world art is not subsidized? You in Japan can rent the National Theater for anything, but there is a programming council that defines the limits. We have a competition system where it doesn't matter what quality you offer, what matters is how close you are to the source of power.
It turns out that the Ministry of Culture is most responsible?
In any normal country, someone who is prime minister, not someone like Matsuto, but someone who is truly a prime minister with executive powers, would demand an audit of the work of the Ministry of Culture. I am speaking quite dispersively because we are being attacked from all sides by kiln owners, ceramicists... If I had stuck to the ceramic trade, I would not have thought of being the Minister of Defense. The consequence of that is the destruction of the energy system. I don't know how to define a man, I mean the president of this country, who is so easy to blurt out in public with "so what". The executive branch, with the president at the helm, attacks organized crime prosecutors who investigate abuses of that executive branch, calling them obstructionists. Among other things, they also attack my children - they claim that someone is financing them. Well, the only ones who financed my children - the protesting students, are my wife and me. This government only successfully fulfills lies, divisions and a long series of looting from public resources.
We have a long tradition of this beautiful custom.
This tradition of recognizing oligarchies through money continued especially after the death of Zoran Đinđić. And now we have come to a situation where they are openly stealing. In the south of Serbia, there is an expression - when a louse is fed, it gets into the eyes. Now the regime resides like a louse in our eyes, and there are still people who do not see it. For different reasons, but also interests. I think that anyone who gives any kind of support to such a government has some problems with reason and honor.
Let's go back to the National Theater...
It is obvious that the administration that passed the regulation, directly aimed against the freedom of employees, does not have the guts to implement it and that it is actually a matter of someone's whim. Our support for the student movement, more precisely the principles of that movement, is indisputable. The management wanted to stop us from showing it and they backfired. They also tried to pick a fight with security. They gave them an order to prevent colleagues who are not playing in the play from going on stage. Security does not want to do that, and the management told them to call the police, and they (the management) will find someone who can. They want to divide us with those security people who receive 50-60 thousand salary. Of course, we will not fall into that trap. Now those of us who are not playing in the play are holding banners in front of the theater, and our colleagues on the stage are loudly supporting our demands in front of the audience. In the theater, especially in Drama, we have a high degree of solidarity, we demand the replacement of the management, the minister and the improvement of working conditions, and we point out that the management introduces politics into the theater, not us. Finally, I saw with my own eyes Dragoljub Bajić, acting manager of the National Theater in Ćaciland.
The resistance offered by the ensemble to the administration is clearly correlated with the resistance offered by the citizens to the authorities?
The theater is a space where it is important for the performance to be socially engaged. This does not mean that it should be political, pamphlet-like. The other day I watched a play that was directly politically engaged, and artistically not good. The theater must find the right ratio between social engagement and art, more precisely, to be socially engaged with artistic elements. That's why it exists. When you read Nušić today, or Sterijine Patriots, they seem to be from this time. And the movements that exist in society have moved theaters to a certain type of activism. It was no accident that the index appeared on the gift at the National Theater. This sends an ethical message. It may or may not concern that play, and then you get another kind of applause that supports the principles of the student movement. On the other hand, an atmosphere is created in which politics is such a dirty thing that it creates the impression that everyone is the same. That corresponds to those who warm themselves in regime armchairs. I think that it suits some opposition structures to be where they are, but that does not exclude the fact that there are people in those parties who have certain political and ethical principles.
What principles do you mean??
Politics as a struggle for certain ideas (and not as robbery). The students, as young people, recognized this and said: "Let's reset the state, let's create some legal framework in which the law will be respected to begin with." The effectiveness of a government system depends on whether it will be able to recognize and catch thieves, who will always be there. I see in the elementary school, near my building, people who deal marijuana and synthetic drugs. I see it with my own eyes. The students gave us hope that we have the strength to demand respect for such principles. We had this authority two years ago, and the director of the National Theater was Svetislav Goncić. As far as I know, he was not a member of SNS, he was a sympathizer. I must say that his idea was to bring together the artistic qualities that exist in the theater, to create a high-quality repertoire, to restore the ensemble, an artistic council composed of people from the house was introduced, the idea was to improve the theater. I don't ask Bulet Goncić which party he belongs to, I don't care if he does his job well. From all sides of the political spectrum, the story of how all ours are good and all theirs are bad is taking shape. It is a sure path to ruin, but also to absolute inertness.
For example?
I'm familiar with some things in energy, I studied it at university. So I know how lignite is transported to blast furnaces. Our coal is of poor quality, there is a lot of mud. Hundreds of meters of conveyor belt carries the coal to the furnace, and there are people around to supervise it. The point is that mud does not enter the blast furnace, because it reduces the volume of the furnace by firing, and the furnace has no more room for burning. You enrich the coal with oil by sporadically pouring oil into the blast furnace to boost the calorific value because you need a certain temperature for the generators to work. You waited for several hundred people next to the tracks to see with their own eyes how the clean mud passes and enters the blast furnaces, they see that hundreds and hundreds of liters of oil are poured from above in order to maintain a fire at all, and then when the space for burning disappeared, at that moment the thing broke. The responsibility is also borne by people who have become so numb and have lost social interest to such an extent that they said "I'd rather mind my own business and get paid than to talk about how this is mud". Because there is someone who will tell you that it is not mud. The regime did work hard on falling into apathy, but the people themselves are also responsible for that.
Something has changed though....
The fall of the canopy, more precisely, the student revolt changed that. We did not believe that our children at that age had any kind of interest in social engagement. My children are at that age, so I experience it intimately. We in the theater did not even understand to what extent their attention was focused on some other intensity of presentation, because short video forms are close to them. When my son reads A bridge on the Drina, says that there are many descriptions. He needs dramatic action, dramatic action. We thought it was a lost generation. We did not enter into communication with them in the right way.
photo: marija janković...
And what do you see now??
I have been in contact with students this year in various ways and I can tell you that I am pleasantly surprised by how they reflect on reality. Among the older generations, some consider them to be very young. Whatever we think about the Second World War, a significant number of members of both movements were in their twenties at the time. The world was changed by those young people. Students make their list for the elections, and then people from that list - who have achieved something in their professional work - are called out for having no political experience. Total absurdity. Is it a political experience to lie, to steal, to have a sneer at ethical, moral or any kind of criticism? Aristotle said that the man who knows the middle, the one who lives in the middle between the extremes, is the one who interests the playwright. And if the theater is a testimony of real life, if the whole world is a stage, then a man who knows the environment, a man from the environment, is the most important segment of society in an ethical sense.
How do you see the relationship of this regime to culture? What does this mode offer??
They are not interested in that, as far as they are concerned, we can all write. They don't understand it. When someone does not understand something, he has two ways - one is to educate himself, the other is to hate. They chose this second path. Vladimir Đukanović said it very openly - as far as I'm concerned, they can all go on strike for the rest of their lives. And it is he who does not hesitate at all to talk about an identity of the Serbian people. He does not understand that what is recognizable as the identity of the Serbian people is culture. Culture is the only area where we can compete with big countries with small investments. We have legal frameworks in which we can develop culture, they should be improved, but here the opposite is being done because systemic anarchy has been created. What Nikola Pašić would say - laws are for opponents.
Law, therefore, it does not apply to them?
The most terrible thing is that this government has on two occasions opened something that is a construction site, I am talking about the Railway Station in Novi Sad, with the message that it is a completely safe facility. You then see it fall and kill 16 people. He could have killed 160 people. And then you realize - someone has to answer. The regime retaliated by saying it was a "color revolution". And that's a matrix, it was applied in Georgia, it's applied in Russia, it's not I don't know what kind of philosophy. Insult, slander, lie, repeat the same thing over and over until it gets into your head. We have come to the point where students are demanding elections because for 7-8 months no one has budged from the deadlock in terms of responsibility. And you have Oscars and Oscars, documented, walking freely around this country. Who threaten by phone, threaten physically, who will beat you if you don't vote for them. On an ethical level, Bokan has lost the right to represent anything, let alone the National Theater. He seriously disrupted international cooperation with his appearance as chairman of the Board of Directors. You have recommendations from some ministries of culture from the region not to come to Serbia. Whoever comes to Serbia and looks at Ćaciland from the side, realizes that this is not a normal country. In that Ćaciland, there are not students who want to study, but criminals who don't want to sit in prison, for the most part. Bokan wants to hold a literary evening there, but they won't let him because they're playing music, and he's commanding them. It is about the profile of an absolutist of dwarf growth. You have that in Shakespeare, you have the Duke of Gloucester and King Lear. In order for the tragedy of King Lear's fate to exist, there must also be the tragedy of a lower mimetic character - the Duke of Gloucester. It is the same in this situation - Vučić gathered dwarf absolutists so that he would represent some greatness in that environment.
Somehow we come back to those of us who did not resist all that.
We are not a nation that can give birth to Teslas or Milutin Milanković every day, they are specimens. We are a nation that apparently gives birth to Pašićs and Vučićs. I think that young people are clean, they haven't had time to think about the responsibility regarding the past because their past is short. But they think about the responsibility that concerns the future. And I think they know that the ideals they set as the measure of a decent life may be unattainable. They are not naive. But they hold fast to those ideals because if you have certain points that you want to reach, then you must be going up, not down, towards them. You cannot, in these social circumstances, achieve any progress through a system of compromises. By doing so, you only come to a compromise with yourself. Whoever compromises with himself has not realized all the potential of his life. Most of us have encountered compromise and most of us have agreed to that compromise in some segment of our lives. And if we are not sorry that because of that compromise, because of that conformism, we gave up developing a part of ourselves, some gift, whatever, small, then we must be aware that others are not to blame for our misfortune, but, first of all, us.
Change happens, first of all, in the person himself, and then in his family, neighborhood, among friends, acquaintances... And we have to understand one thing, and that is that there will always be people who think differently than us. We must not do what this government is doing at all levels, including in the National Theater - we must not bring security and artists into conflict. To conclude, we must finally start obeying the law.
Big holiday discount on "Vreme" - subscriptions 25 percent cheaper until mid-January. Give it away subscription to yourself or to someone else, read what matters.
