Author(s): Sanja Nikčević / Language(s): Croatian
Issue: 21/2016
In our European, cultural circle the theatre originated from the ritual (that is from faith). The relationship between faith and theatre in great epochs went from harmony (antiquity, Middle Ages, baroque and the civic drama of the 18th and 19th centuries), for the theatre asserted both fath and social order, through disharmony (renaissance, classicism, romanticism) because the theatre has some other time as its model (its faith and order, hence they are called “imitative”, all way up to a genuine split in today’s time (Modernism and later the so called Postmodernism). When by the end of the 19th century realism introduced criticism of society as the only legitimate function of high art, the wish was to improve the society. From a ritual art became science, and artists not only photographers of society but also surgeons relying on contemporary sciences. With the time this criticism turned into fault-finding, and the changing of the society for the better into imposing a negative picture of the world as the only thing being worthy of high art. Beauty and positive emotions (happiness, love, friendship) and the very catharsis were declared kitsch, which culminated in the trend of the new European play of the nineties. In that process, the destruction of fundamental human values is considered as artistic courage along with a systematic attack on the institutions such as the government, police, army, and especially the Church. That theatre type is today the main stream of the European theatre, it lives on ample government grants, travels from festival to festival, is awarded prizes and has a strong media coverage, but is losing the audience. Nevertheless, there continues to exist an affirmative, even religious theatre: in extraordinary situations (Homeland War in Croatia) or on the outskirts (on the outskirts of the City of Zagreb, in theatrical amateurism or in the theatres outside Zagreb). In the wish for such a theatre, the audience itself initiates manifestations (Festival of the Christian Theatre Zagreb; FRKA Virovitica).
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