-
Dragan Klaic 1950-2011 A Reflection
- Central European University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Dragan Klaic 1950-2011 A reflection Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Dragan Klaic, a passionate European, a great intellectual force, an inspiring teacher, and a delightful, if at times maddening friend, who kept you on your toes with his quick thinking, provocative statements and challenging questions. LIFT(LondonInternationalFestivalofTheatre)first encountered Dragan in 1993 the year after he had gone into voluntary exile following the bloody and traumatic breakup of Yugoslavia. In July 1993 the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo – Dragan’s birthplace was on the verge of collapse, as the Serbian forces closed in from the surrounding hills. That same week at the LIFT Festival a company made up of artists from across Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Croatia were performing Sarajevo, a haunting 102 lament for the ideals of a multi-cultural city that had been crushed as ethnic hatred inflamed its inhabitants. Dragan came over from Amsterdam, where he had just taken over as director of the Netherlands Theatre Institute, reconnecting with friends and colleagues from the former Yugoslavia and played a leading role in the debates we had organised with Amnesty International and The Refugee Council. Over the subsequent years we would frequently run into Dragan at festivals and conferences; he would always be engaged in fierce debate, usually challenging the status quo – for which he often got into trouble - delivering diatribes against the pernicious effects of nationalism and parochialism; and promoting the imperative of the European cultural project. Dragan was also passionate about festivals and was the initiator and chair of the European Festivals Research Project. So, in 2005, when we were writing The Turning World, Stories from the London International Festival of Theatre, it was very natural to ask Dragan to contribute an essay to our chapter on festivals. Writing in the The TurningWorldhecoinedthewonderfullyevocative phrase describing festivals as experimental zones of sociability, going, in our view, to the heart of the festival spirit. In the same essay he also argued [54.198.45.0] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:10 GMT) 103 that “there was an urgent need for theatre to reexamine its social functions and reconsider its capacity to reshape the collective imagination and memory, to serve as a vehicle of debate, enhance intercultural relationships and affirm the public space as an essential feature of democracy.” This is a subject he returned to in the book he had almost finished at the time of his death about the value of what he termed public as opposed to commercial theatre. Lucy recalls: Dragan has affected how I look and think about things. I am reminded of the 1970 picture of Joseph Beuys on the sofa, cradling an axe. This international work is not all comfy cushions. You need some metal in hand as well...! When engaging with Dragan, the combination of his humour, intellect and curiosity in what you had to say yourself made you sit up straight. No slouching. The broad brush and close detail of a festival is a devilishly darned thing to describe to people, especially when your own ideas for its design are constantly on the move. The world’s turning requires dexterous mapping: artistic experiments; socio-political shifts; paradigms to change and paradoxes to show. Dragan articulated our evolution of LIFT – sometimes better even than 104 we could ourselves – with comic insight and charged sense of a utopia he believed festivals engendered. He knew in his bones they mattered and the vigilance with which their values of cooperation needed defending. The precision and humanity with which he spelt this out was and remains an inspiration. Carrying his ideals on is a shared challenge. No slouching Dragan! Rose continues: I was privileged to spend a great of time with Dragan in Lublin, Poland over the past two years. We were the so called ‘international experts’, along with the artist and writer Krzysztof Czyżewski, helping to develop the city’s bid to become the European Capital of Culture 2016. On an almost monthly basis we would meet at 10pm at Warsaw airport, Dragan arriving either from his home in Amsterdam or from Budapest where he taught the MA Masters in Cultural Management at the Central European University. The car journey to Lublin would be filled with reflections on the state of Europe, gossip on the latest political scandal or bureaucratic incompetence, descriptions of the shows he’d seen on his travels – this opera in Budapest or Paris, that theatre show in...