Dusan Jovanovic, neko gledalisko zivljenje

is not easy to write a short text about Dušan Jovanović, perhaps one of the greatest playwrights, but also theatre directors in this region (director of 130 theatre productions, 23 plays, 9 film scripts, 4 books of essays and columns, 2 novels), and try to give an objective, in-depth and analytical presentation. For his contemporaries, he was an educated, courageous, ethical and flamboyant personality, a talented writer and director, a great interlocutor and narrator. But for future generations, only a fraction of all that will remain, unfortunately, either only in written form (plays) or in video recordings (productions), while the memories of his contemporaries and students will fade away slowly. Jovanović's presence was indispensable for (ex) Yugoslav theatre, and beyond, he constantly shaped it and created it anew, giving it enormous importance and social impact, which cannot be said lately -- theatre has become a marginal artistic practice, despite numerous festivals and premieres in the region. The originality and innovation of Jovanović's stage language were closely related to a refined feeling for the real life around him, Jovanović drew his themes from immediate reality, which he would then vivisect on stage. Although he went through various stages in his work, from the Slovenian neo-avant-garde, through the Yugoslav post-dramatic theatre, and finally to the post-Yugoslav institutional theatre, Jovanović remained a kind of permanent revolutionary in the theatre, faithful his radical, uncompromising view of reality, constantly letting it intrude into his texts and plays, but only in a form that he would then play with, deconstruct and construct in his own performative way. Writing for the theatre and writing in the theatre, all of this was permeated with his highly ethical and political being. Everything personal would become public in his theatre, and everything public in life became his intimate experience later again translated into the theatre. It is not possible to define his directorial poetics, without having in mind his dramatic creativity or all other forms of his creativity, including his personality. If by any chance Dušan Jovanović was a French or German playwright and director, I am sure that he would be ranked among the best directors and writers of his generation, but not because of any specific aesthetic mannerism, but because of the courage and radicalism of his artistic expression and constant questioning the boundaries of theatre. Sensitivity and openness to all social and historical changes, economic and political turmoil, manipulation of power and repression, wars, human suffering, as well as various types of injustice, were always present in his work, which each time had a similar fragmentary structure, similar to jazz improvisations: with its linguistic and rhythmic polyphony, repetitions, syncopations, mashing ups, quotations, interrogative and confessional speeches, narration. Every time he created a completely new performative form, changing the theatrical grammar from the roots. With his entire theatrical being, Jovanović challenged the popular opinion that the theatre is a place of social entertainment, either in the service of a high culture, or a repository of great literature. On the contrary, he is one of the few, like Brecht and Piscator, and later Christof Schlingensief and Rene Pollesch, who until the end of their lives believed in the revolutionary potential of theatre that could change the world, turning it into a laboratory of successful and less successful experiments, in which there was a constant struggle between traditional art and avant-garde.