Contours and Contestations

Abstract

I’ll call her Jelena. At rehearsals in the Varaždin, Croatia, refugee camp I worked at in 1995, she generally showed up dressed in full camouflage gear, wearing her father’s army uniform and a slightly disdainful expression. I recognized this skepticism as similar to that expressed by my Croatian-born father when I told him of my pending performance project — collaboratively created with Cornerstone Theater artist Sabrina Peck and an ensemble of youth, aged 16–25, in the camp. My father wondered how theatre could possibly offer anything of value to those suffering from a displacement wrought by violent interethnic conflict. The question unnerved me at the time and continues to do so. It’s not a bad question to ask. What does theatre have to offer in spaces of violence and territorial dispossession, particularly in the face of narratives that justify those acts as necessary to defend oneself and one’s (sometimes newly reconstituted) social group?