Branislav Jakovljević: “The study of (mass) performance: Was Youth Day a Totalitarian Performance?”
Friday, March 21, Filodrammatica (Rijeka) at 7 PM.

Branislav Jakovljević specializes in 20th and 21st century experimental performance, theater history, dramaturgy, and performance across disciplines (visual art, theater, non-aesthetic performance). He recently completed his second book manuscript, Beyond the Performance Principle: Self-Management and Conceptual Art in Yugoslavia. He also chaired the Performance Studies International conference in June “Now Then: Performance and Temporality”.

Branislav will reconsider Youth Day (celebration of Josip Broz Tito‘s birthday) as a result of a “baroque complex” typical of Yugoslavian culture, while rejecting the usual comparative and morphological readings of such performances.

Branislav examines how performance studies can contribute to historiography, to cultural studies and to literature.

The central object here will be the Youth Day celebration, one of the greatest performances of the socialist Yugoslavia; a performance that was so ideologically over-emphasized that the memory of it is unmistakably associated with a certain sense of fear and unease. However, ideological reading reveals only one thin surface layer of such festivity.

Youth Day considered in both historical and modern performance perspective, reveals new layers of not only these massive feasts, but also economic, political , and ideological characteristics of the society in which they were enacted, and whose constituent part they were.

Organized by: Drugo more

Supported by: National Foundation for Civil Society Development, Foundation Kultura nova, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, City of Rijeka – Department for Culture