After the Fall: Representing post-communist experience and transformed conditions of labour in contemporary documentary theatre

Sanja Mitrovic
Promotors: Klaas Tindemans, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Jorge Palinhos

After the Fall PhD research is part of a long-term project in the field of documentary theatre aimed at addressing the political and social upheavals which have occurred over the last 30 years – from the fall of communism and the emergence of neoliberalism as dominant global ideology, to its recent descent into ultra- conservatism and neofascism. My research will follow two main lines of inquiry:


1. the individual and collective experience of transition leading up to and following the regime change in former communist countries. Of particular interest are parallels between the recent history of countries from the former Eastern Block, and the surviving communist regimes in countries such as Vietnam and China.

2. the changes in character and value of labour since the digital revolution. Radically transformed over the last three decades, the understanding of what constitutes labour, how it is structured and remunerated, serves not only as a litmus-test of financial and economic developments, but also as a prism through which wider socials issues, such as collectivity, community and (in)equality, are reflected.

The connection between two topics is both historical and structural. During the 1990s the collapse of communism around the world was accompanied by an uninterrupted – and largely unregulated – acceleration of digital technologies, establishing ground for new forms of labour increasingly separated from work force through automation, digitisation and artificial intelligence. By the decade’s end, the so-called Third Industrial Revolution was taking over other aspects of our lives as well. I remember opening my first email account in 1999, the year in which the NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia ushered in a new era of unauthorised military intervention and disproportionate power relations within the international community. Today it is hard to imagine work, leisure or social life without email or Internet. Likewise, the rapid spread of social media over the last decade coincided roughly with the 2008 financial crisis, initially offering potential for unrestricted democratic expression but resulting, by this day, in a new brand of populist, right- wing politics, the culture of unaccountability, and near-total annihilation of any claim to veracity or fact. In both cases technological advances served as harbingers of new stages of digital, post-industrial capitalism which, some argue, will lead to a “world without work”. But what this practically encompasses is the collapse of workers’ rights, trade unions and the class consciousness; rampant exploitation at hands of unregulated capital; and much greater vulnerability for individual workers.

For documentary theatre, a practice seeking to formulate an understanding of recent history, these topics are relevant as epochal shifts which have changed the world within the lifespan of a generation. For me as a documentary theatre maker, a closer investigation of these developments – and the relationship between them – offers an opportunity to:
- enrich my artistic practice by using them in the forthcoming projects as thematic, historical and theoretical background for a continued experimentation with aesthetic approaches, live-event technologies and representational strategies through which the nature and quality of lived experience is questioned and translated into theatrical form
- advance my knowledge of documentary theatre by exploring its history in the last 30 years from the perspective of how it has proposed to address these issues within its wider examination of the notions of truth, memory and reality itself
- test different teaching methodologies by positioning them as conceptual frameworks and case studies in the academic and practical curriculum for the courses in theatre directing
Aimed outcomes over the next four years include:
- two theatre productions developed around and in relation to the research, accompanied by a series of video documentations of live performances
- a publication looking at documentary theatre since the fall of communism and its attempts to articulate this experience; a combination of a historical survey and an artist’s book in which research documentation is interspersed with personal reflections on the process and the researched topics
- a publication exploring historical and contemporary strategies for representing the experience of labour in theatre, and changes through which it has been transformed over the last three decades; a combination of a historical survey and a ‘manual’ for a series of workshops addressing this topic through performative and discursive exercises
- a musical release collecting elements of audio archive developed as part of the research and music created for and as part of new theatre productions