Ecdyses of drama and theatre records the specifics of the dialogical relations between the praxes of text and

stage and the parallel transformation of these two fields of art into culture in the last few decades.
Parallel with this it also cultivates the self-reflection of theatre studies. The book arises from Badiou’s
conviction that literary as well as theatre studies (similar to philosophy) are merely mediators for
encounters with truths, or rather “procureses of encounters with truth.” It tries to link the practical
context for live theatre and drama productions with their ongoing reception and reflection. Its pages
reflect the softening of the traditional borders of theoretical approaches on the one hand and of the
disciplines of art on the other. In the discussions, which intertwine with and complement one another
and undermine temporary solutions to establish new ones, dialogues arise between the praxes of theory
and art, dialogues with thinkers (Artaud, Derrida, Deleuze-Guattari, Badiou, Ubersfeld, Pavis,
Lehmann, Sarrazac, Poschmann, Blau, Auslander, Šuvaković, Erjavec, Kralj, Kermauner, and others),
and artists (Zajc, Beckett, Strniša, Jelinek, Svetina, Ristić, Jovanović, Taufer, Hrvatin, Pograjc, Sellars,
Abdoh, Brook, Beckett, Bernhard, Lepage, Koltès, and others).
 The book thus sketches out maps of the networked interconnectedness between art, politics and
thought of recent decades. It focuses on a series of strategies by contemporary dramatic and post-
dramatic theatre and staging practice in general, attempts to locate and verify various crossings which
characterize live theatre and which frame three of its properties which are explored in more depth:
nomadism, rhapsodization and subversiveness.

The first part of the book deals with nomadic journeys through drama and threatre of the second half
of the last century, which trace rhizomatic structures and turning points, interruptions of intertexts as
fabrics of citations. It arises from the conviction that the concepts of physicality and conclusiveness of
texts as practiced by semiotics and structural analysis of the 1960s are inadequate, and that it is necessary
to understand a text as a fabric or a nomadic circulation of citations, as Eco’s open work, Bakhtin’s
principle of dialogism. Every book that we hold in our hands is at the same time, and primarily, an
unbounded text in which other texts and discourses reach between the printed lines. In tracing the
mutual operation of texts it lingers over selected examples of Slovenian drama and theatre texts from
around 1990 (Dane Zajc, Mirko Zupančič, Dušan Jovanović, Drago Jančar, Ivo Svetina). The sites of
intertextuality and maps of nomadic paths in the continuation are found within the dramatic works of
Veno Taufer and Emil Filipčič and the dialogues between the dramatic and novelistic writings of Dane
Zajc and Samuel Beckett. Thus it tracks the techniques and tactics of intertextual seduction and
suspicion.

The second part of the book covers the crossing over of the dramatic to the (no longer) dramatic,
post-dramatic, and rhapsodic. Of interest are the processes and results of the rhapsodic emergence of
the theatre, the intensive rhapsodization of theatrical texts: montages of forms, tones, deconstructions
and reconstructions of theatrical, paratheatrical (especially the philosophical dialogue) and extra-
theatrical (the novel, novella, essay, letters, diary, confession, etc.), as practiced by such different
writers as Ivan Cankar, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, Marguerite Duras, Gregor
Strniša, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Thomas Berhnard, Elfriede Jelinek, Bernard Marie Koltès, Umberto Eco;
and by directors in dialogues with writers, for example, Mile Korun with Dostoyevsky and Jančar,
Dušan Jovanović with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Krystian Lupa with writers such as Alfred Kubin,
Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, R. M. Rilke, Hermann Broch, F. M. Dostoyevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and Stanislaw Lem.

The third part of the book explores the concept of subversiveness in theatre and staging practices of
the second half of the 20th century in Slovenia, and along with it in the art of the second world during the
period of socialism and post-socialism and finally in the art of the first, western world: Europe, the
United States, and Canada. Thus it deals with phenomena from the theatre of the opposition, that which
Italian theatre expert Valentina Valentini denotes with the concept of aesthetics and politics of East
European theatre (Grotowsky, Oder 57, Tadeusz Kantor), through the performative turn of the ritual
theatre of the 1960s and 70s (Hermann Nitsch, Richard Schechner, Pupilija Ferkeverk, Gledališče
Pekarna, etc.) to the so-called postmodern (politicized) performing arts practices of the 1980s and
1990s of the second and first worlds (Ljubiša Ristić, Dragan Živadinov, Vito Taufer, Tomaž Pandur,
Elfriede Jelinek, Reza Abdoh, Jo Fabian, etc.) The book finishes with an epilogue, devoted to a period
which we could denote (as does Guillermo Gómez-Peña) with the concepts post-democratic society of a
mediatized spectacle (Peter Sellars, Emil Hrvatin, Bojan Jablanovec, Matjaž Pograjc in Betontanc,
Robert Lepage, etc.)

Thus the book targets various manifestations of nomadism, rhapsodization and subversiveness, which
are connected with artistic projects by different and at times even opposing authors, who consciously
direct themselves toward the Artaudesque border of theatrical possibility when they simultaneously
produce and destroy writing and stage. Along the path of analyzing realizations of changes or ecdysis
within different fields (from text to space, time, body, media and their use), the book also follows an
explosion and after it a new, non-hierarchical linking of textual and theatre elements in phenomena of
drama, theatre, and staging practices. In this it connects theory and practice and establishes a
relationship between the two which is explicitly open: the French theatre scholar Patrice Pavis would
call it “inter-cannibalistic”, enhancing theory as well as practice.

Tomaž Toporišič:
Levitve drame in gledališča, Založba Aristej, Maribor, 2008.
216 pages, 16,90 EUR.