The Zoostage as Another Ethical Misfiring: The spectacle of the animal victim in the name of art

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Notes

¹Romeo Castellucci, director of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio theatre company, points out in the article ‘The Animal Being on Stage’ that the animal had played a fundamental role in the relationship between the theatre and the death of God: ‘At the moment that the animal disappeared from the scene, tragedy was born’ (Castellucci 2000: 24).

²In connection with the show in question, the director, Romano Bogdan, stated that his intention had been to shock the public (cf. Valent 2002: 33), which confirms the foregoing assumption that it is quite certain that the return of the stage animal is most spectacular in the bloody victim modus.

³Vlasta Delimar gave four variations of this performance (at the Klub Gjuro II, Zagreb, 1996; ŠOU Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana, 1996; Diocletian's Cellars, Split, 1997 and the Slavonski Brod Art Gallery, 1999) (cf. Delimar 2003: 40).

⁴Pino Ivančić lost his job due to the privatization of the Uljanik Shipyards (cf. Bago et al. 2009: 55).

⁵As Puris d.d. Pazin is the largest manufacturer of turkey meat and products based on turkey meat in Croatia, Pino Ivančić chose this Istrian town as the venue of his blood-thirsty performance. Besides turkey meat, Puris d.d. Pazin also off ers chicken and livestock meat to the market.

⁶While the Croatian Democratic Union (the HDZ) is the main centre-right political party in Croatia, the Istrian Democratic Assembly (the IDS) is a Croatian regional and centre-left liberal political party in Istria, led by Ivan Jakovčić, and the Social Democratic Party of Croatia (the SDP) is the main centre-left, social democratic political party in Croatia. There was a media confrontation about Ivančić's performance between the two centre-left parties.

⁷Of all the performance killings of animals that have been part of the Croatian performer scene, the organizers of the re-enactment project entitled ‘The Orange Dog and Other Tales (Even Better Than the Real Thing)’, which was performed at the Performance Studies international (PSi) Conference (Zagreb, 2009), selected only that particular performance (cf. Bago et al. 2009: 55).

⁸Just to contextualise here, the performance in question is that of ‘The Geometry of Bloodthirstiness’ at the Ghetto Gallery in Split in 1999 (cf. Stilinović 2007: 36–7).