Include me out: theatre as sites of resistance to right-wing populism in Estonia, the Czech Republic and Hungary

ABSTRACT

This paper lifts the curtain on the cross-fertilization of political resistance and theatre performance in three post-socialist countries – Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary – by focusing on how theatre can function as sites of resistance to right-wing populism from a cross-cultural perspective. The argument is that theatre performance can function as a critical platform that engages strategies from popular culture to reveal the voices of those who are silenced by populist institutions and actors. Although resistance to populism through critical cultural production is very seldom addressed in academic studies dedicated to Central and Eastern Europe, we claim that theatre can illuminate fresh modes of political action and critical knowledge about world politics. The impetus for this study is Angela Marino’s claim that ‘populism is inseparable from the embodied, relational, and material aesthetics of performance.’ Thus, this paper focuses on contemporary theatrical performances that are put to the opposite end, namely to resist the cultural essentialism put forth by the right-wing populist entrepreneurs in Central and Eastern Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Neo-traditionalism
• right-wing populism’s culture
• theatre as resistance to populism
• performativity
• popular culture

Introduction

According to some social scientists, ‘Populism in Western Europe is quite different from that in the Eastern part of the continent,’ especially because Eastern Europe experienced state socialism, dictatorship and lengthy transition periods from communism to democracy (Simion-Stoica 2018, 101). All of these aspects led to the dissociation of power from the people and ‘one could even say in the ethos of Antipolitics by György Konrád, or Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel that it had been distanced or even seen as a dirty game in the 1980s and from the 1990s on was delegated to the politicians.’ (Kovala and Palonen 2018, 20).

Yet, some politicians keep defining ‘the people’ through the lens of the ideology of nativism as a nearly mystical community of insiders who are invariably ‘good,’ reliable, authentic and juxtaposable to ‘the others’ (both internal and external elites and adversaries of ‘the people’). Thus, populists employ cultural resources of various sorts to straighten this vertical polarization between ‘our people’ and ‘the others.’ This study, however, zooms in on those instances when both cultural producers (in our study, actors, directors) and publics opt out of the engineered mystical unity of ‘the people,’ deflecting populists’ political theatre and its symbolic display (demonstrations, marches, rallies).

Despite the recent emergence of relevant academic production that aims at filling the present gap by investigating populism in Eastern Europe, it mostly deals with the political actors as agents of the contemporary populist upsurge (Pirro 2015). Our paper contributes to this debate with a substantially differrent perspective, by focusing on theatrical production as a locus of anti-populist resistance. We chose three case studies (Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary) to show that theatre can perform opposition against neo-traditionalist appropriation of popular culture by populist entrepreneurs through the very means and platforms of popular culture itself. We argue that exactly these very means and platforms of popular culture are less addressed in the academic works on populism and this is a gap that also requires thorough investigation. Estonia, the Czech Republic and Hungary have the socialist past in common, yet, they all have their own versions of right-wing populism and a common neo-traditionalist appropriation of popular culture by populists.

After the fall of communism, according to current political rhetoric, the former communist countries from Eastern Europe should have quickly adapted to the Western market economy and cultural strategies (Zaborowski 2005). As a reaction to this pressure, cultural production from the region has started to display more local (autochthonous) cultural traditions and neo-traditional styles. Thus, cultural productions are politicized in the sense of an involvement in the pro or anti – European integration debate or the religious values against the western corrupted culture disputes. Western corrupted culture refers to both religious morality – or, more exactly the lack of it – and the market economy. Some countries support a cultural production permeated by religious and nationalist themes that are further employed in populist mobilization. To mention few examples, the pro Victor Orbán regime online publication About Hungary (8 May 2018) cites historian Mária Schmidt claiming that ‘the western, ideologically quite developed half of Europe’ attempts to impose its ‘alleged common values’ to the eastern half. A less intellectual approach is displayed by other two pro-government tabloid-like news sites 888.hu and pestisracok.hu. Both omock the liberal West and its culture. In the same anti-Western register, the Estonian new site sponsored by an NGO (https://objektiiv.ee/) publishes opinion pieces on protecting family and tradition.

This cultural backlash is also directed against cosmopolitan liberal democracy. The academic debates dedicated to populism often focus on institutional politics disregarding the relationship between popular culture, artistic production, cultural traditions and populism. Populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe identify themselves with the formats of cultural productions that oppose, resist or comment on high Western culture on the grounds that there is an antagonism between the general will and the taste of the public and the elite’s cultural and aesthetic tastes. Populism in politics and culture overlap in the performative style displayed by the populists who employ elements from the neo-traditional cultures (e.g. folksy expressions, unsophisticated, vernacular language) rather than elites’ (‘high’) cultural registers (cosmopolitan, multicultural cultural formats). Neo-traditionalist culture puts forth the so-called ‘culturaly popular’ that is not synonymous with ‘popular culture’ (in the sense of pop culture or entertainment industry). Populists employ neo-traditionalist culture strategies because its political core refers to mobilization against ‘progressive,’ liberal culture.

However, as this paper argues, there is a conflation between ‘high culture’ and elitism as well as between popular culture and people’s culture. Populists’ focus on the culturally popular refers to cultural practices belonging to the people within a respective national culture. This is not connected with massproduced culture or strictly speaking entertainment industry as opposed to art. The ‘culture of the autochthonous people’ is incorporated into populist political programmes and it is usually presented as an alternative to the degenerate culture of the elites and its Western influences. As recent research on Western European populism demonstrates, sometimes the populist claim on ‘the people’ is contested through the very same popular culture. Thus, popular culture is not always intertwined with populism. Rather there is an underlying ambivalence regarding popular culture’s positionality vis – á – vis populist demands that is seldom explored in the academic literature on populism.¹

This paper focuses on contemporary theatre and theatre performance as a platform that can engage strategies from popular culture to reveal the voices of those that are silenced by nationalist and populist institutions and actors. A recent open panel of theatre experts at the Lewis Centre for Arts Princeton (2018) focused on ‘the tension and the harmony between theatre and pop culture,’ emphasizing that although theatre has nowadays become eclipsed by popular culture (e.g., popular entertainment such as television, sports, digital media), ‘Theatre has nonetheless lasted the march of history and both infiltrated and been infiltrated by popular culture’s force.’ Along the same lines, David Saltz (2008) also points out that the opposition between ‘low and high art began to break down as deep-rooted Romantic assumptions about art and culture started to give way during the 1960s and ’70s to the sensibility that would be called ‘postmodern.’ Hence, strictly speaking, lowbrow popular entertainment, as defined in opposition to highbrow art theatre, exists only within a historical window extending from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century’ (Saltz 2008).

Yet, irrespective of whether theatre incorporates or is incorporated by popular entertainment, there is the issue of representation that needs to be addressed methodically. Theatre, as well as other performative arts, are expected to represent and to create room for the people to have their voices heard. It is also important to disentangle which ‘representative claims’ can have democratic legitimacy (Saward 2010). According to this constructivist theoretical framework of representation, there is no pre-existing (prior to representation) relationship between represented and representative but any representation is the result of a claim making. This brings us closer to the question of who the audience/theatre goer is. As Éric Fassin (2017) posits, ‘Like the people, we can consider that it existed before the representation or conversely that we made it come about. It is between these two positions that a policy towards the audience is made, just as a policy towards the people is made. Are we on stage to reflect an audience or create it? That allows a shift to be made in the question of cultural elitism.’² Thus, the creation of the audience is an enterprise that strives to display the representations of the people in collaboration with those who attend the spectacle. These representations are, however, fluid and escape the hegemonic narratives of how ‘the people’ deliberate, feel and reason.

The performed spectrums of populism

Approached from the perspective of political science, populism is often defined as a ‘thin-centred ideology which is based not only on the Manichean distinction between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” but also on the defence of popular sovereignty at any cost’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013). Although populism is not a completely formed ideology and has no hard nucleus, researchers of this phenomenon identified several core features – among which are the polarization of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elites’ and the assumption that there is a ‘general will’ that all people share – as the main tenants of this ‘thin-centred ideology.’ Other social scientists define populism from the angle of communication science and understand it as a ‘political communication style’ or phenomenon (De Vreese et al. 2018). However, we have to point out that we do not exclusively rely on a political science-centred understanding of populism but rather the aim is to combine it with a performance studies approach.

The recent escalation of various forms of populism in Central and Eastern Europe generated a multi-layered aggregate of resistance mechanisms, including those infiltrated into the arts and culture sector. The deliberate choice to deal with theatre and politics in light of populism’s dispersion across both Western and Eastern Europe is not arbitrary. In the interpretation of current politics, the concept of ‘theatricality’ is often employed with the purpose of making sense of the ways and ends politicians and populist entrepreneurs perform their acts of persuasion within the public political arena.

We chose theatre as a site of resistance to right-wing populism because performativity and theatricality are linked to audiences in such a way that the meaning of the artistic act is never imposed or set in stone by the artists without the public’s participation. In a similar vein, populist entrepreneurs – politicians and cultural producers who share the populist world view – both from the left and from the right of the political spectrum rely on performed epistemologies to build up their audiences and gain electoral support from them. Thus, approaching populism from performance studies perspective is of the utmost importance because it can inform effective debates on political culture, democracy and the culture wars within it. From a performance studies’ viewpoint, there is no universalizing theory of populism and no ‘set of identifiable qualities,’ (Baldwin – Philippi 2019, 376) and yet ‘populism is inseparable from the embodied, relational, and material aesthetics of performance’ (Marino 2018, 18). This is why, as Angela Marino suggests, populism and its performed spectrums have to be analyzed in situ by reflecting on how the ordinary objects and interactions are turned into ‘aesthetically powerful acts of the political realm’ (Marino 2018). To this end, we will zoom in on various theatrical performances that reveal how ‘the people’ is never a pre-existing category that is put to a firm end but rather one that can be brought into existence in support of or in opposition to popular demands.

Theatre NO99 and United Estonia as political-critical awakening

Estonian politics has been relatively devoid of relevant radical right-wing political entities until the arrival of Eesti Konservatiivne Rahvaerakond (Estonian Conservative People’s Party, EKRE) halfway through the last decade. Entering the national parliament in 2015, it has enjoyed a steady rise in popularity ever since. The party and its leader, Martin Helme, a former Estonian ambassador to Russia, presented a strong nationalist stance on numerous occasions and they seem to have captured this agenda for their benefit. The party’s neo-traditionalist rhetoric is embedded in what Vassilis Petsinis and others describe as post-colonial syndrome related to the former Soviet rule, a master narrative legitimizing the anti-EU, anti-establishment and also anti-refugee and anti-LGBT constructs, calling for empowerment and protection of the ‘people’ and its values, which projects onto the popular culture as well. However, it is curious to observe that emergence of such a political actor has been anticipated in the theatrical sphere several years earlier (Petsinis 2019; Peiker 2016).

The state-owned Theatre NO99 orchestrated a fake political movement that emerged before the 2011 Parliamentary elections on the cultural and political stage of Estonia. The members of the movement (mostly professional actors) mocked populist rhetoric and promised through several staged performances justice for all, social and political reforms and land tax exemptions. Impersonating an extravagant far-right, hyper-populist party, United Estonia has managed to use ‘every trick from the populist handbook’ (from the Theater NO99’s website). Playing a hyper-populist party triggered intense political emotions in spectators and made them feel part of the play.

Compared to the US based contemporary artistic duo Yes Man, United Estonia also practiced a form of hactivism of the real politick. Like Yes Man’s use of anti-corporate artistic tactics while posing as corporate leaders, the actors of the NO99 Theatre rely on trickery, mockery and impersonation of politicians and ‘real’ politics to disclose politicians’ demagogic methods and strategies. The most intriguing form of culture jamming in East European theatre, United Estonia has managed to employ the existing media and repertoire of populist politics to critically comment on those media and repertoires themselves by engaging a public that is far larger than those who usually attend performances at theatres. United Estonia also employed the tactics of media activism, and, like Yes Man, collectively manipulated the mainstream media in the country. By disrupting the dominant politics and culture, the actors associated with this fictitious political movement had the same goals as the proponents of culture jamming, namely ‘to open a new discursive space through a variety of tactics including the appropriation of billboards and magazine advertisements, and media hoaxing’ (Robinson and Castle Bell 2013, 352). The actors of the NO99 Theatre even secretly ripped off the posters that they disseminated in Tallinn’s public space just to attract media attention.

In their public discourses, the actors associated with this movement attempted to disclose how politics is engineered, how people and their votes are manipulated by politicians and encouraged the audience to take an active role in expressing their views on political matters by warning that ‘if you do not do politics, politics does you.’ Under the patented name United Estonia, the actors of the Theatre NO99 organized a General Assembly on 7 May 2010 where 7500 people gathered at Saku Arena in Tallinn after they paid an entrance ticket to attend the spectacle. Although the performance of United Estonia was one of the largest attended theatre events in contemporary Europe, not all the spectators were aware that they were taking part in an artistic (theatre) event. Some of them showed the unconditional support for what they thought to be the birth of a new political party that paradoxically announced itself as a remedy for just everything and everybody. The fake political movement had a visual identity consisting of an anthem, flags, emblems and a media campaign that disseminated its slogans widely. For the supposed General Assembly event, the actors appeared on stage dressed up in sober suits and dresses, mimicking both the physical appearance and the discourse style of populist politicians. The glorious, fascist-style entrance of the Party’s Leader marked the opening of the General Assembly. Reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl’s visual motifs from her propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will (commissioned by the Third Reich in 1934), the entrance of the leader is accompanied by a parade of flags (each of which displayed United Estonia’s badge) as well as by trumpets and drum music. The live performance of the transfigured leader on stage had been visually reinforced by a video projector that multiplied the tableau vivant of the leader in the background of the open stage. When the other (fake) ‘politicians’entered the spectacle room, shaking hands with the spectators and distributing leaflets, several overenthusiastic teenagers stood up and applauded with passion. Their laughter indicates that they did understand the underlying message of the staged performance put forth by the new fake party. “The Leader” opened his speech reminding the audience that “all normal parties, however, have a Leader with a capital letter.” To mark the prominence of the event, he adds that the leader always has an entourage (like at the royal court) and he always look the audience in the eye. The actor dubs the almost mystical encounter between “the people” and their leader as “the birth of a God.” A couple of times the leader was called with the appellative der Führer, hinting to the far-right populists’ faith in the self-proclaimed ‘strong leader.’

Another performance – on the rooftop of the multi-purpose Saku Arena – revealed various negative political emotions occasioned by the invocation of those who do not have a response when faced with social, political and economic injustice. The vitriolic one-man show from the rooftop of Saku Arena was projected on the very same stage in front of all 7500 spectators. In a highly emotional monologue, one of the actors of the NO99 curses both power and opposition parties from Estonia uttering the following denunciations: ‘Fuck you all you fanatical nationalists,’ ‘and fuck you all youth members from all parties and internet commentators’ (the Roof Speech can be watched on Youtube). Later on, he refers to the Estonian ‘elites’ who are not able to refrain from looking down upon ‘the people’: ‘Fuck you bloody intellectuals because you already know everything and you are so sceptical that no syringe can ever get under your skin. I do not know how not to look stupid in your eyes, because everyone is stupid. In the same vein, artists of all sorts were also criticized for the superciliousness of daring to feel special compared to other social and professional categories: ‘Fuck you second rate novelists and water colour painters because you consider yourselves better than other casts in society and because you think that politics is filthy’ (Youtube video) This particular diatribe reveals the unacceptability of artistic production (and producers) that claims to be ‘autonomous’ – perpetuating the mantra of high modernist aesthetic and artistic autonomy – at any costs.

The so-called ‘apolitical art’ as well as the apolitical reception of art (the aesthetic experience) are condemned on the grounds that ‘filthy politics’ cannot and should not be ruled out of artistic matters because art is socio-political in nature, appearing in society as a form of human activity. By overtly criticizing the cultural and political elites of Estonia, the NO99 Theatre discloses the polarizing mechanisms of the right-wing populism in a sardonic way, emphasizing, at the very same time, the lack of reaction from the cultural entrepreneurs when faced with the surge of this kind of politics and its imperatives. Surprisingly, not only the ‘the corrupt elite’ is condemned and ridiculed but ‘the pure people’ category is too. The actor shouts on the rooftop that a janitor deserves to live like ‘a janitor’ because he does not know the difference between Andrus Ansip (the leader of the liberal, right-centred Reform Party in Estonia) and Toomas Ilves (former President of Estonia) and because he does not read poetry.

The ambivalence of the political critique put forth by the rooftop speech – regarding both ‘the corrupted elites’ and ‘the pure people’ – is also revealed by the actor’s staged bitter disappointment that the janitor (the epitomizer of the pure people) is not aware of the difference between ‘yin and yang.’ He does not even know where the editorial offices of the cultural magazines from his country are located. In addition to that, ‘the pure people’ are also seen as unaware of Estonia’s foreign policies as well as uninterested in other people’s struggle (e.g., the people of Tibet). On top of all these, ‘the pure people’ fail to understand what populism is, and the cultural elites fail to be engaged in political struggles reflecting ‘the general will.’ The schizophrenic dilemma of participating without participating in ‘dirty politics’ is revealed as a neither-nor alternative solution (neither the uncontaminated people nor the arrogant elites).

The actors also played with the ontological in-betweenness of their status: ‘While being critical of the methods, the movement also used these same methods. For example, it used a specific populist tactic by avoiding any specific framing. When addressed as a political force, the movement denied being that and called themselves “just actors” and when referred to as actors, they called themselves “political movement.”’³ The ontology of in-betweenness mentioned above refers to a condition of transience (e.g. neither just actors nor political movement). This state of ongoing-ness in-between two states refuses the stale assumptions about United Estonia’s identity.

The shift from essentialist understandings of identity to in-betweenness also played a role in further complicating the United Estonia’s positionality and resistance potential. Looked at from the audience’s perspective, the performances displayed by the United Estonia collective open the door to political commitments of various sorts. The spectators are urged to ‘do politics’ if they do not want ‘politics to do them,’ and yet United Estonia does not promote any political side or style to be embraced by the spectators. Staying away from political art that is propaganda, NO99 Theatre did not intend to be a mouthpiece of any of the political parties, but it wanted to work at the level of fundamental attitudes. Echoing Theodor Adorno, we contend that United Estonia’s performances are a form of committed art whose message remains politically polyvalent not being nailed down to an ideology (Adorno 1982, 318). While propaganda art does not elicit any flexibility in how the message is understood, the politically committed theatre awakes the free choice of the agent (spectator). Yet, the possibility of choosing depends on what can be chosen. United Estonia also illuminated this dilemmatic state of affairs. The short-lived political involvement of the theatrical performances of United Estonia (approximately six weeks) did not remain without consequences. As Vaarik points out, ‘There has been a lot of discussion in Estonia about the impact and legacy of the United Estonia and in a way the authors of the show have also been in doubt about what really happened. There are still some measurable outcomes, including hundreds of articles in media, references in popular culture and politics itself.’⁴ As demonstrated bellow, in similar cultural-political settings from the region, the far right-wing populism is opposed by theatrical performances that display a different image of ‘the people’ than cultural essentialist formats.

Theatre and insights into Czech populism from the outside

Leaving aside the presidential figure of Miloš Zeman, who has had his share of influence in regard to procurement of populism in the country, two parties have been typically considered as the hallmarks of contemporary Czech populism. ANO led by billionaire Andrej Babiš and SPD led by Tomio Okamura (including all of its previous iterations). Such a perspective has not only been shared by the general public and journalists, but also by the academic literature aimed at analysing the current Czech party system (Hloušek and Kopeček 2019). Both parties represent two different models of populism – a major entrepreneur-based centrist populist force currently leading a government and an anti-immigration parliamentary populist party located on the right ideological fringe. Though discourses of both leaders share the anti-elitist basis essential for populism, unlike in the case of Babiš, Tomio Okamura’s rhetoric is overtly nativist, fully embracing the anti-immigration rhetoric on the borderline of hate speech. Especially Okamura and his supporters are prone to making claims for the true culture of the people and apply their neo-traditionalist normative stance onto the cultural sphere, as will be demonstrated further (Císař and Navrátil 2019).

Despite the fact that theatre is commonly acknowledged as a pivotal platform of cultural and political resistance against different forms of oppression within the context of Czech history, its ability to continue performing such a role these days may come under scrutiny. On the one hand, a plethora of widely recognized symbolic figures are firmly situated within general historical narratives, the most prominent one being Václav Havel, a playwright who succeeded in undermining the legitimacy of the communist regime through non-violent means and was instrumental in constructing a solid ideological basis for Czechoslovak dissent in the 1970s and 1980s via both his critical plays and his political-philosophical writings⁵. There are also notable examples of Czech theatre groups, such as Osvobozené divadlo (The Liberated Theater) led by Jan Werich and Jiří Voskovec in the 1930s as staunch opponents of Nazism and racism. On the other hand, the relevance of theatre as a socio-political actor and mobilizing vehicle in the Czech society has seemingly weakened in the most recent decades in the context of the technologically conditioned changes of the cultural and media landscapes. In addition to this rather structural factor, one has to pose the cardinal question of whether the potential recipients – Czech theatre spectators and the wider public – are willing to critically reflect on the rise of populism and the far-right in Czech politics. So far, it seems to have been treated with a rather striking acceptance or indifference by most of them.

Nonetheless, some relatively recent events provide us with proof that the theatre is still able to find its resonance among the Czech public, though in a slightly unexpected way. The decision of the well-known Husa na provázku Theatre in Brno to present, as a single show within a theatre festival, Naše nasilje i vaše nasilje (Our Violence and your Violence) – a play by Bosnian and Croatian director Oliver Frljić – on 26 May 2018 was marred with controversy from the very outset. Though this play contains numerous scenes of graphic violence, the point of contagion arose around a specific one in which a character representing Jesus rapes a Muslim woman. The inscenation was mostly met with superficial accusations of blasphemy and religious offensiveness made by Christian, conservative and far-right circles. Needless to say, none of the critics had a chance to see the play beforehand. On a deeper level, however, Frljić works with symbolic representations of existing anti-immigration rhetoric, projecting its inversions and juxtaposing these with the usual patterns established by populist discourses, including those blossoming in the Czech Republic. As Miroslav Oščatka, artistic director of the theatre, put it, ‘We see and feel that there are various problems. Contemporary art, if it has a good quality, attempts to make statements concerning these problems, instead of hiding from them. Oliver Frljić has the courage to open painful topics and he does it in a controversial way, which attracts attention’ (Krystýna Léblová, 2019. ‘Mnoho povyku pro nic? Hru, v níž Ježíš znásilní muslimku, uvidí pouze dvě stě lidí’ 12 September).

Despite all efforts and strengthened security measures from the theatre management, the play was intentionally interrupted by approximately 30 members of the Slušní lidé (Decent People) initiative. First by producing loud noises and consequently by entering the stage, they physically, though non-violently, blocked the actors from continuing their performance, also due to the inactivity of the present police officers.⁶ Slušní lidé were categorized as an extremist movement by the Czech Ministry of Interior in its report on extremism in 2017. The main reason for this was the fact that prominent neo-Nazi figures stand at the core of this online-formed entity, which has succeeded in attracting the support of a diverse crowd also owing to their anti-immigration rhetoric.⁷ This moment of turmoil in fact represents the physical materialization of the conflict between identitarian populist discourse supported by those who literarily brand themselves as ‘the people’ and a theatrical artistic performance undermining its validity. The rudimentary categorization of the conflicting parties was blatantly coined in a speech by Tomio Okamura, the leader of the parliamentary far-right populist SPD, who talked about ‘us,’ ‘the true Christians,’ which was then juxtaposed against the ‘warmongering, hateful and murderous Muslim ideology’ in reaction to the content of the play, simultaneously declaring it irrelevant.⁸

In this context, it is worth mentioning that the backlash Frljić faced was not dissimilar to one experienced in Poland when he was invited to direct a play entitled Klątwa (The Curse), written by Stanisław Wyspiański in 1899 in the Powszechny Theatre. A noteworthy difference between the two instances can be found in the interplay of the critical content, the context and the impact it has made. Whereas in Poland, the ‘blasphemous’ nature of Klątwa, critique of the Catholic Church, aimed straight at the constitutive element of the hegemonic construct of Polish national identity, the connection between Catholicism or Christianity and nationalism in the Czech case is not self-evident at all. Naše nasilje i vaše nasilje sought to comment on the presently popular anti-immigration discourse critically, it succeeded in provoking a reaction which demonstrates a certain vagueness of its content. Okamura and other Czech populists are using Christianity as a token normative framework (as in this case), in an attempt to bestow their speech with supposed solemnity. Nevertheless, the call for action interrupting the staging of Frljić’s play did not have a clear ideological framing as such; it was based at best on a broad spectrum of neo-traditionalist concerns.

It is interesting to observe that it was a critical play from a foreign author which by far stirred up the strongest emotions and reactions in recent years. Part of this upheaval from the populist side could have been caused exactly by this fact; to paraphrase Okamura once again, no one has to teach ‘us’ how to feel. Simultaneously, it is quite imaginable, that an outsider perspective, presented by an artist who talks in universal categories through performative pieces in order to overcome language barriers, possesses the strength of enriching the domestic critical discourse and overcoming certain provincial limitations.

Another high-profile transgression beyond the established order was represented by the visit of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy with his pan-European project Looking for Europe carrying the subtitle ‘United against populism with the people of Prague,’ performed in the Archa Theatre in Prague on 26 April 2019. With this monologue-based piece, the author attempted to engage audiences in 20 different European cities and to facilitate introspection into the current state of affairs in their specific local context. Thus, the core scenario was in each instance enriched by local references, as happened in Prague (Archa Theatre).

One of the main tropes interconnecting theatre and politics became the already-mentioned Václav Havel as a symbol of a forlorn better past and a spiritual mentor, who in Lévy’s play serves as one of the guiding voices for the main character, an intellectual writing a speech about Europe in a hotel room in Sarajevo. The current Czech Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, consequently represented the symbolical antithesis to Havel, the face of contemporary Czech populist politics. In an interesting turn of events, Lévy decided to confront Babiš directly, beyond the theatrical stage and before the play itself, to get a better grasp of what the populism in the Czech Republic looks like and transfer his imprint into the play in a more precise manner. Thus, the participatory element of the wider concept of the project became inclusive in regard of the play’s main antagonist. Lévy wrote an article on his meeting with Babiš, which reproduced a shortened version of their conversation and added several comments. In general, the ‘Stan Laurel’ of the Laurel and Hardy of Czech populism (Hardy alluding to president Miloš Zeman), as Lévy nicknamed him, seemed to behave rather elusively. However, apparently being aware of the calibre of his interviewer, he answered (in fluent French, as Lévy acknowledged) quite respectfully with direct questions concerning migration, his personal conflict of interests and the role of the Czech Republic in the EU and international politics. As for the factual substance of the responses, Babiš presented his typical pseudo-commonsensical synthesis of middle ground populism and pragmatism, but Lévy seemed to be almost shocked by the unashamed manner of indifference with which his interviewee treated some of the critical points. As he noted: ‘Who is this man? What is this grinning populism with an opportunistic face? And why is it so, that by all accounts (he does not forget to mention it three times during our interview) the biggest pride of Andrej Babiš are the two Michelin stars awarded to his restaurant in Mougins?’ The article ends with an outcry which completes the narrative circle of Lévy’s Czech iteration of the Looking for Europe play: ‘Help! Bring Havel back, please!’⁹

However, it is not only internationally famous intellectuals and playwrights who confront populism in the Czech Republic through theatre. The case of Hannah Sachs tells the remarkable story of a high school teacher from the United States who decided to invest her Fullbright fellowship opportunity into moving to the eastern part of the Czech Republic. Confronted immediately with xenophobia among both the students and the teachers, verbal anti-Semitic attacks directed against herself and the utter unwillingness of the school administration to do anything about these, she joined the already existing theatre group run by one of her Czech colleagues that she helped develop further under the name Undergound Theater. Despite the stark contrast between reality and her pre-conceived image of the Czech Republic as a theatre stronghold (similar to the previous case, especially because of the historical figure of Havel), she decided to start building on the latter.¹⁰

Drawing on the Theater of the Opressed methodology, the students started developing a new way of conceptualizing and understanding the issues of hatred, racism, inequality, exclusion and othering: all those that were rather neglected within the standard curriculum and by the school administration on the everyday level (Sachs 1992). The students got engaged in the theatrical activities and gained a sense of community that empowered them to constitute an opposition within the school against populist discourses of xenophobia, which affected the peripheral regions of the country on a much greater scale than the major urban centres. Even after Sachs’ fellowship finished, the students reported to her that they started self-organizing theatre workshops as a grassroots movement with the very same aim to confront hateful ideologies, still with no support of the school itself. Nevertheless, as became apparent later, this approach to tackling populist discourses found a much wider resonance in the region. Hannah Sachs, being invited back to the Czech Republic for a seminar on the techniques of the Theater of the Opressed for teachers, was overwhelmed by the level of interest and number of participants attending these events (Sachs 1992).

All of these modalities bring to the forefront the questions of how Czechs constitute their identity and how the populists operate with these categories. As the above-mentioned authors hope, it could be assumed that these strategies play a role along the lines of the historical traditions associated with it, mobilizing the wider public against intolerance, hatred and totalitarian tendencies and helping to deconstruct clichés presented in populist discourses. Like in the case of the NO99, Czech theatrical performances (especially Our Violence) facilitates the active political role of the spectators in creating performances.

Performing resistance to Victor Orbán’s culture war through theatrical performances

The Hungarian right-wing populist Prime-Minister Viktor Orbán has positioned himself as the son of ‘the pure people,’ opposing urban, liberal intelligentsia and the cultural productions backed by the non-Governmental organizations, ‘leftist’ cultural centres and pro-European cultural institutions. From this vantage point, the popular (among Budapest citizens) Frida Kahlo temporary exhibition was criticized for ‘promoting communism.’¹¹ Orbán’s neo-traditionalism permeates strongly into governmental cultural policy which prioritizes conservative, nationalist productions that occasion patriotic feelings and emotions by prioritizing ‘Hungarianess’ shaping the normative of popular culture accordingly. One of the most affected forms of cultural production by this wave of ‘healthy cultural reforms’ is theatre.

According to theatre historian Andrea Tompa (2008), from the end of the turn of the century, ‘Hungarian theatre attracted and sustains to this day an amazingly solid audience: in a country of 10 million people, 4.6 million theatre tickets are sold each year, quite a stable number even in today’s terms. (Of course, as is probably true worldwide, musicals attract the most viewers.)’. In the same study, Tompa points out that theatre culture in Hungary, unlike in Germany, was mostly a form of entertainment (popular culture) that did not strive to educate the masses or to occasion political and social consciousness rising (Tompa 2008, 13). This is why operetta is still alive and well in Hungary. Contemporary Hungarian theatre actively produces musicals and operettas and this active engagement with the genre of entertainment is directly proportional with the public demand for these forms of cultural production.

The Hungarian State Opera House and later on the Erkel Theatre in Budapest have been staging the successful musical Billy Elliot (written by the pop star Elton John) for approximatively two years. Another popular culture reference connected with the musical is the three time Oscar nominated movie with the same title . Lee Hall wrote the film’s screenplay while the music is by Elton John. The musical adaptation of the famous film electrified various audiences around the world by displaying the touching story of a young ballet dancer. The plot revolves around an inspirational success story of 11-year old boy Billy, born and raised in an English town, who followed his dream of taking ballet classes in spite of being motherless and economically and educationally disadvantaged. His passion for ballet challenges preconceived ideas and clichés about what society expects from boys to do in life.

The online newspaper Daily News Hungary announced on 7 June 2018 that ‘music and dance are for everyone.’ The underlining message seems to be that, exactly as ballet activated Billy Elliot’s artistic aspirations, music and dance in the Hungarian Opera House are not reserved for the cultural elites’ taste. For better or worse, Budapest’s theatre public attended the many performances of the musical in great numbers.

After 90 performances in front of more than 100,000 spectators since 2016, the Billy Elliot musical has been cancelled by the Hungarian State Opera after a homophobic attack displayed in an op-ed by the pro-Orbán newspaper The Magyar Idők. . The author of the op-ed (Zsofia Horvath) is a psychologist and far-right government’s communication expert who posited that these sorts of artistic performances deteriorate Hungarian cultural life. In her view, Billy Elliot the Musical disseminates gay propaganda ‘in a country with a shrinking and aging population while being threatened by a foreign invasion’ (Eva S. Balogh, 2018. ‘The Fidez Media as a Vehicle for Intimidation.’ Hungarian Spectrum, June 21). Other media attacks on the spectacle insinuated that turning the young generation gay should not be a national objective. The musical does not exhibit, however, any scene of same sex love that would trigger the ferocious attacks made in The Magyar Idők. The far right-wing newspaper, which actually backs the Fidez party’s cultural policies in Hungary, assumed that the Billy Elliot spectacle would display a degenerate vision of healthy culture by encouraging boys to wear ballerina tutu skirts (like in the musical) and to go practice ballet rather than football or some other, more ‘masculine’ activity. As scholars of populism argue, gendering ‘the people’ is part and parcel of right-wing populism heteronormative scenario where ‘ethno-machoism’ plays an important role (Ranieri 2016). Thus, although initially the musical was regarded as suitable ‘for everyone,’ latter on (in 2018), music and ballet dance became perilous and dangerous in the alleged ‘everyone’s elitization.’ In spite of the unexpected cancelling of the spectacle, the Billy Elliot Musical gathered applause from thousands of Hungarian spectators for almost two years; exactly like the 11 years old Billy, they were challenging the long-held beliefs of disregarding passion for ballet as ‘feminine’ or artsy in a pejorative way.

Although the Hungarian far-right government attempts to profile everything in the public cultural sphere according to an ‘us versus them’ narrative of national identity, there are both artists and spectators that create their symbolic cultural spaces of resistance where ‘nation-first’ directives are disregarded or challenged. While Erket is a state sponsored, repertory theatre, the independent scene – especially in Budapest – does not have to fit into the grand narrative and aesthetics of a repertoire theatre. Thus, despite the conservative rigors imposed by the Orbán government, there is still plenty of ‘social and political kick on Budapest’s stages’ (Howard Shalwitz, 2019 ‘Report from Theatre’s Front Line in Budapest.’ HOWLROUND Theatre Commons, January 3). One of the most productive independent theatres from the capital of Hungary is the notorious Krétakör (Chalk Circle). The theatre’s director Árpád Schilling orients the actors’ steps after the Brechtian model of a politically engaged performance. After almost twenty years of performances as an independent company, Krétakör has maintained the same anti-establishment positionality. Their endurance and accomplishments demonstrate that ‘this form of life is possible in Hungary – and it was invented by Krétakör. Government coalitions could come and go, but no culture official took the supposedly “immense” risk of giving either space or regular subsidy to this group, no matter how famous they became abroad. Nor did theatre professionals make their collective voices heard in order to “solve” the Krétakör and put pressure on the state to give’ (Tompa 2008).

One of Krétakör’s performances is particularly astute in questioning the right-wing government’s restorative narratives of national identity. The current political establishment prioritizes two hegemonic narratives: ‘the common people’ and ‘Hungarians first’ (that translates into hatred against the liberal elites and non-Hungarians). To support these narratives, the government appeals to a politics of memory in order to bring to the fore front historical episodes where Hungarian heroes were sacrificed for the country. Krétakör attempted to de-mythologise the hegemonic narratives about national identity through their performance of Bánk Bán ACT (Activists Contribute to the Theatre) in 2016.

Bánk Bán is the well-known opera in three acts composed by the founder of the national school of music Ferenc Erkel in 1861. The opera is regarded as a masterpiece of Hungarian ancestry that reveals patriotic feelings instantiated using musical instruments of Hungarian origin (e.g., the cimbalom). As Krisztina Lajosi (2018) argues, this nineteenth century opera was created as a musical monument for the nation, one ‘whose symbolism and historical narratives represented national unity and could serve as the canonical operatic self-image of the nation’ (Lajosi 2018, 78). The actors of Krétakör aimed ‘to recapture that national symbol, to free it from the burden of national romanticism and stereotypes. They confront themselves with the outdated heroes of the opera to define what is their own identity to understand what kind of community they want to create that deserves to be called home, and should be fought for’ (from Krétakör’s English website).

In their Bánk Bán ACT, Krétakör actors perform their songs, which are not concerned with national identity issues but rather with re-thinking and contributing to more welcoming and inclusive notions of collective identity. By re-singing the Bánk Bán opera differently, Krétakör aimed to re-appropriate a cultural product that had been captured and used by official politics for illiberal ends. In other words, the nineteenth-century opera does not transmit a xenophobic message but rather the ways in which current politics use it might render it as a war declaration against out-groups. In this vein, Miron Hakenbeck posits – in one of Bánk Bán-ACT’s video spots – that Krétakör’s members might share one thing with the central hero of the Bánk Bán opera, namely the urge to struggle for one’s ability to act. It is exactly this ability to act politically that Krétakör exhibits against all odds. Hungarian political theatre displays a multifarious critical stance directed against the ‘traditional Hungarian values.’The performances analysed in this paper disclose the perils of hatred against others, deconstruct clichés, as well as revamp more inclusive notions of collective identity and community, beyond the nationalistic imperatives.

Conclusions

Although there are certain commonalities, the role of theatre in the three countries’ cultural traditions is not similar: In Hungary theatre culture was customarily a form of entertainment (popular culture); Estonians are ‘serious’ about being labelled ‘a people of the theatre’ since ‘out of a population of 1.4 million in 2004, 1.1 million people attended a theatre production (Johnson 2007, 123); in the Czech lands, theatre played the role of political resistance against different forms of oppression within the context of Czech history, some theatres having until today a cult status. We chose to focus on the politically committed performances from three post-socialist countries where right-wing populism is on the rise. Also all three countries have the socialist past experience in common, yet, they all have their own (internal) version of right-wing populism. In addition to the social science reports on the differences in right-wing populist politics from the region, Sławomir Sierakowski approaches these dissimilarities from the perspective of Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique), an Eastern European movement of liberal artists, intellectuals and activists. He posits that the Czech Republic’s populism “resembles the iconic Czech literary character Josef Švejk in that it is half-witted and bumbling, and therefore less threatening. Hungary, meanwhile, has gangster populism … Hungary’s Fidesz is like the mob, and Andrej Babiš’s ANO is like a madhouse’ (Sierakowski 2019).¹² Despite having different impetuses and motivations for embracing illiberalism Estonia, Hungary and the Czech Republic have an enduring theatre culture that can be turned against populists’ pitfalls.

In all three instances, theatrical performances reveal how ‘the people’ is never a pre-existing category that is put to a firm end (as claimed by the right-wing populist entrepreneurs). The most slippery category that populist entrepreneurs employ to support their politics is the notoriously vacuous and not-always-defined ‘the people.’ The examples analyzed in this paper show that theatre has the political virtue to instantiate symbolic power that can question right-wing populism by creating the public(s) that might form a different picture of ‘the people’ that resists populism’s pitfalls. By creating a public for their performances, the theatres’ performances explored in this paper reveal that ‘the people’ is never a pre-existing category that is put to a steady end but one that can be brought into existence in support of or in opposition to the common sense of the national, ‘victimized popular majority’ . ‘Populist on both Left and Right Claim to be Fighting for the People, But Who Exactly they are?’The Independent, August 11). By involving the public in their performance, the actors aim to awaken the political ability to act, including one’s drive to declaim being ‘included out’ of the hegemonic representations of the people, or, as in Hungary’s case, ‘everyone’s elitization’ through a popular culture’s trope (Elton John’s Billy Elliot).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 [POPREBEL _Grant agreement no. 822682]; This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 822682. [POPREBEL]. This article reflects only the authors' view and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Notes on contributors

Maria-Alina Asavei

Maria-Alina Asavei is Senior Lecturer in Russian and Eastern European studies at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University, Prague, and an independent curator of contemporary art. She is currently the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at Fordham University in New York City and a Senior Researcher in Charles University’s research project ‘Beyond Hegemonic Narratives and Myths: History and Memory of the Troubled Pasts in Central and South East-Europe’. Publications include a chapter on ‘Collectivism’ in the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2014); and ‘Aesthetics of Resistance and Persistence’, in Alina Serban (ed), Ion Grigorescu: The Man with a Single Camera, Sternberg Press, Berlin. She has also published widely in peer-reviewed journals such as Art and Education; Modern Art Asia; ARTmargins; Twentieth Century Communism; History of Communism in Europe; Journal of Aesthetics and Culture; Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy; Memory Studies; European Journal of Women’s Studies, Textiles: Cloth and Culture, Politics, Religion and Ideology and Analize: Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies. Her recent book Aesthetics, Disinterestedness and Effectiveness in Political Art (2018) is published by Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield)

Jiri Kocian

Jiri Kocian is a coordinator of the Malach Center for Visual History at the Institute for Formal and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University as well as a PhD candidate at the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. He deals with minorities, identity building, (post-)communist transformation, Jewish minorities in Romania/South-East Europe and oral history. He has done study stays at Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca) and an internship at IOS Regensburg. He was a co-investigator of a GAUK project on Romanian policies towards the Hungarian minority after 1945, currently is a co-investigator in GAČR with Dr Králová and has co-edited/co-authored publications in the Czech Republic and abroad. His latest co-edited work with Martin Mejstřík and Michal Kubát is entitled “Populism in the Times of Crisis” (in Czech).

Notes

1. A notable exception is Benjamin de Cleen and Nico Carpentier’s article ‘Contesting the Populist Claim on the People through Popular Culture: the 0110 concerts versus the Vlaams Belang,’ Social Semiotics 20, no. 2 (2010): 175–196.

2. Sylvia Bottela’s interview with Éric Fassin, ‘Are we on stage to reflect the audience or to create it?,’ 22 November 2017, https://www.ietm.org/en/themes/are-we-on-stage-to-reflect-the-audience-or-create-it (accessed, 24 September 2019).

3. Daniel Vaarik, ‘United Estonia and Political Change in Estonia’, March 2013, https://edgeryders.eu/t/united-estonia-and-political-change-in-estonia/6123.

4. Daniel Vaarik, ‘United Estonia and Political Change in Estonia’, March 2013, https://edgeryders.eu/t/united-estonia-and-political-change-in-estonia/6123.

5. See The Power of the Powerless [Václav Havel’s] written in 1978 as a followup to the establishment of the Charter 77. Václav Havel, Moc bezmocných (Praha: Nakladatelství lidové noviny, 1990).

6. Český rozhlas Dvojka, ‘Vaše naše divadlo. Dokument o dění kolem kontroverzní hry Naše násilí a vaše násilí,’ accessed 10 September 2019, https://dvojka.rozhlas.cz/vase-nase-divadlo-dokument-o-deni-kolem-kontroverzni-hry-nase-nasili-a-vase-7732824.

7. ‘Ministerstvo vnitra České republiky, Extremismus. Souhrnná situační zpráva 2. čtvrtletí roku 2017, ’ accessed 10 September 2019, https://www.mvcr.cz/clanek/ctvrtletni-zpravy-o-extremismu-odboru-bezpecnostni-politiky-mv.aspx.

8. Tomio Okamura, ‘Hra ‘Naše násilí a Vaše násilí,’ accessed 10 September 2019, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1981323105211828.

9. Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘Pomoc! Ať se vrátí Václav Havel! Co je to za populismus s oportunistickou tváří, ptá se po setkání s Babišem filozof Bernard-Henri Lévy,’ Hospodářské noviny,accessed 3 May 2019, https://archiv.ihned.cz/c1-66565190-schuzka-s-babisem.

10. Hannah Sachs, ‘Working with Students to Reclaim Revolutionary Roots of Czech Theatre’, accessed 10 September 2019, https://howlround.com/working-students-reclaim-revolutionary-roots-czech-theatre.

11. Szakács Árpád has launched the critique against Frida Kahlo exhibition displayed at the Hungarian National Gallery in July 2018 in the pro-Fidez newspaper The Magyar Idők, 14 July 2018 under the title: ‘This is the Way Communism is Promoted Using State Money.’ https://www.magyaridok.hu/velemeny/igy-nepszerusitik-a-kommunizmust-allami-penzbol-3291221/.

12. Sławomir Sierakowski, ‘Eastern Differecies,’Berlin Policy Journal, 31 October 2019.