COURAGE

connecting collections

Gordana Vnuk's personal collection contains published and documentary materials about the festival of new theatre Eurokaz, the theatre company Coccolemocco, the international theatre festivals Young People’s Theatre Days and Young People’s Theatre Days of Dubrovnik and the The Society of Amateurs in Culture and Arts Vinko Jeđut at which premises the company was working for some time under the pretext of being its theatre section. Coccolemocco, as a part of independent cultural scene, introduced new elements to the performing arts and a new type of theatre into Croatian and Yugoslav society. Through their selection of themes, the young theatre zealots inaugurated and discussed issues pertaining to Yugoslav leftist practices, relying on the utopian ardour of their generation who chose theatre as a possible mode of responsible and open action along the lines of Brecht and his dialectical method. Such an attitude ultimately lead to negative criticisms from a part of the professional mainstream community.

The collection of photographs by Croatian conceptual artist Tomislav Gotovac presents four performances (Reading the Newspapers, Listening to the Radio, Watching Television and Telephoning) from the 1980 and 1981 in which the artist awaited the death of Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, thus underscoring the social and media psychosis of that moment. The work used a subversive strategy by which the artist indirectly drew the public and socialist regime into the performance, leaving them to think: what is the artist showing?

The István Darkó Legacy – Péter Egyed Private Collection, beside the documentary material of unconventional childhood activity and the sole appreciable Transylvanian Hungarian radio play of the Romanian communist regime, contains writings that – in form of fantastic stories, evading the censorship of the time – made possible the representation of an “Other“ world completely different from the Party ideology.

The collection reveals the life and work of the famous Lithuanian theatre director Jonas Jurašas. He was expelled from the position of director of the Kaunas State Drama Theatre in 1972. Jurašas did not agree to work under the proposed conditions of ‘Soviet theatre director’. He expressed his own view of what kind of working conditions and rights artists, and specifically theatre directors, should have. His terms were rejected by Soviet cultural administrators. Jurašas became unemployed, and had to endure poor living conditions. He and his family were among the first people in Soviet Lithuania to request permission to emigrate to the West, and received it from the Soviet government.