Difficult evening. Staged reading at the local theatre festival (the longest-running experimental theatre festival in Yugoslavia, having outlasted even Yugoslavia) that lasted an intermissionless almost five hours, with everyone intending to wring the usual pathos out of the event (house darkened, etc.) rather than the reportage that I suspect was the genesis of the concept. Bright side, observed the event and thought about its nature, and sampled a very wide range of the strongest local actors. And in the old Austro-Hungarian theatre, you can always look around and imagine a past or future time when the entertainments might tend a bit more to the First or Second Vienna School. The local arts are a bit of a confusion. If they would clarify the lines of work, and the nature of each institution, things might become more clear -- as opposed to each institution trying to be all things in its form. A promising new theatre has apprently launched with a Seagull in the newer part of town (that of the old Republic), which would have been right up my alley, but it sold out before I turned my attention from arrival and calibration to theatregoing.
I knew I was in for a difficult evening at the beginning -- charming old theatre, but at the entrance, they forced the audience to file between two large unkempt fellows wearing the insignia of a local private security company on their synthetic workclothes. The audience members seemed not to notice, dutifully submitting to the scrutiny, as if they wanted to eat at a nice restaurant, and accepted the fact that the underworld figures there had placed a few goons at the door.
There's a way of doing things in the arts, and it's really only evident when the work inside the room guides the sensibility, though an institutional memory can carry it forward in time -- hence the charm of old Vienna. Of the three or four winds guiding the Balkans, Vienna is of the north -- an alternative for the locals between the Orthodoxy of the East and the Latins of the West. Reading an interesting dissertaion written at Berkley a few years ago about the Austrian cadastral and construction initiative that followed the 1879 withdrawal of the authority of the Sublime Porte. The locals, always paradoxically clinging to distant authority rather than the Christian nationalists in the hills while simultaneously treating the emissaries and orders of that authority with profound suspicion, switched their allegiance from South to North, seeking protection from East and West. At least those who stayed. And after the 1919 dictatorship, the old Austrian borders (which followed the earlier borders) were restored. So Austria, in a Clifford Geeertz--local meaning sense is a sort of northern culture that offered a safe haven from the Serbian and Croatian imperial forces, a role that subsequent mediators perhaps unwittingly stepped into, naturally thinking the classicism at the center of things to be a product of all three cultures.
But it's not that simple -- the cultural sensibilities of the north informed both East and West. Serbian priests lauded the pananthropos of Shakespeare, and Romanian actors trained in Paris, while the theatres purchased their stage machinery from the emergent German industrial cities. West and East are both creatures of the North as well, at least in the cultural arena.
So, perhaps Mozart, and when the subscriptions allow, Schoenberg might be a good charm. And once the rooms start to do their proper work, there might be a few less goons about, or they might find work in the stage carpentry shop instead.
After the return from five hours of scrawling things onto the pad in darkness, several hours of maddening tasks until almost the hour of dawn. Sufficient is the day, but sometimes there's some stoppage time involved. No run, given the late waking, which was the catastrophe -- simply washed out all the clothes, gargled with some salt water to try to offset the long hours in the underventilated room, and got to the morning yoga. A commissar from the East would think me a national socialist; a national socialist would think me an ardent commissar. But this is the mind of east and west, and there are many more Hegelian dualities to life, even just limiting things to cadastral dimensions of the north, the south, the east and the west. We haven't yet even begun to talk about up and down, for example.