The Waning Politics in Slovak Theatre

After the political changes in 1989 endowed Slovakia with the prospect of a successful and effective economic transition, the country’s theatre scene boldly reflected the euphoria, which drove the society to a path where it could experiment, criticize and shift paradigms. Nonetheless, the artistic revolution of the 1990s (witnessing the advent of such innovative theatre ensembles as Stoka or GuNaGu) soon waned and gave way to a more commercial and politically benign theatre in the 21st century, trailed by the state-funded network of national theatres. This paper endeavors to examine how the dialectical relationship between state-funded national theatres and the fringe scene in Slovakia brought about a state in which political discourse and artistic originality became an inherent part of the independent theatre scene. While very few plays directly addressed the country’s political development after 1989, or the dynamically changing social power structures, many productions were intrinsically political in the way they challenged the specifically delineated system of art funding. For example, the aesthetic of the Stoka theatre (and its artistic successor SkRAT), bearing traces of the devised method reminiscent of the American radical theatres of the 1960s and 1970s (such as the Open Theater or the Living Theater), became an artistic channel used to subvert not only traditional ways of theatremaking, but also the long-established torpid system of art funding. This paper aims to trace the development of political theatre in Slovakia after 1989 and speculate about why the political engagement through theatre seems to be losing its sting