This is not a performance about the cultivated, well-bred Miroslav Krleža, the Krleža paraded by leading intellectuals of bourgeois provenance… This is a performance about the systemic abolition of society through the elimination of important words from Croatian and other European languages: socialism, self-management, worker, workers’ council, capitalist, owner of the means of production, slave, utopia, dialectics, People’s Liberation War…
KRLEŽA, OR WHAT ARE FLAGS TO US AND WHAT ARE WE TO FLAGS THAT WE CRY FOR THEM SO is a performance inspired by the radically critical spirit of Miroslav Krleža. Krleža is resurrected in the performance as theatre is the only institution of humanity that makes resurrection possible. Therein lies the essence of his politicalness. In him, utopia is possible.
The Krleža that appears in this theatrical work is the erased Krleža, Krleža the proletarian and the proletarian writer, atheist, communist, Leninist no less, and Yugoslav. Krleža is to Zagreb what Aeschylus is to ancient Athens: a man who acts and lives for the “polis” he inhabits, fighting for the best of its prospects despite the narrow-minded reality.
The performance talks of flags as such – devoid of metaphor. Krleža, during the entirety of his long life in Zagreb, lived under numerous imperial, national and ideological flags. Therefore, he lived in several states in the same area, under several flags as part of the same nation, with different anthems of the same people, through thick and thin. And he lived his life by the logic of perspective for an age when flags will become obsolete as there will be no use for them.
