Nostalgia as political emotion: Eastern European subjectivities in the (post)Soviet theatre context

Abstract

The article aims at uncovering the significance and the dynamics of the emotion of nostalgia in Lithuanian theatre. Although frequently discussed in a negative sense as a sentimental attachment to the imaginary past, especially when concerning Eastern European identities and subjectivities, nostalgia can also be seen as an ambiguous political emotion. Drawing on two productions, one by Eimuntas Nekrosius from 1980 and another by Rimas Tuminas from 2004, the author shows that dealing with nostalgic emotions in theatrical communication can prove to be much more complicated and politically ambivalent than one may suppose. There are examples in Lithuanian theatre when the stage was perceived as a backward gazing space reflecting the lost innocence of pre-mediated vocal communities of the past. Numerous productions of "national classics" in the Lithuanian theatre of the twentieth century can be regarded as reconstructions of local, rural community. According to Svetlana Boym this kind of nostalgia can be described as "restorative". The production by Eimuntas Nekrogius, called "The Square" is an example of the opposite - "reflective" kind of nostalgia, for it does not seek to reconstruct or recollect the lost experience of organic community but rather lingers on the ruins of the lost world and focuses on the dynamic landscape of the emotion itself Liberated from the situation of direct and immediate emotional engagement of the spectators, nostalgia is transformed into the sequences of visual images, structured around playful ambivalence that has no resolution but lingers instead backwards and forwards, creating a space of excess and unpredictability. The production of Marius Ivaskevicius "Madagascar" directed by Rimas Tuminas challenges the ideas of an organic local community offering instead a burlesque of mass exodus of Lithuanians to Africa.[...]