Stevo Žigon and the Horizon of Expectation of the Yugoslav Public During the Tumultuous ‘60s

The article examines the place of the Yugoslav actor and director Stevo Žigon in the context of the 1960s – the period of the first upheavals in the post-war history of the Federation. It traces the main socio-political processes and the reaction to them by the artistic intelligentsia through the emergence of the cinematic Black Wave and the BITEF. The text outlines S. Žigon’s place in the context of these processes, as it focuses on three important roles of his from the 1960s – the role of the judge in Z. Berkovic’s film “Rondo» (1966), the Robespierre’s monologue during the student strike at the University of Belgrade in 1968, the performance “Hamlet» (1971), which Žigon directed, while also playing the main role. The film “Rondo” is considered one of the prime examples of Yugoslav cinema modernism of the 1960s, in which several theatrical approaches were applied (interior shots, leitmotif, the “theatre curtain” effect, etc.). Robespierre’s monologue of the same name, performed by Stevo Žigon during the student strike in Belgrade, is interpreted as a performance composed of three types of elements – «dramatological», «historical» and «performative». Based on theatre reviews from that time, the reception of S. Žigon’s performance “Hamlet” (1971) is analysed as a particular phenomenon in the Belgrade theatre life and as a testimony to the creative evolution of the director and the actor in the course of assimilating the ground-breaking achievements in European directing (H. Litzau, P. Brook). The article concludes that Žigon’s contribution to the development of SFRY’s theatre can be thought of in two directions: the approach of the stage art to the current socio-political reality through performative practices and active experimentations with the theatrical language; the opposition of the “literary theatre» and the use of the achievements of the world’s avant-garde theatre schools of the 1950s and 1960s.