------------------------------------------
The Accidental Editor
Vanda Butkovic
In 1996, as a full time student trying to come to terms with the fact that I had made a terrible mistake in choosing to study social work, I found creative asylum by working as a part-time roving reporter on a local Zagreb TV station ‘Open Television’ (OTV).
My reports were absurdly eclectic; interviewing the Mayor of Zagreb on a Monday about in-fighting within his party, and an old woman the following day about her leaking roof. Occasionally I was sent to the National Theatre to cover the opening night of a long forgotten Croatian opera, as no one else had the nerves to sit through a sub-standard performance with a tedious nationalist libretto.
OTV had produced culture shows in the past, but with poor audience figures and low revenues from commercials this was no longer considered viable. In June 1997 I offered to produce two half hour shows about upcoming Zagreb festivals: the Contemporary Dance Festival and the Eurokaz festival of New Theatre. The theme for that year’s Eurokaz was The Body, through form of Modern Primitivism. To a largely conservative theatre public this was nothing short of a scandal; performances by Franco B, Ron Athey and Orlan shocking to the core much of the mainstream audience.
I was assigned a crew and post-production team, and was given the gig under the condition that the shows would be ready for broadcast before the national TV Network’s aired their review of the festivals.
When the first of my ‘Festival Specials’ was aired at 7pm on a Saturday night to an unsuspecting audience, OTV’s telephone system went into meltdown with a flood of vitriolic complaints claiming the show to be demonic! To my amazement, the broadcast was lambasted in national newspapers and the network was castigated for showing scenes of a sexual and ‘satanic nature’, considered an affront to catholic dogma.
The uproar centred on footage shown from Ron Athey and Franco B’s performances. Images of a naked man having his testicles stapled together to form a makeshift vagina while suspended from butchers hooks pierced into his bare back was not typical prime-time Croatian TV viewing. The show wasn’t all blood and guts. I am proud to have introduced the Zagreb TV audience to Gekidan Kaitasha and their show Sadism, Masochism, Fascism, Fetishism, Feminism: Tokyo Discipline, where in one scene, a naked, angry-looking female performer devoured and spat out an entire raw Savoy cabbage in front of a hungry-looking guinea pig, trapped inside a glass jar.
So Modern Primitivism helped me to get noticed. And, to my surprise, the network offered me my own weekly half-hour culture show - ‘Dom Kulture’.
My aim was to attract an audience which would not normally watch the mainstream culture shows on Croatian TV, due the staid elitist approach and use of overly high-brow language.
I brought together a small team of passionate theatre goers and accomplished journalists, none of whom had studied dramatic arts or were involved in the theatre industry. This was key, as it enabled us to craft reviews free of influence from the small but incestuous performance arts establishment at the time.
The show covered all of the creative arts. My editorial policy was to be as egalitarian as possible; I was at pains to allocate the exact same airtime to an unknown artist or theatre company as to a celebrated artist or performer – up to three minutes, no more, no less. The pace and rhythm of the show was consistent throughout.
Half way through each show we always had a three minute portrait of a forgotten or an un-known artist. An interview with a film director famous in the 1960’s would be followed by a piece about a team of young seminary boys who had worked for months on a huge church mural in a newly built church in the suburbs of Zagreb. There was no recognisable thread to the running order of the three-minute vignettes; this was designed to keep an element of surprise. Theatre reviews discussed not only individual performances, but also theatre repertoires for that season, the choice of which were often politically motivated.
We took an unconventional approach to covering large exhibitions or major openings. Our journalists would go to a gallery before paintings had been hung for a chat with the curator about the concept for the layout of the exhibition, or they would record a ballerina practicing a one minute solo for an opera, rather than the opera itself.
At first finding material for the shows was a painstaking task, but after a few shows were broadcast we started receiving a huge numbers of calls and faxes from artists inviting us to see their work.
The success of the show was based on the fact that we attributed as much importance to an emerging artist who pickled peppers as an art form as to a major exhibition of Croatian baroque paintings. We spoke to our audience from an independent perspective, free from influence of the closed established cultural circle. We had nothing to lose and I think that this resonated well with the viewers.
Today, well and truly freed from the shackles of social work, and on the verge of embarking on my Performance Arts career, I can fully appreciate the value of ‘Dom Kulture’ to the emerging or forgotten performer/artist. As I trawl forlornly through websites looking for illusive opportunities and entry points into the industry, how great would it be if a group of rough and ready, enthusiastic local TV journalists contacted me to show interest in my work and to offer me three-minutes of precious exposure? It’s a sad indictment that in one of the world’s foremost cities of culture, TV networks are not prepared to take the risk to produce non-commercially generated products showcasing the wealth of London’s creative talent.