Hvar City Theatre Days, Vol. 50 No. 1, 2024.
Original scientific paper
Hvar Theatre Days: The Role and Contribution of Živko Jeličić
Ivan Bošković
Abstract
Hvar Theatre Days is one of the longest-lived Croatian scholarly and cultural events, having for fifty years brought together some of the most important names in scholarship about literature and the theatre, with theatre studies experts, directors, actors from both home and abroad. In company with Batušić, Bogišić, Fališavac, Hećimović, Kravar, Pavličić, Senker, Schiffler, Novak, Marijanović, Posavec, Rapacka, Vončina and Tomasović, who were the most frequent, Jeličić was a noted speaker at the event as well as a member of the editorial board of the volumes of proceedings. Jeličić took part in Hvar Theatre Days a dozen times and left important records of it. Whether discussing personae or characters and their structure, speeches and retorts in which the personae created their stage and dramatic identity, the dramatic charge, the dramatic properties in novel writing and so on, Jeličić’s insights are more the result of reading dramatic texts and authors than attempts at verification on the stage. Jeličić most often approaches the themes, authors and works under consideration from the perspective of reader with the experience of writer, narrator, whose undoubted creative vein enabled him to delve astutely into the hidden strata and meanings of a text. This experience enabled him to recognise, out of his own passion as author, the true meaning of a literary persona, how figure and character are constructed, how dramatic charge and tension are set up, how language and gesture are involved in their characterisation and the revelation of inner states and moods and so on. Jeličić primarily perceives the dramatic work as text, penetrating profoundly into and acutely observing its dominant dimensions and contents, drawing more on his own talent and intuition than on dramaturgical interpretative presumptions and insights. The articles lack notes and references to literary or dramatic theory to back up his readings, and also wanting are references to the stage life of individual works from the perspective of their capacity to be staged. Jeličić but rarely referred to opinions voiced by other authors and authorities about this or that work or writer. He relied most of all on his taste as reader and the strength of his own experience of the literary or dramatic work, addressing the contents and features that he thought to have the greatest specific literary or dramatic gravity. Some of his ideas are often at odds with today’s readings, and the evaluations of some works are not fully articulated, which, of course, does not diminish the relevance of some of the thoughts and reflections expressed in them, with which he drew the attention at the time when the papers were spoken.
Keywords
Živko Jeličić; Hvar Theatre Days; dramatic work; dramatic charge; state personae; characters; dramatic identity
Hrčak ID:
316969
URI
Publication date:
8.5.2024.
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