Sex Education II: Fight

[At the venue HAU3] director Tjaša Črnigoj shed light on the history of emancipatory birth policies in the former Yugoslavia in a short lecture performance entitled Sex Education II: Fight. With the help of photos on old overhead projectors (East German: Polylux) and in brisk, informative frontal reports, two performers in dungarees explained the empowering biography of the partisan and women's rights activist Vida Tomšič.

“Love is a verb” is the title of the Berlin festival. Or: “Love as an act, as an action”; festival curator Petra Pölzl sees it as an appeal that questions love as a romantic ideal with fixed roles for women and men. “For me, this love is of course also the question of how we can co-create community, how we want to live, how we want to relate to each other.” Questions to which the festival provides political answers, explaining how, for example, love relationships had been and continue to be controlled by the state. The Slovenian group around Tjaša Črnigoj presented Sex Education: Fight, a lecture performance on a forgotten chapter of history. This is the story about a country, about an unknown young woman and about love, the performers in socialist workers' overalls explain at the beginning. The country, which no longer exists, is called Yugoslavia. The love is that between the partisan and later minister Vida Tomšič and her future husband, the gynaecologist Franc Novak. The unknown young woman is a woman who got unintentionally pregnant in 1940. An old-fashioned overhead projector shows a bowl of water with a dark lump. Herbs are added, then liquids, quinine, phosphorus, and finally knitting needles and a coat hanger press against the lump until the water turns red, the text quotes from a manual on illegal and life-threatening abortion. Tjaša Črnigoj uses old photos, newsreel excerpts and transcripts of meetings to recount the arduous struggle for freedom of choice in childbearing in Yugoslavia. You can literally smell the air of the socialist offices, but also the enthusiasm of the new liberated socialist man. However, the responsibility of men is not mentioned at all, except for a short comment on alcoholised husbands who regularly rape their wives, without, of course, using the word rape. Love as a verb, as political action, alternative cohabitation as a response to experiences of discrimination, racism and colonialism, these were the central subjects during these first festival days and nights at HAU. The old Sponti movement saying about solidarity as the affection of peoples comes to mind, as well as the even older one about love that goes through the stomach.

In Fight, we follow, among other things, the euphoric search for and discovery of the manufacturer of the first diaphragm in Slovenia, and the path to this information unfolds like a suspenseful adventure, as the information keeps slipping away. It is not held by some of the country's central archival institutions, nor by museums. [...] Yugoslavia was one of the most progressive countries in the field of women's rights at the time, so in the documentary play Fight, the creative team is interested in, among other things, why this was so, and they set out to 'find out' by reconstructing actual events. Events that were constantly subject to fluctuations of good and bad. [...] As an event, the fight constantly oscillates between the cruelty of violence against women, blood-stained hands and underwear, and the optimistic future announced by the diaphragm as a sign of a bright future for contraceptive potentials.

The series of lecture-performances entitled Sex Education II confronts and reminds us of the importance of acquired rights and the advancement of medical science. Fight is a journey through time and space: from the initial stage in Unity Square we journey into 1940 and into the body of a model woman somewhere in former Yugoslavia—a woman without education and rights, living as an object used to satisfy male sexual urges, perhaps even pleasure. In the cold and dark cellar at The New Post Office, the actress lists plants that help terminate a foetus. If they fail to work, there is a selection of acids that can be consumed. Should even this fail to work, you can try a feather from a rooster’s tail, a parsley root, horseradish, a knitting needle, or a hanger. [...] The scenes of the lecture-performance Fight offer much more than described above: the engaged and in places witty performance by actresses Sendi Bakotić and Vanda Velagić (both from Rijeka, Croatia, but their families originating from every part of the former Yugoslavia), Tijana Todorović’s and Lene Lekše’s set and costume design, and small live interventions by director Tjaša Črnigoj. The accompanying text to the performance, which in its concept and with arguments supports the need for Sex Education II, reads: “In a time of the retraditionalisation of society and politics, which questions the right to safe abortion and contraception all over again, it is far from clear that women’s bodies belong to them alone—something that we still and once again need to fight for.”

In lines with the feminist principle, the theatre narrative constantly intertwines the personal and the political, reminding us how we take the rights which are the result of the long and persistent fight of our sisters for granted. Our journey through The New Post Office spaces, through historical and collective memory, through the experiences of the previous generations of women and through our personal history, tells us the story of how we should not stop and settle for the world in which we currently live in. We can lose everything we have gained in a heartbeat. This is why it is necessary to remember those times, but also to gain an awareness of the current situation. In fact, in Croatia the vast majority of gynaecologists exercise the right to conscientious objection and abortions are often performed against payment, and in Slovenia it may happen that gynaecology will be excluded from basic health insurance. With its format, Sex Education II reminds us of the activist extent of theatre [...], which finds it function mainly in its ability to change society through aesthetics. All those of us who followed Sex Education II all the way to the end certainly found ourselves at least a tiny bit changed by this feminist school.