HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Sanja Nikčević (born 1960) is a
Croatia Croatia, officially the Republic of Croatia, is a country in Central Europe, Central and Southeast Europe, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. It borders Slovenia to the northwest, Hungary to the northeast, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herze ...
n theatre critic and distinguished professor of
theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a Stage (theatre), stage. The performe ...
history History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...
in the drama department of the Arts Academy of Osijek, Croatia. She is also head of the drama module of the doctoral program in
literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...
at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Osijek (Osijek, Croatia). She is the president of the Croatian Critics' Association and Governing Board of Matica hrvatska. Nikčević lives in
Zagreb Zagreb ( ) is the capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Croatia#List of cities and towns, largest city of Croatia. It is in the Northern Croatia, north of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the ...
,
Croatia Croatia, officially the Republic of Croatia, is a country in Central Europe, Central and Southeast Europe, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. It borders Slovenia to the northwest, Hungary to the northeast, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herze ...
.


Education and work

Nikčević was born in Varaždin. At the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb she obtained a BA (French language and comparative literature, 1984), MA (1993) and Ph.D. (1998) in American drama. She worked as a journalist and theatre critic for the Croatian daily newspaper '' Večernji list'' (1985–1993), was an advisor for theatre in the Croatian Ministry of Culture (1996–1997), and was a freelancer.


Academic career

Nikčević was a
Fulbright The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States cultural exchange programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people ...
scholar (CUNY 1995, mentor M. Carlson; UCSB 2002, mentor W. D. King) and lectured at the
University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...
in 2001. Since 2003, she has been employed in the English department (Faculty of Philosophy, Osijek), teaching courses on American and British drama, where she still works in the Ph.D. literature program. Since 2007 she has been employed at the Arts Academy in Osijek (UAOS) where she teaches courses on the history of world drama and theatre.


Activities in international and national associations

Nikčević was the founder and first president (1994–2000) of the Croatian Center of ITI-
UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...
where she organized numerous international events (seminars, drama colony, exchange writers and directors, presentation of theatre of other countries in Croatia and vice versa). Since 2004 she was secretary, since 2010 she was president of a national theatre critics' organization ( HDKKT), and since 2014 she was a member of the main governing board of Matica hrvatska. She has served as an EXCOM board member for ITI Worldwide for two terms and is an active member of numerous international and American associations of scholars and critics (ASTR, ATHE, IFTR, AICT, and ATCA).


Editorial activities

At the Croatian center of ITI Nikčević founded and edited the publication ''Croatian drama'' (the only publication on Croatian theatre in English) and
Mansions
'. She was the editor of ''Mansions'' until 2004 and published more than thirty books. From 1998 to 2002 she was the editor of the Croatian mainstream theatre journal ''Theatre'' (
Kazalište
'). She founded Ars Academica (a series of textbooks for the Arts Academy) where she was editor from 2009 to 2013.


Publishing activities and field of interest

Her main topics of research are American drama, contemporary European drama, Croatian war drama and
theatre criticism Theatre criticism is a genre of arts criticism, and the act of writing or speaking about the performing arts such as a play or opera. Theatre criticism is distinct from drama criticism, as the latter is a division of literary criticism whereas th ...
and
history of theatre The history of theatre charts the development of theatre over the past 2,500 years. While performative elements are present in every society, it is customary to acknowledge a distinction between theatre as an art form and entertainment, and ' ...
. She has participated in more than one hundred national, American, and international symposiums. She has published more than one hundred articles on European and American theatre in English which were published in the US (SSEP, PAJ),
Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
,
Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
,
Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
,
Bosnia and Herzegovina Bosnia and Herzegovina, sometimes known as Bosnia-Herzegovina and informally as Bosnia, is a country in Southeast Europe. Situated on the Balkans, Balkan Peninsula, it borders Serbia to the east, Montenegro to the southeast, and Croatia to th ...
,
Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...
,
Slovakia Slovakia, officially the Slovak Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's m ...
, Macedonia and
Slovenia Slovenia, officially the Republic of Slovenia, is a country in Central Europe. It borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and southeast, and a short (46.6 km) coastline within the Adriati ...
in academic or theatre journals and academic-edited volumes, and forwards of books. Nikčević publishes theatre reviews in the Croatian weekly cultural newspaper ('' Vijenac'', '' Hrvatsko slovo''). She has published six books and edited six anthologies.


American drama

In Croatia Nikčević has edited the ''Anthology of American Plays'' (1993) in two volumes and published three books on American drama: ''The Subversive American Drama or Sympathy for Losers'' (1994)''; Affirmative American Drama or Long Live the Puritans''(2003) and'' Losers' Genius in Our Town''(Zagreb, 2006)''. '' In these books she introduced a new classification of American drama based on the attitude of plays toward the main American myth, the American dream. Plays depicting losers and failures of the American dream (from Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and David Mamet, for example) she calls subversive. Plays that show characters who can accept their position in life and make the most of it (mainly solving their problems and achieving the American dream) she designates as affirmative American plays (from Thornton Wilder through comedies and melodrama to Harling's '' Steel Magnolias,'' Margaret Edson, etc.).


European drama and new trends

Nikčević's book on the spread of in-yer-face theatre from its origin in 1990s Britain all over Europe, ''New European Drama or The Great Deception'', (Zagreb, 2005) was both attacked and praised. It has been translated into Slovak (, Bratislava, 2007) and Bulgarian (, Ruse, 2009). Selected chapters were published in several languages – English (''New Theater Quarterly'', August 2005), Polish (, Dialog 1/2005. str. 122–135.) and Hungarian ( u Szinhaz, Hungary, July 2005). It has been included as a rare non-English book as literature on the official website of in-yer-face theatre by British critic Aleks Sierz, whose book was the first to define the genre. Nikčević's book received the prestigious Croatian Award (Petar Brečić, 2006). After five years, in 2009, the second edition was published, including not just an additional chapter about the destiny of new European drama over those five years, but also reactions to the book (attacks and praise).


Croatian drama

Nikčević edited the first
anthology In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs, or related fiction/non-fiction excerpts by different authors. There are also thematic and g ...
of Croatian plays published outside of Croatia: ''Anthology of Contemporary Croatian Drama'' (Macedonia, 2002). Her book on Croatian drama ''What is Croatian drama to us?'' (Zagreb, 2008), deals with some less-fashionable but very important writers ( Tanja Radović, Miro Gavran), genres (the comedies of Ivan Kušan or literary cabaret of Boris Senker) and topics (the disappearance of political drama after the fall of communism, religious plays during wartime, etc.) She offered a new classification of Croatian drama () based upon the attitude of the drama toward reality, where she proves that this attitude has three points: politics, emotions and
intertextuality Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, Gerard Genette (1997) ''Paratexts'p.18/ref ...
. Some decades are dominant in dealing with one point: the 1960s and 1970s with politics as a means for the destruction of the individual ( Ivan Kušan, Ivo Brešan, Dubravko Jelačić Bužimski, Nino Škrabe, Mujićić, Boris Senker), the 1980s dealing with emotions and the inner world of the hero ( Miro Gavran, Lada Kaštelan, Mate Matišić), authors of the 1990s are in search of intertextuality ( Ivan Vidić, Asja Srnrc Todorović, Tomislav Zajec), while the latest period is in search of the voice between these three points.


Croatian war drama (on the Homeland war)

Edited: # ''Anthology of Croatian War Plays 1991-1995'' (Zagreb, 2011) where she included 11 plays (Nino Škrabe: , Davor Špišić: , Matko Sršen: , Katja Šimunić: ''Blueblanche,'' , Milan Grgić: , Lada Martinac/Snježana Sinovčižć: , Goran Tribuson: , Zvonimir Zoričić: , Miroslav Mađer: , Zvonimir Majdak: , Miro Gavran: ). # ''Anthology of Croatian War Comedies 1991-1997'' (Vinkovci, 2013) where she included eight comedies (Milica Lukšić: , Tahir Mujičić/Boris Senker: , Lydia Scheuermann Hodak: , Zvonimir Zoričić: , Miro Gavran: , Ivan Kušan: , Ljubomir Kerekeš: , Ivo Brešan: ). # ''Anthology of Croatian Post-War Plays 1996-2011'' (Zagreb 2014) where she included 12 plays ( Lydia Scheuermann Hodak: 992/1996 Pavao Pavličić: 996 Hrvoje Barbir Barba: 997 Vlatko Perković: ''Deus ex machina'' 997 Slobodan Šnajder: ''Ines & Denise'' 997 Dubravko Mihanović: 004 Gordana Ostović: 005 Tena Štivičić: ''Fragile'' 005 Amir Bukvić: 006 Igor Hamer: 007 Lada Martinac: 009 Miro Međimorec: 011. The anthologies and Nikčević's theoretical work on the topic (''Plays on Homeland War of one hundred titles from cabaret till allegory'', published in the journal ''Republika'' 7-8/2012. p. 67-91) are changing the usual beliefs that there are no war plays from the Homeland War or that these plays are not of a good quality. Her research showed that from 1990 to 2011 more than one hundred professional Croatian plays were published or performed, plays that are connected with the topic either directly, through a character connected with the war, or through
allegory As a List of narrative techniques, literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a wikt:narrative, narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a meaning with moral or political signi ...
(speaking about another war but with direct inspiration from the Homeland War).


Theatre criticism

Nikčević edited a collection on essays in ''English Theatre Criticism Today'' (2002) as a result of three symposiums on theatre criticism that she organized in the Croatian centre of ITI (Pula 1998 and 1999, Zagreb 2000). She published the first theoretical book on theatre criticism in Croatia, titled ''Theatre Criticism or Inevitable Companion'' (2012), where she compared two different attitudes toward theatre criticism (European and American) with a new definition of the genre. She is member of the American Theatre and Drama Society and was member of the International Committee of the American Theatre Critics Association.


Acknowledgements

* Honorary citizen of Waterford, Connecticut (1999). * Order of the Croatian Interlace by the President of the Republic of Croatia, for the promotion of Croatian culture (2000). * Petar Brečić Award, for book on theatre (''New European Drama or Big Deception'') (2006). * Antun Gustav Matoš Award by Matica Hrvatska, for best critical book (''Theatre Criticism or Inevitable Companion'') (2012). * Andrija Buvina Award (2018).


Main Publications


Books (Croatian)

# ''Theatre Criticism or Inevitable Companion'' (2012, Award A.G. Matoš). # ''What is Croatian Drama to Us?'', Naklada Ljevak, Zagreb, 2008 # ''Losers' Genius in Our Town,'' Zagreb, Faculty of Philosophy, 2006 # ''New European Drama or Big Deception'', Meandar, Zagreb, 2005 (translated: into English NTQ 83/2005, Slovak, 2007, Bulgarian 2009., Award Petar Brečić 2006., second edition Zagreb, 2009), # ''Affirmative American Drama or Long Live the Puritans'', Croatian center of ITI, Zagreb, 2003 # ''Subversive American Drama or Sympathy for Losers'', CDM, Rijeka, 1994


Translations (other languages)

# "British Brutalism, the ‘New European Drama’, and the Role of the Director" NTQ (New Theater Quarterly), published by Cambridge University Press, 83/2005, p. 255-272 # "" (Let's make new European drama) Szinhaz, Hungary, July 2005 (translated from English by Keszthelyi Kinga) # "" (Everything has consequences), Dialog (Poland) 1/2005. str. 122–135.


Articles published in English (selection)

# "Sanja Nikcevic: The Comeback of Political Drama in Croatia: Or How to Kill a President by Miro Gavran", in: Haedicke, Susan C., Deirdre Heddon, Avraham Oz and E.J. Westlake (eds.), ''Political Performances. Theory and Practice''. IFTR/FIRT Political Performances Working Group. Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2009, IV, 379 pp. Pb: 978-90-420-2606-3 # "Croatian Theatre and the War 1992-1994", in: Dennis Barnett and Arthur Skelton (eds.), ''Theatre and performance in Eastern Europe. The Changing Scene'', The Scarecrow press, Plymouth, 2008. # "How to Impose Violence as a Trend?", in: Ian Herbert and Kalina Stefanova (eds.), ''Theatre and Humanism in a World of Violence'', (24th congress of the IACT), St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, Sofia, 2009. p. 57–72. # "Angles on the stage Religious Theatre in Croatia 1945-1989; 1999-1994; 1996-2002" in ''Europassion. Kirche-Konflikte-Menschenrechte. Rudolf Grulich zum 60. Geburstag'', Gehard Hess Verlag bad Schussenried, 2006. # “Actors Under Power”, Theatre Year Book 2003 Theatre Abroad, ITI Japan Centre, Tokyo, 2003, p. 160-167 # "Political Correctness, Identity, War and Lost Communication" in Lužina, Jelena (ed.) ''Balkan Theatre Sphere'', Fakultet dramskih umjetnosti, Skopje, Macedonia, 2003., p. 89-95.


References


Literature

* * *


External links


List of works
at the Ruđer Bošković Institute pages
Sanja Nikčević
at GoodReads {{DEFAULTSORT:Nikcevic, Sanja 1960 births 20th-century Croatian non-fiction writers 20th-century Croatian women writers 21st-century Croatian non-fiction writers 21st-century Croatian women writers Croatian theatre critics Croatian women critics Women theatre critics Living people People from Varaždin Croatian Roman Catholics Andrija Buvina Award winners Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb alumni Academic staff of the University of Osijek University of California, Santa Barbara people