(Re)discovering the Self through an ‘Other’: Reflections on the Spiritual Education of the Actor in the Remnants of Yugoslavia
This article considers the undercurrents of spirituality in Professor Bajčetić’s approach to Stanislavski-based actor education in the apparently secular environment of communist Yugoslavia.
It concentrates on the first year of the four-year programme of actor education in which students worked on themselves, exploring the question – ‘Who am I?’ as an actor, as a character and as a human being. Bajčetić worked for 45 years as a professor of acting at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, during which time he taught generations of more than 300 students from all over the former Yugoslavia, as well as several generations of students in Norway, where he taught for ten years.
The article is written from my perspective as a member of Bajčetić’s last class, and based on the research I did twelve years after his retirement in 2001. I surveyed a number of his former students and interviewed Bajčetić directly in 2014. In the process of (re)discovering the Self through the construction and performance of an Other, Bajčetić insisted his students connect to the spiritual without naming it as such, in ways that could liberate both actors and audiences – as much off-stage and on.