Hats, or the Centre Around Which Everything Turned: Movements of Belgrade’s Hats Theatre, 1993–2006

This chapter is about a hybrid aesthetic of Serbian troupe, Hats Theatre (Pozorište Šešira/Позориште Шешира), described in the local press as a genre-bending multimedia amalgam of “music-dance-comic book-performance”. Hats Theatre was active between 1993 and 2006, during the period of major socio-political unrest in the region, burdened by the great austerity and civil war, induced by the breakdown of Yugoslavia. The company was conceptualised by the designer Ljudmila Stratimirović as an alternative form of fashion show for her hat collections, but it quickly outgrew genre parameters to include dance, video, and pop music concerts. Given that it involved many subcultural artists in over a decade of its existence and that it continued to work consistently (even during the bombing of Serbia in 1999), the lesser-known example of independent troupe Hats Theatre may be of interest to artists across today’s post-Brexit Europe, itself burdened with austerity, the upsurge of local nationalisms, xenophobias, and a new war (in Ukraine). This chapter explores ways in which Hats Theatre used its aesthetic to produce sustainable multimedia art, subtly inscribing its social reality. I argue that the lighthearted aesthetic promoted Hats Theatre’s agency, allowing it to carve a space through which to blur boundaries between art forms, as well as to open new trans-national collaborations, particularly touring across the new administrative borders (as the earliest Serbian theatre collective performing in Slovenia and Croatia from 1994).