Staging Vulnerability: Precarity, Dispossession, and the Limits of Despair

Since he emerged as an innovative director in the mid-1990s, Bulgarian director Javor Gardev has staged over 50 productions throughout Europe. His theatrical oeuvre unveils and explores the condition of precariousness, a condition of human vulnerability that Judith Butler discusses extensively in recent work. The bare human body, stripped of protective layers, haunts Gardev’s stage- as both predator and prey. This article examines Gardev’s preoccupation with existential vulnerabilities: isolation, a constant threat of violence, various types of imprisonment- and the way these vulnerabilities can be exacerbated socio-politically. In conversation with Gardev, the article explores Gardev’s approach to directing, and the ways that violence, and a generalized threat of violence, but also a longing for contact and connection and the potential for hope, permeate Gardev’s worlds.