Biography

Vida Davidović is an award-winning Bosnian and Serbian playwright, screenwriter, dramaturge, and novelist. She is mainly interested in writing about Balkan modalities of femininity under colonial gaze and transgenerational trauma (mental illness) in the Balkans. Her plays are fragmented, non-linear, and poetic, often inspired by psychoanalysis and postcolonial theories.

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“KANSAS CITY, KANSAS”

KANSAS CITY, KANSAS is a play written as a part of a graduate thesis at University of Nebraska – Lincoln that operates in the tradition of expressionist dramaturgy and playwriting, taking up themes of abuse, imperialism, war, trauma, womanhood, Balkan identities, and the history of the Balkans, as well as the discourses of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. The use of different theoretical frameworks related to both international and personal politics, which are shown to be intertwined, suggests a strong relationship between political processes in Second World countries that have experienced multiple occupations throughout their history and the way women in those countries relate to questions of body, authority, femininity, and interpersonal relationships. The play ultimately aims to establish the deep connection between two entities— personal and political—and to present politics through individual feelings and bodies; it seeks to point out the destitution of identity that follows the destitution of the country, and the destitution of the country that follows the destitution of national identity under the forces of colonial oppression. Playing with the idea of mirroring, the play resolves around three characters reflecting each other’s lives as immigrants from Bosnia living in the US through a fragmented, non-linear, often surrealist form with many dream-like sequences. Ultimately, Kansas City, Kansas is written to all of us who carry marks of geopolitics on our bodies.