Maska - Volume 30, Issue 175-176, 2015

This editorial offers a short commentary on the criteria of the Public two-year tender of the Slovenian Book Agency (Javna agencija za knjigo Republike Slovenije / JAK) for the selection of executors and co-funding of cultural projects in the field of books for the period of 2016–2017, namely: “Significance and the role of the applying journal in Slovenian culture and journal production”, “Significance of the proposed book publication project for the enrichment and development of Slovenian book market”, “Presentation of the planned activities for ensuring public accessibility of the applying journal and its promotion”, and “Presentation of the plan of activities to ensure accessibility and promotion of the book publication project”.

The future of performance consists of the complexity of an unknown guaranteed rather than the simplicity of a success or failure. This article offers a critique of failure in contemporary performance theory through the philosopher Henri Bergson’s writings on disorder and the art practice of Janez Janša. When the future is considered as an unknown guaranteed, it becomes possible to invent life in the same way that art is created.

Dutch performance artist Dries Verhoeven triggered a big controversy with his latest project Wanna Play? Love in Times of Grindr, produced by the independent theatre production house Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) in Berlin. He set out to question the topics of intimacy and of the private and the public on the Internet via mobile applications designed for meet-ups and was faced with an outraged gay community, which stood up in defense of privacy and managed to pressure the producers to cancel the project after just a few days. In the light of current events and the “censorship” coming from unexpected corners of society, we sat down to discuss important topics in Verhoeven’s work.

The article discusses the characteristics of the theatre of director Jernej Lorenci from his directing of The Oresteia (2009) to The Illiad (2015). It defines Lorenci’s break with his former poetics in the directing of The Oresteia, and finds the new condensation of his directing procedures in The Iliad. In the discussed theatre period, Lorenci seeks the possible lapses, soft slips, the play of the alleged that only constitute the true reality, and is not interested in a well-made play. In his shows, Lorenci believes the man rather than the world; in fact, he acknowledges the world only insofar as it is reflected in the man and is projected out of him. His understanding of the man and his humanity perhaps compares to Agamben’s conception of the man as a being who is infinitely missing himself. The paper illustrates the mentioned thesis by analysing two of Lorenci’s figures from The Iliad.

“Approaching the Real” utilises the author’s dramaturgical involvement in both to reflect on the creative process behind Jernej Lorenci’s productions of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s The Crazy Locomotive and Rudi Šeligo’s The Wedding at SNG Drama Ljubljana, both characteristic of the director’s work. By revealing methods and concepts behind the staging of the plays, we can gain an insight into the director’s thinking, that is, the “reflective processing” of the creative team. These are productions in which we can talk about approaching the authentic or, better said, the so-called “real”, and which arose as collective creations of a homogenised authorial and acting team.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the contemporary art festival City of Women, which was dedicated to survival tactics, I discuss the conditions under which it came about and the conditions under which artists or self-employed individuals in the field of culture must work in this time of cuts to public funding of the arts in Slovenia. In the context of selected performances from this year’s City of Women programme, I ask how it is possible to create antagonistic art within the capitalist means of production without the artist and producer burning themselves out in the process and, with the insights of Silvia Federici, how it is possible to separate oneself from the market and from the country without reducing oneself to poverty.

An anonymous reader and spectator of the playwright and performer Simona Semenič tries to establish contact with the playwright with the help of performative writing via an open letter. She studies Simona Semenič’s playwriting and her “self-performing” in autobiographical performances, or the victim trilogy, from the point of view of the never-clarified and never-overcome drama or dramatic relationship between the audience and the author. In the second part of the trilogy, entitled the second time, the audience is placed on stage, under the spotlights, with a mic in their hands, while Simona Semenič in the spectacular role of imegavictim in a golden dress and golden sandals with high heels sits on a bar stool and says nothing for the whole time. “And perhaps this is all she’s wanted to say.”

The article analyses the 7th Gibanica biennale of Slovenian contemporary dance. It notes that both festival prizes – the jury prize and the audience prize – have, for at least the second time in a row, come as a surprise, and that they represent a sort of subconscious mechanism. It highlights the importance of the festival conference about the Slovenian dancer, choreographer and pedagogue Ksenija Hribar (1938–1999), which also had a role in promoting the awards named after her (now awarded twice). By considering some of the themes in the works chosen for the biennale, which move from the conditions under which artistic work occurs and the objectives of that work to a within dance questioning of form, the heterogeneity of Slovenian contemporary dance is highlighted.

“Gibanica 2015: A Joint Critical Diary” is an experimental and subjective documentation of the Slovenian dance platform written in co-authorship. We describe and informally analyze the performances that were presented at the festival, but alsoother experiences and encounters. The diary collects thoughts, conversations, (mild) disagreements, coffee breaks and walks around Ljubljana.

Due to it being a subject of a judicial copyright dispute, Frank Castorf’s staging of Brecht’s Baal raises the question about what needs to be protected: copyright or theatre practice. Castorf’s stagings are known for their text montages and various shifts in space and time, which is what he did again in his latest performance, where he combined Brecht’s Baal with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, concentrating a number of female figures into one and moving the action to theVietnam War. After the premiere, Brecht’s heiress, Barbara Brecht-Schall, procured an injunctionprohibiting the piece. This was her last public act: she died a few months later.

In the framework of Kunstfest Weimar, Rimini Protokoll staged the premiere of Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, Vols. 1 & 2. Seventy years after the author’s death, the book’s copyright in Germany has expired, which raises the question of how much of a taboo and how dangerous the book still is. This question is also at the centre of the mentioned performance; it was made in cooperation with people connected to the book through personal stories, which sheds light on the book from other perspectives and at the same time demystifies it.

A review of a very unusual and highly topical Hamlet, as seen at the Pilsen Theatre Festival, and directed by Daniel Špinar, the young director of the National Theatre in Prague. In the year of the 50th anniversary of Jan Kott’s influential book Shakespeare Our Contemporary, it’s remarkable to see how this Hamlet reflects the way Kott read the play and the main character – as a character who is not defined by the situation imposed on him, at any rate not beyond doubt, and who “accepts it but at the same time revolts against it” – and then how he goes even a step further.

A review of the catalogue Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook, with which the Dutch gallery Casco concluded its Grand Domestic Revolution (GDR) project, dedicated to the “living research” of reproductive work. The author outlines the concept of the curators and editors Binna Choi and Maiko Tanaka, links it to American feminism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discusses it in terms of the works created for the project, especially those that appeared as part of the 19th City of Women festival in 2013. She appraises the GDR project, the GDR Handbook, and the exhibition in Ljubljana of GDR GOES ON as a risky but inspiring attempt to socialise reproductive work at the intersection of art, theory, activism, and everyday life.

“A Marathon Camp for Artistic Strategies in Politics and Political Strategies”, which was part of the 2012 Steirischer Herbst festival, is a symptomatic example of subverting the horizontal modes of self-organisation to the benefit of the cultural industry of the existent or an aestheticisation of resistance. Despite its superfluous curatorial packaging, Truth Is Concrete (Sternberg Press, 2014), a collection of contributions by the project participants, can be a source of potential new reflections on artivism and (its) “nonviolence”. The key question that the event and the publication raise is why artivism often evokes ambiguous and mixed feelings.

The first book in the new series Thinking Through Performance offers a mental feat of a concise survey of numerous performances by various artists and theatrical and philosophical concepts, which the author, Valentina Valentini, also observes within the fields of other disciplines. Three basic lines of investigation bring forth the visions of contemporary theatre worlds, their images and the strategies of their establishment, the expansion of the field while blurring the boundaries between visual art, the performative and new media, as well as the transformation of the actor into the autonomous body of the performer and the body that becomes plural, open, hybrid, space itself. With its in-depth and wide-ranging probing of the key phenomena in contemporary performing arts, its taking into account diverse perspectives, and its fragmentary approach within a complex field, the author has created a productive foundation for new starting-points and understandings in the dialogue between theory and practice.