Sanja Frühwald: TIGER LILLIES

In the frame of Bobri festival.

January 21 at 6 p.m. (general public)
January 22 at 10 a.m. (schools)
There will be a 15 minute discussion with the director after fter the performance for schools. The discussion will be translated to slovene.

Six women, six stages of life, six stories. The youngest is nine, the oldest eighty years old. A whole life between them. What have they experienced and what still awaits them? (more…)

VN Lab – Laboratory for contemporary performing arts – Application due date: January 15

Photo: VN archive

January – June 2017

The VN Lab is organized as a series of six workshops connected into a continuous creative process. The work follows the method of self-staging we’ve developed on the basis of a 10-year creative practice and on experience from giving numerous workshops at home and abroad. (more…)

Beton Ltd.: ICH KANN NICHT ANDERS

Photo: Toni Soprano

The first performance of the German cycle

“The bridge between being principled and practical is called survival. In theatre, we always use stories to be able to talk about the world, we play roles to be able to speak of human nature, and we pretend that a table is a table. But we were aiming for a reverse principle. Since we cannot speak with any certainty and artistic integrity of anything else than ourselves, our position, our principles and non-principles – all the rest are moralistic discourses or whining excuses and guilt washing – precisely the things that an artist should not possess can emerge between practicality and integrity: detachment, fascism, sexism, narcissism, misanthropy … It is these little perversions which show that we are not exempted, even if we pretend that we are.

In the end, we have to admit to ourselves that we can do no other. Ich kann nicht anders.

And this dual position is more than perverse.

My life is disgusting, I make myself sick, and yet I am so far from changing anything. And even though I am frightened by these sacred spaces, I am unresponsive and stiff as soon as I leave them. In the end, I am not worth anything.”

The authorial poetics of collective Beton Ltd. (Katarina Stegnar, Branko Jordan, Primož Bezjak) is characterized by a search for intimate entries into the global issues – their position is often personal – a search for new, hybrid forms of performing, and a mastery of performing techniques. Ich kann nicht anders is their fifth performance, where the counterpoint between the total intimacy and the echoes of the global events reminds us of a thesis by Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat, that the real revolution is always a revolution of everything, all social interactions, even the most intimate ones.

The world around us is saturated with change, and if there is one constant, it is currently uncertainty. We anticipate changes, but it is not yet clear what they might be. One of the possible strategies to combat the deafening noise of the world is to retreat into one’s own world. Not to surrender, but to defend one’s own intimate territory against the outside world. A retreat into intimacy, where freedom is possible and where utopia is – now.

Credits

Conceived and directed by: Beton Ltd.
Performers: Primož Bezjak, Branko Jordan, Katarina Stegnar
Music: Dead Tongues
Space design: sonda4, Toni Soprano
Costume design: Mateja Benedetti
Sound design: Jure Vlahovič
Dramaturgical adviser: Urška Brodar
Graphic design: Saša Kladnik
Proofreading: Barbara Rogelj
Photography: Toni Soprano
Technical director: Andrej Petrovčič
Technical assistance: Martin Lovšin
Executive producer: Maja Vižin
Produced by: Bunker, Ljubljana
The performance was supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana
With help of: Elektro Ljubljana d.d.,  Slovensko mladinsko gledališče
Thanks to: GT22, Športno društvo Tabor, Aljoša Cetinski, Mini Teater, Uroš Kaurin

Performances

Premiere: 
26th August 2016, 8.00 pm, Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana

Upcoming performances:

9th and 10th March 2019

Past performances: 
27th August, 29th August, 30th August 2016, 8.00 pm, Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
24th September, 25th September 2016, 8.00 pm Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
8th October, 9th October 2016, 8.00 pm, Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
19th November and 20th November 2016, 8.00 pm, Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
22nd November 2016 ad 6.00 pm and 9.00 pm, Narodni dom Maribor, Maribor
4th April 2017, The Week of Slovenian Drama, Kranj
13th and 14th May 2017 at 8.00 pm, Dvorana Športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
3rd and 4th June 2017 at 8.00 pm, in the frame of Flanders – Balkan Express Meeting, Dvorana Športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
17th September 2017, 8.00 pm, Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
5th and 6th October 2017, Prague Crossroads International Theatre Festival, Czech Republic
10th and 11th October 2017, Festival Konfrontacje Teatralne Lublin, Poland
10th and 11th February 2018, 8.00 pm, Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana
6th March 2018, 8.00 p.m., Slovene National Theatre Nova Gorica, Slovenia
11th August 2018, 9.00 p.m., Kamfest, Kamnik, Slovenia
6th and 7th October at 9.00 p.m., Dvorana športnega društva Tabor, Ljubljana

Critics

Arhar N.: Ich kann nicht anders, Delo, 30. 8. 2016 (pdf 180KB) (translation: M. Jesenko)
Jelesijević N., In a vacuum of preserving bare life : Ich kann nicht anders, Radio Študent, 30.8.2016 (pdf 172 KB) (translation: M.Jesenko)

Video

Ich kann nicht anders Trailer from Bunker Ljubljana on Vimeo.

Photos

Photo: Nada Žgank

Blažka Müller Pograjc: AMOR OMNIA VINCIT* (based on the literary material by Per Olov Enquist entitled The Book About Blanche and Marie, Beletrina Publishing House)

Photo: Borut Peterlin

This poetic and yet rather cruel story, which Matjaž Pograjc likes to call a magic physical performance, is fragmented and functions on several different levels. The narrative here and now consists of a story about Marie Curie’s love episode, which leads us to Blanche Wittman’s and Jane Avril’s past. (more…)

Betontanc: TRACK OF THE WORLD

Photo: Nada Žgank

The premiere of Track of the World leaves the audience completely mesmerized: Betontanc has returned to its roots, to physical theatre once again! Not that fascination with movement, sport and choreography, so characteristic of Matjaž Pograjc, has ever disappeared, but the aspect of corporeal mastery or physical work once again takes the central stage in Track of the World. (more…)

Betontanc: TRACK OF THE WORLD

Photo: Jure Vlahovič

We all like sport because of its purity. There’s only you, your body, the track and the competition. Everyone wants to win, but some people need to win. Everyone believes they can be a champion. We’re all held captive in the same game without a way out. What to do? Can one retire? Can one tell the truth? Why? Sometimes it is better to dream in broad daylight than it is to live at night.  (more…)

Beton Ltd.: EVERYTHING WE’VE LOST, WHILE WE’VE GONE ON LIVING

Photo: Urška Boljkovac

The performance Everything We’ve Lost While We’ve Gone on Living emanates from the absurd as defined by the contemporary temporal context and as developed by the French playwright Eugène Ionesco, in his work The Killer. Bold glamour and exquisite show; grandiose buildings and time when everything is possible; is that merely a dream that belongs to the past? What exactly were we born into and in the middle of what did we grow up? What should we have done, but haven’t? (more…)

In the frame of KUL Abonma we present: Mare Bulc + performers: ALL TOGETHER NOW!

Photo: Domen Ulbl

A theatre-dance project with the exclusive cast of musicians only. It portrays a country as a band, its inhabitants as musicians, and migration from one country to another as the transition that musicians make from one band to another.
” … an ideal cast in every respect: in sincere socially critical engagement, music invention and performing skills”. (Blaž Lukan, Delo, 18. 4. 2013) (more…)

Andreja Rauch Podrzavnik: Time Body Trio

Photo: Martin Podrzavnik

I know what time it is all the time. Rarely do I get lost in time. My day is split into hundreds of tiny units, as I go around doing different stuff, thinking different thoughts.
It’s a feeling of disorientation, of losing of something at the expense of something else. It’s a struggle for a new formation, for a redefinition. And lots of shame on top of that. (more…)

Matija Ferlin: SAD SAM LUCKY

Photo: Nada Žgank

The performance, devised by an award-winning dancer and choreographer Matija Ferlin, is a physical, turbulent and emotional tribute to a one-of-a-kind avant-garde poet Srečko Kosovel. (more…)