Dialog Festival
Damned by the Traitor of His Homeland!
text (based on the actors’ improvisations): Oliver Frljić, dramaturgy: Borut Šeparović, Tomaž Toporišič, sets, costumes, choice of music: Oliver Frljić, assistant director, movement consultant: Matjaž Farič, sound design: Silvo Zupančič, lighting design: Oliver Frljić, Tomaž Štrucl, stage manager: Urša Červ, premiere: March 2010
cast: Primož Bezjak, Olga Grad, Uroš Kaurin, Boris Kos, Uroš Maček, Draga Potočnjak, Matej Recer, Romana Šalehar*, Dario Varga, Matija Vastl
*the actress does not appear on stage due to an injury sustained shortly before the opening night; however, given the fact that she participated in the creation of the production, she is always mentioned among the cast.
“Just like the soil of the former Yugoslavia, where it is impossible to thread the ground without wading into bones, this performance, too, overflows with corpses. And just like those non-theatrical corpses have a certain value on the political market, the corpses we mass produce and resurrect on stage have a certain value as well. If such devaluation has occurred in the theatrical representation of death, what is the value of real death? To figure that out, one only needs to watch the news from Haiti or ask what Srebrenica means to us today. Little, less, nothing at all?”
Oliver Frljić
The Croatian director led his Slovenian actors through a process of very personal, profound improvisations as a result of which there emerged a scathing, disturbing, sometimes even shocking performance. Frljić uses wartime and political traumas to ask universal questions: about the boundaries of artistic and social freedom, individual and collective responsibility, tolerance and stereotypes. The theatrical framework of this laboratory is provided by stories from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia; the title comes from the last verse of the national anthem of this now defunct country.
“The production of Damned be the Traitor of His Homeland! is a dark political cabaret, full of dead people – dead simply because a handful of stage heroes have lost their temper over the subject of nationality, killing everyone around them. The play waves this unbearable lightness of dying, characteristic of the Yugoslav wars, in the audience’s face in order to shatter the stereotype of sacred victims who died for the nation and the state.”
Bojan Munjin, Novosti
Slovensko Mladinsko Gledališče, one of the most interesting theatres in Europe, which since the 1980s has been known as a place of not only daring artistic experiments, but also strong and controversial political statements. Today, a characteristic feature of the company’s work is the principle of team energy; successive productions emerge as a result of a laboratory work of the entire team, work which ends with brining together the solo parts to create one coherent, powerful whole. The theatre seeks to develop codes of new artistic practice, new visual paradigms and new ways of interpreting the classics, modernism or postmodernism.
Sponsors: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana