Slovenian Youth Theatre

Mladinsko Theatre

File:Mladinsko theatre exterior.jpg The main front
Address	Vilharjeva 11 Ljubljana Slovenia
Designation	Slovensko mladinsko gledališče
Construction
Opened	1955
Rebuilt	1989
Architect	Jože Plečnik
Website
http://en.mladinsko.com/home

The Slovenian Youth Theatre or Mladinsko Theatre (Slovene: Slovensko mladinsko gledališče) was founded in Ljubljana in 1955 as the first professional theater for children and youth in Slovenia. It is situated in the Baraga Seminary, a building of the architect Jože Plečnik in the center of Ljubljana. During the 1980s it has developed into a center of theatrical research and politically engaged theater. It is recognized by a wide range of innovative poetics of different directors and phenomenon of ensemble energy, a Peter Brook-like approach to acting with, a laboratory for a theatre research, a laboratory for actors, directors, choreographers and musicians to research and develop, risk and create.

History

Introduction

Founded in the 1950s by Balbina Baranovic, the directress that founded also the first experimental theatre company in Slovenia, Mladinsko Theatre has collaborated throughout its history with the theatre reformers that had shaped the Slovene theatre of the second half of the 20th century.

The Mladinsko Theatre story is an extraordinary relief map of contemporary theatre practices of the reformers of the Slovene theatre of the second half of the 20th century, among whom let me only mention some directors: Žarko Petan, Mile Korun, Dušan Jovanović, Ljubiša Ristić, Meta Hočevar, Paolo Magelli, Janez Pipan, Vito Taufer, Tomaž Pandur, Eduard Miler, Matjaž Pograjc, Martin Kušej, Dragan Živadinov, Emil Hrvatin, Tomi Janežič, Matjaž Berger, Jan Decorte, Diego de Brea, Jernej Lorenci, Ivica Buljan, Silvan Omerzu and Damjan Kozole.

1970s

The key turn for further research and establishing the trademark under which Mladinsko is today known in Europe and the world, came in the first half of the 1970s with the great Slovenian playwright Dominik Smole, who took over as the managing director and ensured the theatre the necessary artistically demanding youth performances. In the 1970s the Mladinsko was on the theatre margin which allowed lots of different creative energies to congregate there. The political powers deemed the theatre unimportant, so organizational changes could be made as well as programmatic ones. The 1970s were also the times of a crisis at the Drama Ljubljana (the Slovene National Theatre) where the circumstances prevented the development of the kind of contemporary theatre which Mladinsko started developing with the arrival of Dušan Jovanović.

1980s

The next decade – when Petar Jović became the managing director and Dušan Jovanović the artistic director (with the help of the dramaturg Marko Slodnjak), followed by Ivo Svetina – was first marked by the projects by Ljubiša Ristić, especially Missa in a minor, which began the series of projects that profiled the Mladinsko as the nexus of the political and at the same time experimental. At the same time, around the mid-1980s, poetics that were not bound to “actual political” began to appear. First, there were the projects by Vito Taufer, then the performances by Janez Pipan and Scheherezade by Ivo Svetina, directed by Tomaž Pandur, Dragan Živadinov’s projects ... This line has continued throughout the 1990s until now in the form of diversity and auto-poetics in the performances by Eduard Miler, Matjaž Pograjc, Emil Hrvatin, Tomi Janežič, Matjaž Berger, Diego de Brea and a wide range of contemporary theatre artists.

1990s till Present

Under the artistic leadership of Eduard Miler, Tomaž Toporišič, Matjaž Berger, and in the last few seasons of the current director of the theatre Uršula Cetinski, Mladinsko became a space of the wealth of diversity while remaining the Slovenian centre of theatre research. The strong accents of Martin Kušej (Scandal after Cankar), Meta Hočevar (A Family Album), Matjaž Pograjc (Roberto Zucco, Fragile!), Emil Hrvatin (Male Fantasies), Eduard Miler (Susn, The Mission), Tomi Janežič (Oedipus Rex, Utva), Matjaž Berger (Galileo Galilei, Interpretacija sanj), Diego de Brea (The Damned, Crime and Punishment), Ivica Buljan (Young Flesh), Jernej Lorenci (Gilgamesh), Vinko Möderndorfer (Blasted), Barbara Novakovič, Vlado Repnik, Ivan Peternelj, Jan Decorte, Sebastijan Horvat, Damjan Kozole, Silvan Omerzu … have, together with Taufer’s research of an extremely wide territory of theatre function (let us remember the performances Silence Silence Silence, Pippi, Midsummer Night’s Dream) and the projects of Dragan Živadinov resulted in the aesthetically most diverse period in the history of the theatre that the critical machinery in Slovenia – due to the limited tools it was operating with, and at the same time do to ideological altercations of the political left, connected to the so-called independent or “dependent” production – didn’t know to or couldn’t analyse or contextualize.

Activities

For this reason, the placement of these phenomena into the international and festival theatre space, was extremely important. Today, when we are ensconced in the post post-socialist era of the so called transition period in Slovenia, the historic distance enables us to claim that without this support from abroad Mladinsko as a phenomenon of contemporary theatre wouldn’t have survived. That the positive response in Europe and the Americas was critical for the continuation of the research. Thus, the duality occurred: Mladinsko was relatively marginalized in Slovenia, while abroad it represented Slovenian art, culture and even the country.

European Ambassador of Culture

A crown, or the final confirmation of the fact that Mladinsko is the Slovene theatre with the strongest brand name internationally, is the honorary title and the award European Cultural Ambassador that it received in 2008 by the European Commission on the grounds of its intensive international activity and the quality of its performances. The theatre, to whom the City of Ljubljana did bestow the Župančič Award for special achievements as a “exceptional example of communal creative will for quality conveying theatre art to wider circles” as early as 1969, has thus become the European Cultural Ambassador before becoming a Slovene Cultural Ambassador, which is flattering for the theatre itself, but less so for the Slovene politics.

See also

• Diego de Brea
• Matjaž Pograjc
• Dragan Živadinov
• Dušan Jovanović
• Tomi Janežič
• Vinko Möderndorfer

External links

• Mladinsko Theatre homepage
• Mladinsko Theatre building and architecture