Slovenian Youth Theatre
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46°3′39.82″N 14°30′34.28″E / 46.0610611°N 14.5095222°E
| File:Mladinsko theatre exterior.jpg The main front | |
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| Address | Vilharjeva 11 Ljubljana Slovenia |
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| 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 Baranovič, 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 Slovenian 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 Slovenian 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, Oliver Frljić, Borut Šeparović 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, Ljubljana) 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
Together with several representatives of the socalled independent scene, the Mladinsko Theatre of the last two and a half decades has been a place of creation which has brought strong impulses also into the more institutional Slovenian theatre. The impulses moved in the direction of Richard Kostelanetz’s “theatre of combined ways of expression for the post-literary age”. On the one hand, it emphasises “meta-theatricality” as defined by Bonnie Marranca, i.e., the focussing upon the third paradigm of the spectator and their perception and, on the other hand, the double coding of theatre springing from the tactics of the historical neo-avant-gardes, postavant- gardes and political performance of the second half of the 20th century. The tactics of epicization, formalist and energy theatre, the stage of the landscape, of parataxis, simultaneity, play with the density of signs, musicalization, visual dramaturgy, intrusions of the real, the scenic essay, heterogeneity, metonymic space, framing, scenic montage, aesthetics of speed, aesthetics vs. the real body, intermediality – to use the terminology used by Hans-Thies Lehmann for the analysis of the postdramatic – all this has taken the Mladinsko Theatre into the heterogeneous spheres of contemporary performing arts at the meeting points of various artistic mediums that have constantly enriched and added to the theatrical field. Theatre has found itself in the embrace of the gaze and the word, which it has obviously found quite agreeable.
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 Slovenian 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 Slovenian Cultural Ambassador, which is flattering for the theatre itself, but less so for the Slovenian politics.
See also
Bibliography
- Has the Future Already Arrived? 50 Years of Mladinsko Theatre (Slovensko mladinsko gledališče, Ljubljana, 2007)
- Tomaž Toporišič: The spatial machines and Slovene (no longer-) theatre, Maska, Spring 2008.
- Tomaž Toporišič: Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Subversive Strategies of Today's Art, Polona Tratnik (ed.): Art, Resistance, Subversion, Madness, Monitor, Koper, Annales, 2009.
- Spatial machines and Slovene (no longer-) experimental theatre in the second half of the 20th century, in Occupying spaces: experimental theatre in Central Europe: 1950-2010, I. Svetina, T. Toporišič, T. Rogelj (ed.), SGM: Ljubljana, 2011: 418-468.
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