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T h e...C I R C L E S...S E L E C T I O N |
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Sterijino Pozorje Festival |
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Novi Sad |
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May 26th - June 5th 2008 |
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MONDAY - JUNE 2nd 2008 |
Small Stage, Serbian National Theatre |
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21:00 |
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Ivo Svetina
OEDIPUS IN CORINTH
SNG Drama, Ljubljana (Slovenia) |
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Director
IVICA BULjAN
Dramaturg DIANA KOLOINI
Set designer IVAN KOŽARIĆ
Costume designer
ANA SAVIĆ-GECAN
Composer MITJA VRHOVNIK SMREKAR
Choreographer
TANJA ZGONC
Language consultant METKA DAMJAN
Assistant to director
ROBERT WALTL
Assistant to dramaturg ANA KRŽIŠNIK
Assistant to set desiner IZTOK VADNJAL
Premiere:
October 7th 2006 |
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Polybus, tyrant in Corinth |
MARKO MANDIĆ |
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Merope, his wife |
VERONIKA DROLC |
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Oedipus, their adopted son |
SAŠA TABAKOVIĆ |
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Agron, the warden of the royal herds, once a shepherd in Cithaeron |
UROŠ FÜRST |
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Tyche, his wife |
PETRA GOVC |
Leukos, their son |
ALJAŽ JOVANOVIĆ |
The High Priest, also the exorciser of dreams |
JOSE |
Pythia |
POLONA VETRIH |
A refugee from Thebes |
ALOJZ SVETE |
Chorus |
KATJA LEVSTIK |
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VANjA PLUT |
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DITKA HABERL |
Guitar |
ANŽE PALKA |
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| SLOVENE NATIONAL THEATRE, LjUBLjANA |
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| SNT Drama Ljubljana is the the largest drama theatre in Slovenia. As the oldest theatre in the country, it was a result of the very first endeavours to establish a professional Slovene theatre (the Slovene Dramatic Society was established 140 years ago) and heir to a tradition which dates back to the foundation of the Provincial Theatre in Ljubljana in 1892. Faithful to tradition and to the mission of a national theatre, SNT Drama strives to be a contemporary and open artistic organization which knows how to communicate with current aesthetic and intellectual challenges. In the last thirteen years in particular, under the direction of general manager Janez Pipan, SNT Drama has won recognition as the strongest and sometimes also the most daring theatre in Slovenia. SNT Drama Ljubljana is a repertory drama theatre. The repertory is constantly refreshed by new productions of classical dramas (usually in new translations). The small stage also allows presentations of jewels like Tchrimekundan, the first production of a Tibetan mystery play in a European theatre. SNT Drama Ljubljana pays special attention to Slovene drama, new plays in particular, though the repertory regularly includes Slovene classical authors. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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| In his play Oedipus in Corinth, Ivo Svetina narrates the part of the story that few playwrights ever tell: Oedipus’s youth at the court of Corinth, before he killed his father and married his mother, before he even returned to Thebes, in short, Oedipus before he became a tragic hero. Svetina’s Oedipus is a young man who lives as the son of Corinth’s tyrant Polybus and his wife Merope. He knows nothing of his real origins but his dreams have been haunted by images of an unknown town and inexplicit events foretelling his terrible destiny. Tormented nights drive him to question himself about who he is, but he can not find answers anywhere. Polybus and Merope hide the truth from him that he was brought to them by a shepherd from Cithaeron because they want him to remain their son and be the successor to the throne of Corinth. His friend Leukos, the son of the shepherd Agron, whom Polybus raises as his son’s peer and later also as his own lover, does not understand Oedipus’ problems. The High Priest tries to exorcise his dreams using torture, but this also does not help, it does not ease Oedipus’ doubts, nor does it answer his questions. The play starts with the celebration of Spring, on the night when the people of Corinth drive out a scapegoat. Asking himself whether he is not also some kind of a scapegoat, Oedipus searches even more for the truth about himself. Nobody at home offers him an answer, so he takes his question to the oracle at Delphi. There, Pythia tells him that his home is not his real home and, speaking in puzzling, complicated sentences, she foretells his destiny. |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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Concurrently with the 53rd Sterijino Pozorje Festival, in the early days of summer, it will be exactly forty years since the student protests and other turbulent political events that marked the already historical year of 1968. Besides the social turmoil caused by this movement all around the world, as well as in former Yugoslavia, it also had a significant impact on the art of that time, theatre in particular. Some of the most important local Yugoslav reflections of 1968 were recorded, among other places, in Sterijino Pozorje, causing an adequate aesthetical and ideological turbulence. Today, forty years later, the Berlin Wall has fallen, Europe has united, Yugoslavia has disintegrated; in our country the burdensome decade of the civil war is now behind us, and the decade of slow and unfinished democratisation of the society and economic transition is near its end. Our theatre after October 5 is only just timidly starting to grapple with the social and political problems of the post-Milosevic Serbia, and the socialist past of this country is a special kind of taboo: it is being treated superficially only as a dark dictatorship, without a need for critical and dialectical insight and possible recognition of elements of its positive heritage. In such a context, the treatment of the 1968 revisionist or leftist movement is equally inadequate.
The situation is such in our theatre, but not in the European as well: the programme of the Circles is, therefore, dedicated to problematising the leftist legacy of 1986, both on the level of topics and theatrical language. The questions raised by this year’s Circles are: how do we see 1968 today and all that has emerged from it in the political sense? Is a radical political change based on progressive ideas possible today? Is there any aesthetic heritage of that period present in contemporary theatre?
Ivan MEDENICA |
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IVO SVETINA
One of the most prolific Slovene writers. He first attracted attention in the 1960s as a poet, but is also a playwright, fairytale narrator, translator, and essayist. His presence in the Slovene cultural sphere is constant and intense. He was born in 1948 in Ljubljana and graduated from the Faculty of Arts with a degree in Comparative Literature. He worked as artistic director of the experimental theatre Pekarna, as editor of the drama programme at Radio-Television Slovenia, as dramaturg and artistic director of the Slovene Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana, and as under-secretary at the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. He is now the director of the Slovene Theatre Museum. Svetina began his artistic career in 1967 as a member of the literary group called 441 (later 442). That group later became the core of the avant-garde Pupilija Ferkeverk Theatre, which broke with literary theatre at the end of the 1960s. At that time, the group created the renowned performance Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks, in which Ivo Svetina performed. This experience and his later collaboration with Dušan Jovanović at the Mladinsko Theatre motivated him to begin writing for theatre. Svetina’s poetic dramas have been successfully performed in Slovenia many times. Among the most successful is Beauty and the Beast, Scheherazade, The Gardens and the Dove (produced as Babylon), Thus Died Zarathushtra, Oedipus in Corinth. Svetina’s work is based on the belief that everything is possible in theatre, that theatre is not intended as a place to imitate familiar, already-seen aspects of physical and historical worlds, but is rather a place which enables the creation of new, dreamlike worlds. His belief in the power of myth and poetry on the stage is born out by the many successful productions of his plays. |
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WHY (YET ANOTHER) OEDIPUS? |
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At the end of the 1960s, a decade almost as long as a century, I found myself one spring evening in Rome in a little cinema on one of the little streets between Corso and Piazza Navona watching Pasolini’s film King Oedipus. It was a time when I was revising the verse for my first poetry collection The Magnolia Puppet Sails on a Strawberry to the Golden Ruler’s Palaces; a time of the August 1968 occupation of Warsaw Pact forces in the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia, after which Jan Pálach later set himself ablaze on Wenceslas Square; a time just before a white industrial chicken was slaughtered in the performance Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks, marking, as Veno Taufer wrote, the end of literary theatre in Slovenia. A time both cruel and tender, made complete by the utopia of freedom and a lasting revolution, which aimed for the liberation of the human body and the realization of universal love, sexual and spiritual, which marked its banner with the slogan Make love not war! (...)
I was astonished over shocking details that Pasolini recorded in his film rendition of Sophocles: when Oedipus is already the King of Thebes, he enters his bedroom one day and lays alongside his wife Jocasta and, just before entering her, calls her “Mother ... ”. That time when I watched Pasolini’s masterpiece – and every time since – that “minor” intervention in Sophocles’s original dialogue has violently shook, shocked, seized, stupefied me. Why? Yes, why? Precisely in this question also probably hides the answer to the question, of why I (yes, I!) undertook the task of writing Oedipus’s story in verse. After thirty years I now answer: because in the word “Mother”, Pasolini deposits in his film the revelation that Oedipus lives also now, that the gods have gone to sleep, withdrawn into hiding, fled from humanity and changed into God, who has (also) died. Oedipus is alive, because he doesn’t live only in the myth, but also in our subconsciousness, which is the birthplace of myth. Oedipus lives, though humans are no longer the toys of the gods; though his life is not leveled by hamartia, the tragic flaw, the destined mistake, the evil destiny, the divine prophecy. Oedipus still lives because man is the son of fathers and not gods; because his mother is a woman, and he is borne of her: because he is wrapped nine full moons in her womb, the primordial form of paradise before paradise. (...)
Ivo SVETINA |
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IVICA BULjAN
Ivica Buljan was born in 1965 in Sinj, Croatia. He studied Political Science, French Studies and Literature as well as Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb. He started working in theatre as a dramaturg (collaborating with such directors as Vito Taufer, Christian Colin, Jean-Michel Bruyere, Krizstof Warlikowski, Ivan Popovski ...), but since 1996, has mainly worked as a director, directing work by Pascal Quignard, M. Tsvetaeva, Seneca, Filip Šovagović, G. Feydeau, E. Jelinek, M. Krleža, Ivana Sajko, Fausto Paravidino, Botho Strauss, many plays by Bernard-Marie Koltes and Pier Paolo Pasolini; in addition, he has recently directed a dramatized version of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He works most often in Slovenia and Croatia, but has also staged plays in Belgium, France, Russia, Montenegro, Lithuania and Italy. His performances have toured to international festivals. He was director of the Croatian National Theatre Split. He is a co-founder of the Ljubljana Mini Theatre. He is also a co-founder and artistic director of the World Theatre Festival Zagreb. He has collaborated as a teacher with Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre in Paris and is also a lecturer at the National Theatre School in Saint-Étienne in France. He has received numerous awards for his work. |
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Theatre is a dirty art, as its purpose is to disorder the world, make it more complicated and unrecognisable than it already is. This cannot be done on television or film. Theatre is an art which shows us the structure of the world through lack of order. Svetina’s Oedipus leads into the very heart of this chaos. Not only on the level of the story, although this is an interesting aspect too, but through simple yet most challenging questions: who am I, where do I come from, and where I am going? And here, the questions are raised by the hero, who is still not tragic, and therefore is surely beautiful...it is an adolescent, lascivious beauty with no reflection... I have constructed the play around the obsessions close to Larry Clark, and the road to initiative dreams leads through Lynchian labyrinths. In its theatrical energy, Oedipus is dedicated to Living Theatre, early Baroque, Ariane Mnouchkine, Grotowski – the pioneers of the new sensitivity born during the 1960’s. Oedipus has been stripped of his roots, and that is exactly where lies the birthplace of the authorial approach these directors broke new ground for. This is the generation we owe our gratitude to, as they discovered that narrative event doesn’t exclude the director’s subjectivity.
Ivica BULjAN |
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Essentially, Everything Is OK
To Svetina, history is clear, ascetical, and relieved of the lexical abundance from his earlier dramas. It is strict poetry you enjoy while reading without thinking about a stage, or you watch it so you do not care what it is like in your own imaginary world. Oedipus’s key problem – the archetypical situation of a son who is trying to find himself, questions posed to gods, Pythia, parents...reaches the present day. Svetina develops parallel stories, equally rich in substance (...) As for the content, Buljan’s restrain towards the text is felt in the tragedy’s constant coquetry with other genres, so the tragedy takes itself from the pedestal of the ultimate tragic story. Everything referring to ‘here and now’ is substantially valid. The drama is spread on several levels and each reflects the textual code of intertwining and complexity, a fusion of coldness, reason and a feverish heart beat. (...) The caricature that summarises the story of Oedipus is a genuine urban cynicism with no pathos and romantic feeling of the ‘pain of the world’. A tragic anticlimax which tells us that King Oedipus is only still possible as a sketch, regarding the problem Oedipus had already solved in (Buljan’s) prehistory. Even when Buljan’s final move ‘undermines’ Svetina’s story, the play is ‘only’ still a (melo)drama. Everything is as it is supposed to be – clear, peaceful and tidy. With absolute calm, Oedipus (like Hamlet) awaits his end. Whatever it is.
Andrej JAKLIČ (Delo - Polet, 12th October 2006)
A Sum of Creative Work
(...) Svetina builds his Oedipus upon the tradition of the literary genre of poetic drama, conceiving it as a calm and ominous introduction into the well-known tragedy. I. Buljan takes a different point of view, seeking his inspiration in the very element which, in a more classical approach, could be seen as a burden of the play: in the articulation of his ceremoniously dignified and metaphor rich speech he transferred into the field of an all-enveloping physical and risky histrionic expression. In the very first scene of the expulsion of the sinful goat which is, with a remarkable contribution of choreographer Tanja Zgonc and composer Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar, encircled by participants in a Balkan folk dance, the actors are subjected to dizzying motion and stirred up physicality, their dialogues are supported by a pronouncedly physical action, whether it is a furious fight, lascivious dance or a mechanical sexual act. While the text is focused on hiding the truth about Oedipus’s origin, his articulation reflects a powerful comprehensive effort focused on postponing the thing which becomes more and more inevitable - on justifying the secret which would undermine the depicted world. The actors rise to the challenging task.
Petra POGOREVC (Dnevnik, Ljubljana, 10th October 2006) |
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.The
management preserves the right to change
the schedule
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Copyright
: Sterijino pozorje 1998-2008.
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