station selbstsein

Opening night 12^th March 2020, Old Power Station, Ljubljana
Running time 50 minutes. No intermission.

Concept and performance Klemen Janežič
Dramaturg Sara Živkovič Kranjc 
Composer Branko Rožman
Voice Nina Ivanišin
Tiny whoop Mark Bizilj
Lighting designer Borut Bučinel
Costume designer Timotej Rosc
Visual design Pikto
Photography Urša Premik
Expert assistance Sandi Skok, Fabio Liberti, Jernej Bizjak, Dušan Janežič, Nina Ivanišin
Special thanks to Andrej Omejec, Brigita Janežič

The production explores our integration into and autonomy within today’s Western structure, and the impact of the surrounding environment on our primordial nature. The basis for the author’s existentialist and relational questions are the different situations and states significantly determined by the negational, or negative, by the inflections that signify "no" – powerlessness, non-acceptance, irresponsibility, indecisiveness, uncertainty –, as well as his desire for a meaningful and increasingly necessary balance between natural human reality and contrived systemic objectivity. Since he is embedded into the existing system, but also because he is researching into what is essentially hidden inside the physical, the exploration of the subject’s individuality presentsa double choreography challenge, as the independence is unknown not only to the audience, but also to the subject. The subject thus takes an ancient shamanic image of a human clad in animal skin, who transforms in contact with everything unknown on his path, in the space limited by the first demarcation line between dark and light – in fact, he is constantly defined by the experience of other, reflexively inscribed into the subject as the trauma of a new birth. Janežič’s choreographic mapping of human and also individual evolution can thus happen in two stages – the first one could be described as a birth from the cocoon and adjustment to light, it is, thus, a process of individuation, while in the second stage the subject gets entangled with the drone, a symbol of a technological alien object which the researcher learns about between the two extremes – fascination and rejection manifested as anxiety. By finding point zero, in which the movement becomes an allegory for the image of thought, or pure energy, Janežič concludes his path of the physical-spiritual awakening in the stage context reminiscent of Dali’s surrealist composition La Gare du Perpignan. This is the work which the painter, after a supposed experience of cosmogonic ecstasy in 1963, declared to be the "Centre of the Universe", which in Janežič’s case is the subject himself in his final image of perceived quiescence, in which in fact intense, microscopic movements filled with energy spin, and the energy finally explodes in the final scene of revelation as a point of no return into independence.