Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana
Female Outcasts
Original theatre project after Rudi Šeligo’s writings
*The production will not be shown at the festival due to an urgent repertoire change of the participating theatre.
Opening night 27th September 2019, Small Stage of Slovenian National Theatre Drama
Running time 2 hours 45 minutes with intermission.
Director Mirjana Medojević
Dramaturgs Eva Kraševec, Ilija Đurović
Set Designer Branko Hojnik
Language Consultant Tatjana Stanič
Music by Ina Puntar, Samo Kutin
Lighting Designers Nina Ivanišin, Vlado Glavan, Branko Hojnik
Cast
Tina Vrbnjak
Nina Ivanišin
Tamara Avguštin
Ina Puntar
Samo Kutin
The performance Female Oucasts is based on selected texts from Rudi Šeligo's opus, using them as nodes of a net, woven over a collective memory of its creators. Selected Šeligo's texts have become "material" for Female Outcasts performance, intertwined and merged with individual experience by the mill of theatrical processing and production. Crucial for this process are the actresses, their personal contact with the material, and the musicians, who equally complement the performative with their medium.
Therefore, Female Outcast is a testimony of ourselves, in fact, of those parts within us that can be called spaces of the soul. A space of the soul is also a place of a ritual, especially a theatre ritual. Šeligo is keenly interested in the magic of theatre. The performance explores the aspect of magic that addresses the most vulnerable human features, i.e. the injured and innocent substances that are related to the instinctive response to the world. When one considers that in each one of us, whether male or female, homo ludens resides, it is the aim of the production to conjure homo ludens to the surface, and to induce somehow the innocence which is probably hidden therein. Šeligo writes about an outcast anima ... and by so doing, about himself but not about that part of himself that is familiar, well-known and recognized, but about the part that he keeps discovering and opening through his act of creation. He offers us a space, so that the play after his selected works goes along the same path. This is the path of mirrors, fate, prophecy, suffering, and at the same time the path of esotericism and play. A female outcast resides in every human being as one’s shadow.
Female Outcasts do not try to stage some sort of a "story", much less do they want to create a theatrical "illusion"; they contradict the convention of an institutional performance with an informal beginning in front of the entranceway, with the reorganisation of space, where the audience is seated on the stage, and the performers take over the auditory. The performance on the one hand contemplates its own conditions and subtexts, peels off dramatic characters and layers them through a persona interweaved with social reality, and on the other it "deconstructs" the very act of staging and weaves a loose but challenging semantic web with diverse fragments.
Gregor Butala, Dnevnik, 10. 10. 2019
Director
Theatre director, playwright and performer Mirjana Medojević (1990) was born in Montenegro. She completed her studies in theatre directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Cetinje and postgraduate studies at Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television Ljubljana, where her mentor was theatre director and professor Tomi Janežič. In the last five years, she has directed about ten productions in Slovenian, Macedonian and Montenegrin theatres, some of them based on her own plays. She has received prestigious awards for her directing and dramas, including an award for the best production of the 2016/2017 season given by Association of Theatre Critics and Researchers of Slovenia at 52nd Maribor Theatre Festival (Crime and Punishment, AGRFT and Puppet Theatre Ljubljana) and awards for the best original drama plays at the Jurislav Korenić Days Festival (Chamber Theatre 55, Sarajevo, 2017) and MIT (Royal Theatre Zetski dom, Cetinje, 2015). The productions she directs and in which he plays are often invited to different international theatre festivals.
Producer
Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana is the oldest theatre institution in the country, founded by the Government of the Republic of Slovenia. It is the central Slovenian repertory theatre house and one of the culturally most influential institutions in the region, with a permanent 43-member ensemble. Drama's repertory includes classical, contemporary and experimental theatre productions.
