Rok Vevar: Inflate the theatrical event, let it burst!
How do we get a handle on the production Out? Via Negativa conceives of pride in quite explicit terms, literally, analytically, almost scientifically, but less so moralistically. It seems to be saying the following: inflated nothing (the theatrical event) pushes out the membrane (the matter, through which the viewer morphs into the actor and the actor into the viewer) of its weak boundary to a point where it either bursts (viewers leave) or perseveres in a frail equilibrium (we are waiting to be let off by the theatre protocol).(Večer Maribor, 17. November 2008)
Nika Leskošek: Theatre spectator may very well be god, but what when performers are atheists
Why pride and indirectly audience’s pride? First because pride is handily the last remaining, as yet untreated sin, and second because their specific approach consisting of shock-therapies and stretching the boundaries of theatricality has time and again provoked opportune reflection while simultaneously honed the taste of the audience. The opening of ever new horizons of expectation move more and more towards the unreachable heights, primarily thanks to the performances of sinful lust in Would Would Not and to sheer brilliance of Viva Verde on sloth. It is high time, then, to settle accounts with the omnipotent position of the spectator, who is henceforth setting impossible demands. While, at the same time, of course, also with their own trodden path which is in vital juxtaposition with their audience. (Radio Student Ljubljana, 11. November 2008)
Igor Ružić: Out, Via Negativa
The Slovenian performance group Via Negativa has already demonstrated the value they attach to an interactive approach. All of their projects to date, all part of a seven-year-long scheme of enacting deadly sins, were interactive, as performance art indeed is. At times, perhaps, even slightly more so, or at least with an insistence towards it. Well, a simple summons to cooperate delivered from the stage only very rarely falls on fertile ground in a more or less darkened theatre. The stage continues to be a position of power, or at least more power than that of the silent auditorium, and the members of the group know this even as they attempt to evade the normative ways of functioning in a performing situation. (Radio 101 Zagreb, 17. October 2008)
Nataša Govedić: Dogformance, dogs lives and beasts
Judging by the dramaturgy which simply sequences episodes of hyper-theatrical as well as failed “non-action” on the stage to then once again re-enact them in a faster mode, the group Via Negativa judges people as brutally as it does our four-legged friends: we are all one big army, incurably subservient to a template. (Zarez Zagreb, 30. oktober 2008)
Kathy Gray: OUT Via Negativa, Perforations Festival, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club
BOMB Magazine No. 116, Summer 2011, Brooklyn, New york (whole review)
