Theatre Spectator May Very Well Be God,
But What When Performers Are Atheists

NIKA LESKOŠEK, 11. November 2008, Radio Student Ljubljana (fragment)

Similarly as in previous performances, sin is once again explored interactively, taken outside the domain of theatrical representation and projected across the barriers. This time the performance turns on pride, indirectly then on the pride of the audience, though pride, paradoxically, is precisely what Jablanovec & company have developed as a side product of their seven-year-long theatrical journey.

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. Having abandoned the representation of characters and acting out predetermined and alien words by way of opposing the classical theatre, Via Negativa have dedicated themselves to the process of self-searching in relation to the theatrical. Again we are presented with the trick of Jablanovec’s trade as each of the performers undertakes the task of questioning in his or her own personal way. The result is a cluster of seemingly disconnected and fragmented pieces, but which nevertheless make up a mosaic-like narrative whole, this time about the difficulties of performing under the heavy weight of the audience’s ego.

Grega Zorc is caught up in a penetrating search for a text, Darko Japelj, thoroughly fed-up with movingly portrayed characters, is fighting off the classical theatrical repertoire, Boris Kadin, like a magic rabbit, is cooling down fiery bodyartistic blood, and the radical Katarina Stegnar, overcome by a hysterical fury, simply fucks off the entire audience, driving them out of the auditorium. In a parodied image of oscillation between obliging flattery and utter ignorance, when the physical or the psychological tearing-apart will no longer do, the performers go down on their knees and enact a doggedly devoted game of “fetch and bring”. To finish, they thank us for our attention in a speech oozing with trashy sentiment.

The performance unfolds in tediously drawn-out acting against the audience’s expectations, continues more frenetically in a radical attempt to negate and obliterate the audience and their expectations until it culminates in utter subordination and acceptance of the inevitable as the performers seemingly indulge the audience. Instead of a loaded and creative shock-therapy, the audience were served a half-baked lesson wrapped in cling film. And even this to only the biggest of the audience’s egomaniacs, whose mute presence kept forever delaying the end. In a graded finale the actors also betrayed performing unease in their bearings towards the spectator. It isn’t easy with the spectator, even less so without him…