One More Warrior Every Day

A performance for 15 students and a newspaper published on the day of the performance

Fifteen students struggle to make sense of headlines from the daily newspaper about the day’s politics, sports results, natural disasters, sex scandals, traffic accidents, world stock markets, etc. As they run up the ramp shouting headlines from the morning paper, they try to remember names and information that is mostly meaningless to them. Each pupil represents a particular page of the newspaper and the order of their appearances follows the logic of leafing through the newspaper. The newspaper we flicked through with our morning coffee resonates in the cries of the student warrior as an object of absurdity, helplessness and rebellion. The performance is the end of a year-long workshop with students from the Tabor boarding school in Ljubljana during the 2003/2004 school year.

“The newspaper printed on the day of the performance demands a special dynamic from the performers, who rely on the element of the unpredictable and react quickly. The result are performers, with their qualities and shortcomings, including juicy dialects and stage fright, which sometimes ties their tongues and causes them to make mistakes… The effect is spontaneous and mostly funny, but when you see these warriors, who are still in “unstable images”, rushing towards the ramp and shouting the titles, and when you finally see each one of them in his “warrior” costume, in which he enters the world, the title takes on its melancholy colour – because according to the logic of this world, all that follows are the ideas and ideals that these young people embody; every day another one is sacrificed. The work of the creative tandem Via Negativa succeeds in proving that the theatrical principles of VN also work outside their own system“. (Primož Jesenko, Delo Ljubljana, March 2004)

One More Warrior Every Day

2004
Performance • 50 min

Concept and direction — Bojan Jablanovec
Assistant director — Nana Milčinski
Performance text — Delo Ljubljana newspaper, 03-03-2004
Performers — Metka Drčar, Barbara Divjak, Miha Grgurič, Maja Jurjevič, Jure Klavora, Peter Lahajnar, Urška Ličef, Jaka Matišič, Matej Obreza, Miha Obreza, Anja Pleberšek, Dominik Prelc, Urška Ravnik, Anja Rupnik, Sašo Sotlar (DDT Ljubljana students)
Mentor of the DDT theatre class — Marta Šuštar
Producer — Špela Trošt
Production — Via Negativa
Co-production — Dijaški dom Tabor, Ljubljana

Performance
03-03-2004, Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana