Dark matter: The unsettling world of Sebastijan Horvat
On a Slovenian director with a knack for the uncanny.
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Sebastijan Horvat’s production of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is one of those productions that stays with you. I saw it back in 2018 and I still find myself thinking - and talking - about it. Not just because the Slovenian director’s take on Fassbinder’s 1974 film about the tender relationship that forms between a German widow in her 60s and a Moroccan migrant worker 20 years her junior was sensitively handled - even though it was - but because it contained a central formal gesture that felt so revelatory and clever - and, well, perfect.
The production premiered in the Slovenian Railway Museum in Ljubljana, but I saw it in a concrete hanger in Belgrade’s harbour, as part of the BITEF festival. The first half of the production is a relatively straightforward staging of the story, sticking closely to the film’s plot and its 1970s West German setting with the performance taking place on a fairly narrow space in front of a bank of seating. A familiar set-up despite the cavernous venue. That is, until the interval.
Instead of a regular intermission, the audience were put to work. We were handed crates and planks and chairs and instructed to help build the set. Working together, helping each other, we constructed a small apartment within the concrete hanger. Having built it, we were then invited into it, to sit on every available chair and surface, to crowd around the furniture and perch on the bed. The remainder of the story was performed around and between the audience, with the actors often centimetres from the audience’s faces. Onions were fried on the stove top, food was consumed at the little table, a love scene took place on the bed.
In this interview with SEEstage, Horvat describes the thinking behind this shift:
“There was an extremely strong emotional moment when we invited people to build a house for the characters in the intermission, to build a house together for this beautiful love between a refugee and an older lady. We put some music on from the 70s and 80s, from a time when everything was still possible.”
Horvat says he took inspiration from the Youth Work Actions in the former Yugoslavia, where young people were deployed to help build infrastructure. Horvat’s parents helped build the highway from Rijeka to Split. “They were working for free, but they were having a beautiful time. They were young and they were all the time having parties. They were dancing and singing and falling in love. They were working for a common goal,” he said. He wanted to recreate something of the spirit of this via an act of shared labour, of home-building.
Horvat is one of the most prolific and interesting directors working in Slovenia and the wider region. In the last year he’s directed productions of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin in Ljubljana and Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults in Belgrade. His work often has a cinematic quality and while his production of Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, which I saw it earlier in the year in Ljubljana, was a bit blunt for my tastes in the way it addressed fascism and identity politics, it did provide an illustration of one of the things I find so compelling, so very yes-please, about his work: his propensity to change the rules of the performance mid-way through, so that the show you understand yourself to be watching becomes something else entirely, swerving from a relatively conventional production of Brecht’s play to kind of meta-theatrical cabaret of grotesques.
An ambitious, international trilogy
Perhaps the most exciting example of Horvat’s tendency to play with expectation, was his ambitious three-part staging of Heiner Muller’s 1973 play Cement. Instead of a straightforward staging, he broke the play up into three stylistically distinct productions, creating a trilogy that spanned three theatres in three countries.
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