And the beat goes on: Sebastian Nübling and Jackie Poloni take the pulse of a country in Slovenia Counts
On a propulsive new show about what it means to be Slovenian.
Welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre.
This week I’m in The Stage talking about the Ivan Vazov National Theatre of Bulgaria and its recent shift towards a more outward-looking, international model. For this week’s newsletter we’re in Ljubljana (again), where I went recently for the premiere of a new show about what it is to be Slovenian.
Here comes the usual plea - if you find this newsletter interesting or valuable, please consider sharing it or, if you or your organisation are able, becoming a paid supporter. I also have a Ko-fi account, if you want to support my writing this way.
What do you picture when you picture Slovenia? Beautiful lakes, pretty pastel churches and rivers fringed by willow trees all framed by the Julian Alps. Slavoj Zizek standing on a bridge in Ljubljana talking about the line that divides Central Europe and the Balkans? That statue of Melanie Trump that looks like a melted chocolate bar?
With a population of just over 2 million, Slovenia gained its independence in 1991, after breaking from the former Yugoslavia, and is now an EU member state. It is a small country, bordered by Italy on one side and Croatia on the other, sharing borders with Hungary and Austria too.
This new show from Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre (whose work I have previously discussed here and here) sees German director Sebastian Nübling and musician and DJ Jackie Poloni attempting to take the pulse of a country that is not their own.
In preparation for the piece, they interviewed a few prominent Slovenian thinkers, including historian Svetlana Slapšak (for more on her, I’d really recommend listening to this episode of the excellent and comprehensive Remembering Yugoslavia podcast). In this SEEstage interview with Poloni and Nübling about the making of the show, they also talk about drawing inspiration from this article from cultural workers union, ZASUK exploring the exploitation of workers in the cultural sector. This triggered discussion, says Poloni, of the role of cultural institutions that are also part of the state apparatus. “Because they are funded by the state, do these institutions have the ability to enact real change by making the audience witness a critique of themselves?” With the show, they set out to question the role theatre plays within Slovenia’s cultural landscape and its ability - or otherwise - to enact real change,
The result is text-light, movement-heavy, music-fuelled devised piece that pushes its cast to the physical limit. The stage is a shiny black expanse, bare except for a cluster of microphones forming a kind of cage. When the beat kicks in, the performers start to move one by one to the front of the stage, walking with a fixed rhythmic gait in time to Poloni’s music, rocking backwards and forwards on their socked feet. Wearing tracksuit bottoms and hoodies, they judder to the front of the stage before exiting, circling around to the back, and beginning again. Sometimes they advance to the front of the stage in pairs, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, like zombies with a sense of rhythm, the colours of their tracksuits reflected in the black mirror of the stage. This goes on and on, creating a kind of conveyor belt effect, a human loop.
After a while they start to chant, quietly at first, little more than a whisper, then with increasing gusto. One word: Slovenia. Over and over: Slovenia, Slovenia, Slovenia.
While the cast never break pace, the mood continually shifts. Sometimes they pound their chests or thrust their fists in the air like spectators at a football match supporting the home team, sometimes they become a hostile mob composed of those who would keep others out. The mood veers between jubilation and shame, a sense that sometimes it is stressful being Slovenian. Occasionally the cast form a pack, only to break apart; still, they continue to chant, more intensely: a mantra, a slogan, a battle cry: Slovenia, Slovenia, Slovenia, Slovenia. At one point Lina Akif becomes almost possessed, the word Slovenia tumbling out of her mouth in a kind of breathless word vomit.
The performers begin to form different patterns as they move across the stage. At one point the actors start to bark like dogs, sometimes in a comic fashion, sometimes more menacingly. Robert Prebil spits repeatedly on the floor, making a kind of cartoon 'ptui' sound as he does so. Lena Aymard emerges with a cross of tape over her mouth, and, later, over her crotch.
Fragments and snatches of text – devised with the cast – gradually emerge. Janja Majzelj relates how, as a single woman, her behaviour and sex life are monitored and commented on by her neighbours, something she waves away with a little flick of her hand. Prebil briefly becomes a politician, sloganeering into a microphone. In this way we get a sense of who gets to be part of a country, whose voice gets heard, whose bodies matter, how small nations can be village-like in ways good and bad.
The show, created in conjunction with dramaturg and Mladinsko artistic director Goran Injac, is a feat of considerable endurance and stamina for the cast, whose clothes soon start to darken with sweat, small patches at first which eventually merge into a super-continent of perspiration. This is an ensemble renowned for the physicality, for their very bodily approach to the performance, and Nübling and Poloni really put them through their paces.
In other hands this might have been an endurance exercise for the audience too, but Nübling, Poloni and the performers insert so much variety and play into the piece that it never becomes wearying, quite the opposite, it is intense, visceral, hypnotic and, at times, very fucking funny. (For more on Nübling’s rehearsal process, may I point you towards this previous post on the making of Three Kingdoms, which remains the best-read thing I’ve published on this newsletter thus far).
Then things start to get wild. There is leaping and cavorting. Hoodies are whirled in the air. For anyone familiar with the Mladinsko ensemble it will come as no surprise that Vito Weis is the first to strip off his T-shirt, before capering around the stage with his underpants wedged up his arse-crack. Prebil pounds his bare chest until it’s red. Lina Akif unveils her breasts and proceeds to jiggle them. Nataša Keser joins in, bouncing across the stage with her boobs out. Weis at some point has, I think, a sock over his cock, while Arif runs around with just a T-shirt on and no underwear. (This is a form of female nudity you rarely see in media and it made me think of the scene in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, where Julianne Moore argues with her husband sans-underwear, which while , on the one hand, yet another example of Altman’s fondness for placing women in humiliating situations, Moore performs with an electric mix of vulnerability and ferocity). This display of jiggling flesh is set to a song associated with a Slovenian tourism campaign. This part of the show could, I suppose, be taken a kind of meta critique/piss-take on the prevalence of nudity in a Slovenian theatre. It’s at once deliciously unserious and also leaves you with questions about the expectation of performers to put their bodies on display.
In the most text-dense section of the show, the cast start talking shit, literally, describing encounters with faeces, both animal and human, in streets, in elevators, in buildings, all the mess and muck and sweetcorn-flecked excrement that no one wants to acknowledge, the ugly stuff that is not part of the national self-image but nonetheless exists.
Towards the end, there is a moment where the cast totter around clutching twigs, an all-too-brief moment of renewal and hope in a country that voted out its populist premier Janez Janša in 2022. But it’s momentary. The beat is merciless and before long the actors are sucked back into the same old patterns, the same rhythm, the same chant, circling around the stage just as they did at the start. Only now the fatigue is etched on their faces, their breathing is more ragged, their exhaustion apparent, their clothes soaked in sweat. Vito Weis is sopping. The man is drenched. When he finally takes off his T-shirt and wrings it out, what looks like several pints of perspiration pour onto the stage. He then stares down at the resulting sweat-puddle and says, very pointedly, “Slovenia.”
Formally, the piece straddled the line between physical theatre and dance. While the Mladinsko ensemble are not dancers, the piece demanded of them physical precision (as well as exuberant arse-waggling) and they delivered on all counts. I suppose one could describe it as a kind of theatre of exertion –it reminded me, inevitably perhaps, of Žiga Divjak’s 2022 show Crises, also created with members of the Mladinsko ensemble, which saw a group of actors jogging on the spot for the best part of an hour, but it also brought to mind Miet Warlop’s wonderful One Song, in which a group of dizzyingly skilled actor-musicians perform the same song repeatedly, albeit at different tempos, playing instruments while simultaneously doing sit-ups or running on a treadmill. Given their previous discussion of the exploitation of cultural workers – the pressure to give of yourself, your time, your energy –the rivers of sweat are also testament to the physically punishing nature of the piece, and the things we ask of actors. (I write this while aware that permanent ensemble members have a degree of security and stability that most UK actors can only dream).
The performance also highlighted the tension between the individual and the community, particularly in a country with a communist past. I found myself thinking of the documentary Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body which explores how sporting events and mass calisthenics can create a sense of unity (and brotherhood) but also minimise/mask difference - it is difficult to critique a machine in which you’re a component.
It is also a piece in which music is not simply one facet of the design but the show’s heartbeat, its driver. Poloni, who also performs as Yantan Ministry, said in that SEEstage interview: “music as a medium is something that people can claim for themselves,” perhaps more so than with theatre. “There’s a big difference in the way people absorb music compared to how they absorb theatre.” Certainly, as watching, I was aware of the beat having an impact on me as a spectator.
And yes, I’m aware of the irony of I, a non-Slovenian, expending all these words on a show about the condition of being Slovenian, given that I have only a superficial grasp of the national self-mythology the show was exploring/exploding, but then again this testament to the legibility of the piece, which eschews specificity for something more primal.
At the end, the performers, weary and wrung-out, come and stand among the audience. Together, they turn to look back at the stage, now empty, and for a brief moment we are all, as a group, looking in the same direction.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
FIND – The Schaubühne’s Festival International New Drama focuses on British playwright and director Alexander Zeldin, with audiences able to watch Faith, Hope and Charity, the third part in his The Inequalities trilogy, and his most recent production The Confessions, inspired by the life of his mother. The festival, which also includes work by Tiago Rodrigues and Martin Crimp, runs from 18th-24th April.
Saint Joan of the Stockyards - Italian company ErosAntEros join forces with Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre for a version of Bertolt Brecht’s take on the Joan of Arc story featuring live music composed for the production by cult Slovenian band Laibach. It premieres in Bologna on 18th April.
Medea’s Children – Milo Rau’s latest production draws on true-life tragedy of a woman who decides to kill her children and take her own life , only to survive, and fuses it with Greek tragedy. It premieres at NT Gent on 18th April.
Thank you for reading! You can contact me about anything newsletter-related on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
"mess and muck and sweetcorn-flecked excrement" - pure poetry Natasha!