Competition Programme of the 58th Maribor Theatre Festival Announced

A common trait of the selected productions, which I noticed only towards the end of the program, is the redefinition of the performative, or at least a noticeable transformation of the stage space and scenic elements; it is not just a noticeable segment that significantly co-creates the dramaturgy of the whole production, a few times as an equal actor.
Vilma Štritof, competition program selector

Today, a press conference was held in the Kazinska Hall of the Slovene National Theatre Maribor, where the competition program of the 58th Maribor Theatre Festival was revealed. The presentation was attended by Aleš Novak, the festival's artistic director, and Vilma Štritof, the selector of the competition program. This year, the Maribor Theatre Festival will take place from 5 to 18 June, with the introductory program content aimed at involving young audiences taking place from 22 to 24 May.

The festival once again brings a high-quality and diverse program, which is important for the promotion of Slovenian theatre creativity, the cohesion of the Slovenian theatre space, the development of new audiences, the relevance of professional judgments, and the evaluation of creative achievements, as well as for the international promotion of Slovenian theatre and the development of professional reflections.

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The main part of the festival is the competition program, which will feature twelve performances selected by Vilma Štritof, who has seen 120 productions in the calendar year 2022, three-quarters of them in institutional theatres. "Last year's Slovenian theatre production was characterised by two lines: on the one hand, it was marked by hyperproduction, produced under inferior conditions, hastily, with less thought and preparation, which ultimately resulted in inferior performance quality and aesthetic incompleteness, while on the other hand, there was a different, new, fresh sensibility and a strong creative charge", she wrote about the post-conventional period in the introduction to the justification of the competition programme. She designed it to "reflect diverse poetics, in which the performances raise relevant social issues of the present, detect and draw attention to the neuralgic points of our reality, care about the environment that co-shapes the habitat of all of us, and form a critical perspective, they explore the human position and role in a world that is being disrupted or even disintegrating on many levels, they unravel and identify destructive repressive and patriarchal social patterns and problematise them, including those that were never really questioned a few years ago, or at least decades ago, but can no longer be overlooked today. I took the opportunity to select the maximum number of twelve productions that, in addition to the above criteria, stood out for their artistic quality, creative charge and overall expression of all the segments involved," explains Vilma Štritof, the selector.

 As the artistic director Aleš Novak said, this year's festival is conceived as a comprehensive presentation of the creative power of Slovenian theatre, and at the same time as a confrontation and creative dialogue with the international theatre space. The Maribor Theatre Festival will once again promote Slovenian theatre creativity and develop new audiences while serving as a space for networking, socializing and celebration. "The Maribor Theatre Festival will be inaugurated by the European theatre festival hit La Tempesta, produced by Teatro Stabile Torino and directed by Alessandro Serra, the Italian author Pippo Delbono is coming to Maribor again with his new play Amore, and we will host the French collective AÏE AÏE AÏE AÏE with their production Ersatz, and The Handke Project by Jeton Neziraj and Teatro Ristori. The accompanying program will present a selection of performances by Slovenian producers, selected according to the criteria of quality and relevance for a comprehensive and in-depth presentation of Slovenian theatre creativity and creative trends. In line with the festival's tradition, we are organizing professional events dedicated to the reflection of theatre developments, presentations of professional literature, talks with theatre artists and theatre-music content," said Mr. Novak.
The Young Theatre program segment, which will take place from 22 to 24 May, plans to "incorporate contemporary theatre for young audiences in a wide range of diverse performance practices, also with the aim of expert review and reflection on the most dialectically effective means of performance, complemented by the development of forms, methods, and techniques of engaging young people for the development of identity, self, and moral self-image and the lasting construction of theatre audiences," Novak announces.
In cooperation with UL AGRFT, the festival is organizing a wide range of Student Theatre activities. "In agreement with the management of UL AGRFT, we have set the festival dates between 5 and 18 June 2023, which allows students to actively participate. We will offer students the space and the necessary support for their final productions, we will continue with the Borštnik Blog, and we will organize workshops/masterclasses for students led by visiting foreign artists," concludes the Artistic Director.

It seems as if the creators are mostly inspired by narrative works of different genres, biographies, capturing from other media (film, poetry, scientific works). Narrative theatre brings to the Slovenian theatre landscape a different experience for all involved, more focused on verbal interpretation. In more and more movement performances, the movers/dancers more or less articulately reach into the field of verbal expression alongside the language of the body, which does not always bring added value. Alongside the author's vision, the creators are much more driven by contextualisation, questioning and testing of production procedures, interdisciplinarity (for example with architecture, a painting exhibition, a lecture), which finds itself in an intersection where theatricality extends the field of representation to the original content, while at the same time positioning itself as a wider space in which a process of hybridisation of procedures, strategies and audience addresses takes place. Traditional hierarchical concepts of sign systems are thus giving way to an equal distribution of theatrical resources, but this by no means means means that the imagined performative vision of the classical dramatic text can no longer speak to the contemporary spectator in a relevant way. It is the coexistence and interplay of the whole spectrum of theatrical visions and practices that creates the dynamism, the diversity of the Slovenian theatre space and its manifold excesses.
Vilma Štritof, selector of the competition programme of the 58th Maribor Theatre Festival