Jan Krmelj: The State - CANCELLED / POSTPONED

Important notice for ticketholders of Jan Krmelj: The State
Performances on 7 and 8 October

Please be informed that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control — namely, technical difficulties in Linhart Hall — the performances of Jan Krmelj: The State scheduled for 7 and 8 October have been cancelled and will be rescheduled to later dates.
You will be notified of the new dates via email as soon as they are confirmed. Your existing tickets and assigned seats will remain valid for the rescheduled performances. Should the new dates not suit you, you will be entitled to a full refund or a credit note.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your understanding.

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Running time: The performance lasts approximately 2 hours and 20 minutes, including one interval

Warnings: This production will include theatrical haze, strobe like lighting effects and occasional bright flashes of light.

In Slovenian with English surtitles.

An original creation blending documentary and ritual with speculative fiction, The State interweaves archival records, philosophical texts, sound compositions, and performative gestures into an unpredictable structure that casts the audience into ever-shifting roles of witnesses, citizens, and participants. The State transforms the theatre into a fragmented archive of history, protest, and imagination. It is a story about the destruction of performance spaces and about the power of the memory of resistance. Fragments of memory spill out: Joseph Beuys, Rosa Luxemburg, Sophie Scholl, an unidentified individual facing tanks in Tiananmen Square, the burning body of Jan Palach, the still body of Antonin Artaud, Aaron Swartz in a room full of servers. Each story constitutes a crosspoint accommodating the human body’s resistance to the machinery of the state; a lightning rod in which imagination collides with violence.

If the state is an algorithm of control, can theatre establish its poetic counter-state? Can theatre establish a different form of sovereignty—temporary, fragile, fluid, and perhaps precisely because of this, absolute? How to think of the country at a time when we have become citizens of a global state, a state of consumption and exploitation? How to reflect on community, how to reflect on a sense of belonging? The state is a machine. The state is inscribed through the bodies of those who inhabit it, but also those who flee from it or cannot locate their identity within it. A fiction, which we may or may not choose to believe in, but one that we constantly establish and which constantly defines us. The state is an electric current. Its dynamics are determined by financial and geopolitical interests, endless wars, corporate powers, the measurability and predictability of our habits. A present turning into history, dispersed across fields of silicon. The state is an algorithm. In this, the neural economy is analogous to the economy of theatre, which at its core is the art of anticipation: an anticipation of effect and of the structure of an event.

The State will dream a territory freed from control. A dialogue with theatre, a hymn to its emancipatory power and to the possibilities of imagination in a time defined by violence.