In the one-act comedy A Respectable Wedding (1919), Bertolt Brecht, one of the greatest German playwrights and theater reformers, ruthlessly mocks the apparent perfection, false morality, sentimentality, and meanness of the bourgeois class. The wedding, which represents the pinnacle of illusory happiness for the bourgeoisie, falls apart before everyone’s eyes as quickly as the groom’s handmade furniture. Brecht uses the example of a wedding to highlight many broader social problems, exposing the absurdities that emerge when the facade of a happy event of an exemplary family begins to crumble, and all the secrets of the newlyweds and guests come to light. Through the creation of a contemporary microcosm, Brecht clearly demonstrates the bourgeois mechanisms that contributed to the development and rise of Nazism.

About the 2009 production of A Respectable Wedding at Drama SNG Maribor directed by Mateja Koležnik, now one of the most recognized Slovenian directors at home and abroad, Vesna Jurca Tadel wrote in Sodobnost that it is “a real treat – both in terms of acting creations and precise and thoughtful direction and stage solutions that create the foundation for many comic situations and details.”

Premiere: 25. October 2024 in Fran Žižek Hall (prva izvedba leta 2009)

The independent Palestinian singer and musician’s creativity lies in the space between words and music, and her poetic lyrics move between the personal and the public. She is a strong advocate for women's rights. 

Terez Sliman’s musical repertoire is based on unique life experiences interpreted through music with great vulnerability, sensitivity and innovation, which soon made her a household name on the independent music scene in Palestine and the Arabic world. With a handful of concerts on the old continent, Terez has also won over the hearts of European audiences. 

She has released a number of singles and music videos, and has appeared in theatre and musical shows. A landmark in her work is the 2020 album, When The Waves, whose collaborators include Palestinian musician Raymond Haddad and Norwegian music legends, guitarist Eivind Aarset and drummer Helge Andreas Norbakken. 

In times of adversity and the sustained horror-ridden warfare in Palestine, the voice of Terez Sliman, who has chosen to stay in her native land, is a plea for peace and hope for a better future.
 

Bitter comedy Paradise, set in a nursing home of a small Slovenian town, portrays the life of its residents. It is based on documentary (memoir) material, which makes it authentic and unsentimental. It introduces the theme of ageing by means of interwoven themes of exclusion, isolation, loneliness, death, (un)fulfilment of life and physical and mental health. Paradise does not aspire to be (just) a documentary testimony, but a contemporary fairy tale celebrating life – with equal opportunities for all. It assembles stories like a mosaic, proceeding from memories that evoke regrets, fears, melancholy in the elderly, and elicit bitter laughter of recognition by the audience. The stories blend into a subtle eulogy of the moment when we glimpse the meaning in the daily drift of often underestimated values, since the play explores the value of life from the only relevant point of view – the end of the timeline, close to death. This point of view, using a delicate prism of bioethics, as it were, touches also upon the individuals’ right to end their suffering and pain. 

Paradise is mostly a non-verbal performance, based on a mask play in the manner of Spiazzi's specialisation – commedia dell’arte. The style of commedia dell’arte, employing full masks, is characterised by comic features, albeit spiked with a theme of bitter aftertaste. Spiazzi has already dealt with the theme of ageing: in Minsk, Belarus, he created Family Album, an original project, presenting three generations of a family stuck in a small flat of the elderly grandmother and mother. In Kiev, he paid several visits to a nursing home together with drama students, where they collected the residents’ reminiscences and created a performance called The Belvedere Boarding House. In Paradise, Spiazzi aims to explore the uninhibited draining away of time (life) taken-for-granted, as we spend it rather miserably in our service to the capital on a daily basis, and take notice of all that is worthwhile rather instantaneously, impatiently, distractedly. When was the last time, for example, that you sat down in a comfortable chair and gazed through the window without saying a word?

Matteo Spiazzi (born in 1987) is an Italian director and theatre pedagogue. He graduated from the Nico Pepe Academy of Dramatic Arts in Udine with a degree in theatre directing, specialising in mask work. He has worked as a director, theatre pedagogue, lecturer, producer, and event organiser in Italy and internationally. He has held lectures and given practical seminars on theatrical masks at the University of Verona, the Central University of Quito in Ecuador, the Art Department of the University of Tartu in Estonia, the National Academy of Dramatic Arts of Belarus in Minsk, the University of Culture of Kiev, as well as at the Theatre Academy DAMU in Prague. Spiazzi is a recipient of many awards and prizes for his work as a director.

Duration 1 hour and 10 minutes (no break)

Stage adaptation by Luka Marcen and Tatjana Doma
Director Luka Marcen

The story of Drago Jančar’s monumental novel And Love Itself (2017) begins with a chance event: two girls stand in the middle of Maribor’s square in front of the Astoria Cafe, and one of them recognizes an acquaintance in a passing member of the SS units. This encounter triggers a dramatic series of events that forever change the lives of all involved. And Love Itself is not just a historical war or love novel, although it is both. Primarily, it is an intimate story about the destructive power of love – and hatred that fatefully connects all four main narrators.

Through the intimate stories of people from different corners of history, Jančar essentially includes the city of Maribor as the central protagonist, thus creating a literary monument to it. The stage adaptation by director Luka Marcen and dramaturg Tatjana Doma takes Jančar’s complex web of intimate human destinies and perspectives on a turbulent historical time as its starting point. And Love Itself is not a historical view of the events of World War II in the city of Maribor but primarily a reminder of today’s turbulent moment of how important humanity is. For love to survive, love alone is not enough.

Juan Ignacio Gómez Gorjón, better known as Chicuelo, is a Spanish flamenco guitarist and prolific composer from Barcelona. Throughout his successful career, his name has appeared alongside vocalists as renowned as Enrique Morente, Duquende, Miguel Poveda, El Cigala and Mayte Martín, and jazz musicians Chano Domínguez, Carles Benavent, Jorge Pardo, Raynald Colom and Marco Mezquida, to name but a few. 
His new project, Caminos, consists of double bassist Manel Fortia, drummer David Gómez and the exquisite Mexican dancer Karen Lugo. With an unusual formation and tapping into the characteristic styles of tangos, alegrías, bulerías and granaínas, the project opens new sound pathways in flamenco. Engaging in an irresistible interplay, the trio’s jazz-infused flamenco sparks passion and draws forth unconventional expressiveness in Karen’s graceful dancing. Expect originality, daring and virtuosity.

Julie’s ‘crystalline’ and ‘intoxicating’ vocals sang the theme songs to Brave (2012), Disney Pixar’s animated adventure film. Her songs Touch the Sky and Into the Open Air were both nominated for the Academy Award. Julie Fowlis writes lyrics in the mellifluous Scottish Gaelic, plays the bagpipes, as well as the oboe and Cor Anglais, which she studied at the Glasgow Academy. 
In 2005, Julie’s album Mar a Tha Mo Chridhe (As My Heart Is) won the hearts of audiences around the world – her fans include Björk, Ricky Gervais and Phil Selway (Radiohead). 

Fowlis won Folk Singer of the Year at the 2006 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. And the plaudits go on and on: Her voice has been streamed over 120 million times on Spotify alone, and has been heard in space on an official NASA astronaut playlist. She has a lily flower named after her, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in March 2021.

Fleeing from the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, Aziza Brahim grew up in refugee camps, listening to the radio for hours on end. Through music, she was able to communicate her personal story, relating it to those of others, and her life seemed to get easier. 
Her latest album, Mawja, mirrors that feeling. “It refers to that magical moment when you turn on the radio and that song you like just starts playing,” explained the singer when the album came out. The music reflects the percussive beats of the Iberian Peninsula, the pulsating rhythms she soaked up as a student in Barcelona. Infused with blues, folk music and desert punk, the album also finds inspiration in The Clash. In addition to sorrow and tender elegies – dedicated to her late grandmother, an important poet of the Sahrawi revolution and culture – the music conveys a strong sense of hope, exploration and adventure.

The normal life of a theatre show can usually be counted on the fingers of one hand. If counting on three fingers, we’ve got a success story; if on all five, it’s a sensation. Extremely rare are the performances that count their years on the fingers of both hands. These are legendary shows. There are hardly any performances that need a third set of fingers to count on. These are solitary exceptions, monoliths that defy time and at the same time attest to the indestructible power of theatre, which is otherwise subject to transience. And that is why such a monolith, transcending the theatrical life of all ten fingers, is particularly worthy of attention.

Piaf, Edith Piaf is such a monolith. Twenty, yes, twenty years have passed since its premiere at Kavarna Union, on the ideal, but sadly no longer operational stage of perhaps the finest cabaret venue in Ljubljana. Anyway, what happened that December evening in Kavarna was by no means meant to survive, alive and kicking, over a span of two decades. Non-existent budget, but boundless enthusiasm, a young creative team at the beginning of their theatrical journey, not enough time, too much work and the determination to see the project through, no matter what form it would end up taking. It has evolved into a form with no superfluous detail, in which nothing gets “stale”, none of Vesna's gestures has “gathered dust”, everything in its place, clear, pure, direct, emotionally charged, powerful.

The success of Vesna's vocal-theatrical take on Edith Piaf – still with musical accompaniment by (also appearing as an actor!) Joži Šalej – was certain at the premiere, and later confirmed by the Borštnik Award for Best Actress, by numerous tours and the 20th anniversary of the production.
And it will be confirmed by the anniversary show in Cankarjev dom's Linhart Hall.

Nobody could fail to notice her.
Nobody could imitate her.
Nobody can forget her.
Her name was Edith Piaf.

It seems the icon of Edith Piaf has lodged itself firmly in people’s consciousness: a gentle, fragile girl who rose from street singer to soul-stirring chanteuse. Nobody could have sung as beautifully and uniquely as Edith without not only having glimpsed but also tasted the dark side of life. The saying “only those who have endured hell can speak of paradise” undeniably applies to Edith.

The production was selected to compete in the 2004 Maribor Theatre Festival (Borštnikovo srečanje), where award-winning Vesna Pernarčič received the Best Actor Prize.

Vesna Pernarčič

Vesna first began performing professionally in her third year at the Ljubljana Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television as Mirandolina in P. Turrini’s Die Wirtin directed by Samo Strelec (ZATO Theatre, Ptuj). After graduation, she joined the acting ensemble of the Slovenian Permanent Theatre in Trieste. After three years, she became member of the Prešeren Theatre Kranj, where her first role was that of Micka in Županova Micka (The Mayor’s Daughter) directed by V. Taufer. She is currently member of the Prešeren Theatre Kranj.

Selected awards: žlahtna komedijantka (awarded to actors in Slovenian comedy, 2019, 2012, 2007, 2005), Best Actor Award at the Maribor Theatre Festival (2018, 2004), Prešeren Fund Award (2014)

This exciting and in many ways provocative production is based on Ödön von Horváth’s novel Youth Without God and Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s sociological study Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. 

The novel shows a group of boys who experience catharsis on a school trip, when one of them gets killed in a game of power. One of Berardi’s heroes, in turn, the 18-year-old Eric Harris, turns Von Horváth’s imaginary trip into an ultimate version of the Doom video game, in which the weak end up under the feet of the strong. 

Both patterns emerge from fiction to become reality. The first led to a bloody war in the first half of the 20th century. The second led to the Columbine High School massacre. 

Age group: 16+