Mallika Taneja: BE CAREFUL (IN)

Photo: David Wohlschlag

Tuesday, August 23rd , 7.30 pm
Thursday, August 25th, 7.30 pm
Glej, the Theatre

Mallika Taneja is an Indian actress and director, described by a professor of the Kirori Mal College as an artist characterized by a precise attunement to the world, sensitivity to injustice and a refined awareness of social and personal space.

Be Careful, a miniature perhaps deserving the feminist label, deals with the concept of women’s safety. In part, it participates in the current heated and difficult struggle against assaults on women in India, where the perpetrators and silent majority regularly shift blame onto the victims, perhaps the way they dress or present themselves. Taneja scorns this logic and – just as her own person, too – exposes it bare; ripping pretence from the hypocritical dominant discourse by chanting titbits of advice given to women online on the subject of being prudent, staying safe. Clothes (or the absence thereof) are essential carriers of political and identity markers. What do Taneja’s have to say?

Devised and performed: Mallika Taneja
Production Support: Suhasini Taneja
This performance was first created at the Tadpole Repertory as part of their show ‘NDLS’.

30 minutes

The performance is in English.

Free tickets, but you can support our festival with voluntary contributions. More information and ticket booking: +386 51 269 906, info@bunker.si.

Anestis Azas & Prodromos Tsinikoris: CLEAN CITY (GR)

Photo: Christina Georgiadou

Monday, August 22nd, at 7.30 pm
The Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana 

Clean City by Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris, directors vacillating between Greece and Germany, challenges the rhetoric of »cleaning« that manifested at the pinnacle of the Greek crisis, blaming migrants for all the »dirt« in society. They address it in literal manner, seeking to answer who in fact cleans the city in concrete reality. The result is a documentary performance portraying five cleaning ladies that came to Greece from Albania, South Africa, the Philippines, Bulgaria and Moldova.

A performance illuminating the invisible workers of the world who keep the globe spinning while at the same time paying society’s debt – incurred in return for the chance to partake in the prosperity of the Greek milieu, multiplied by the recent crisis crashing first and foremost on their shoulders. A poignant performance, sobering yet full of humour, for the protagonists’ vitality is unbreakable, their sacrifice translating into an investment in the future generation: progeny. Their fates express a certain universality, not due to the ubiquitous presence of the cleaner’s profession but because their tribulations are so often reminiscent of our own personal trials.

Research, text and direction: Anestis Azas, Prodromos Tsinikoris
Performing: Mabel Matchidiso Mosana, Rositsa Pandalieva, Fredalyn Resurreccion, Drita Shehi, Valentina Ursache
Dramaturgy: Margarita Tsomou
Set and costume design: Eleni Stroulia
Assistant to the set costume designer: Zaira Falirea Oblikovanje svetlobe/Lighting design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Music: Panagiotis Manouilidis
Video: Nikos Pastras
Assistant directors: Ioanna Valsamidou, Liana Taousiani
Production manager: Vasilis Chrysanthopoulos
Video appearance: Nelly Kambouri
Puppet construction: Yiannis Katranitsas
Coproduced by: Onassis Cultural Centre – Athens, Goethe-Institut (v okviru projekta EUROPOLY/in the context of EUROPOLY project)
Touring support: Onassis Culturall Centre – Athens

75 minutes

The performance is in Greek with Slovene and English surtitles.
Translation of the performance: Polona Vozel

Free tickets, but you can support our festival with voluntary contributions. More information and ticket booking: +386 51 269 906, info@bunker.si.

Penny Arcade: LONGING LASTS LONGER (US)

Photo: Penny Arcade Archive 

Sunday, August 21st, at 8.00 pm
Monday, August 22nd, at 9.30 pm
Glej, the Theatre

Penny Arcade is a genuine superstar of the Warhol Factory. Since her stardom scintillates far beyond Warhol’s universally allotted 15 minutes, she continues to look like a million bucks, her performances, poems, texts and public appearances offering a delightful mixture of witticism, humour and profound insight into the nature of being human. She sparkles with one-liners in the style of »Mediocrity is the new black. «, »Hope is a killer. «, or »I didn’t have children. I don’t take hostages. «

Memory likes to play tricks on us, painting the past prettier than it was. Penny Arcade, though, can’t be fooled. She’s seen everything there is to see, always maintaining her distance. When she recounts the past decades, she treats them in the finest shades of stand-up ridicule and vivisection. When she laments the changes of the day, she doesn’t sound embittered but rather wishful for the younger generations to experience what was possible to her: a fulfilling, free and vibrant life. A living legend in dialogue with the rock and roll music of the recent past.

Conceived, written and performed by: Penny Arcade
Co-directed and designed by: Steve Zehentner
Produced by: London Artists Projects

70 minutes

The performance is in English.

Free tickets, but you can support our festival with voluntary contributions. More information and ticket booking: +386 51 269 906, info@bunker.si.

Ludomir Franczak: THE RECOVERED ONES (PL)

Photo: Maciej Zakrzewski

Saturday,  August 20th, 9.30 pm
DUM

Ludomir Franczak is a Polish visual artist, director, curator and more. He’s most interested in the subjects of memory and identity, portrayed in the form of complex hybrids of visual art, history, literature and approaches distilled from performance arts.

The historical origin point of Franczak’s performance are the fates of those Germans who were, in the wake of then-new post-2WW border delineations between Germany and Poland, forced to abandon their homes and leave for Germany. In the Slupsk city archives, Franczak uncovered manuscripts of their biographies, seeing them no longer as a faceless mass he could relate to only in historical terms. Ludomir describes The Recovered Ones as a personal atlas, a performance that crafts its story from the remnants of history’s material artefacts. Naturally, the stories he puts together are constructs, something conveyed already by the set of the performance which is literally being built as it goes. And yet, let’s not forget, history, too, is – a construct.

Screenplay, directing and scenography: Ludomir Franczak Glasba/Music: Marcin Dymiter
Costume design: Magdalena Franczak
Voices: Irena Jun, Andrzej Golejewski, Stefan Filipowicz, Mateusz Nowak, Dorota Lesiak, Katarzyna Duma, Magdalena Franczak, Wiktoria Wrzyszcz, Emil Franczak,
Produced by: Centrum Rezydencji Teatralnej, Scena Robocza
Slovene translation: Petra Meterc

70 minutes

The performance is in Polish with Slovene surtitles.

Free tickets, but you can support our festival with voluntary contributions. More information and ticket booking: +386 51 269 906, info@bunker.si.

Philippe Quesne: NIGHT OF THE MOLES (Welcome to Caveland!) (FR)

Photo: Martin Argyroglo

Friday, August 19th at 8.00 pm
Saturday, Avgust 20th 2016 at 7.30 pm
The Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana 

Philippe Quesne is the founder of the Paris-based Vivarium Studio, a hub connecting artists from a variety of disciplines. He is an editor, the author of numerous performances, spatial interventions and installations, as well as the artistic director of the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. His education and primary background are in set design. We’re happy to welcome him to Mladi levi for the third time; following performances L’Effet de Serge and Next Day, he will this year appear with his new creation Night of the Moles (Welcome to Caveland!), a current hit of contemporary theatre and festival stages.

Night of the Moles stays faithful to Quesne’s style – some call it an idiosyncratic one – existential stage études, glitching everyday occurrences, life laid bare without the spectacularization we’ve grown so accustomed to we’re now practically shocked by genuine existence. His latest piece, likewise, delves into the stuff of life: joy, happiness, birth, death; we observe a community of moles in a cave; the moles anthropomorphic, the cave … is it Plato’s cave where the audience joins the protagonists in their distorted view of ideas, a group gazing of shadows? Or is it the underground where humanism and the arts seek refuge, or a shelter for the apocalypse? A fable without a moral.

Performing: Yvan Clédat, Jean-Charles Dumay, Léo Gobin, Erwan Ha Kyoon Larcher, Sébastien Jacobs, Thomas Suire, Gaëtan Vourc’h
Costume design: Corine Petitpierre
Assistant costume designer: Anne Tesson
Dramaturgical collaborators: Léo Gobin, Lancelot Hamelin, Ismael Jude, Smaranda Olcese
Artistic and technical collaborators: Marc Chevillon, Yvan Clédat, Elodie Dauguet, Abigail Fowler, Thomas Laigle
Technical crew: Patrick Bonnereau, Joachim Fosset, Alain Gravier, Pauline Jakobiak, Jean-Christophe Soussi
Scenography: Ateliers de Nanterre-Amandiers: Michel Arnould, Philippe Binard, Alix Boillot, Jérôme Chrétien, Jean-Pierre Druelle, Fanny Gautreau, Marie Maresca, Myrtille Pichon, Olivier Remy, Claude Sangiorgi
Assistance with scenography: Chloé Chabaud, Juliette Seigneur, Amélie Wellan
Seamstresses: Karelle Durand, Lydie Lalaux
Produced by: Nanterre-Amandiers – centre dramatique national
Co-produced by: Steirischer herbst, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, La Filature – Scène nationale, Mulhouse, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Théâtre National de Bordeaux Aquitaine, Kaaitheater, Centre d’art Le Parvis à Tarbes, NXTSTP (s pomočjo programa Kreativna Evropa/with help of the programme Creative Europe)

90 minutes

Free tickets, but you can support our festival with voluntary contributions. More information and ticket booking: +386 51 269 906, info@bunker.si.

Via Negativa: MANIPULATIONS

photo: Madster

Asking someone to kill his own son is a horrible game to verify the faith. Abraham was ready to pay the price, he trusted the will of GOD, and he was richly rewarded. Today we sacrifice entire national economies, which must pay absurdly high prices in order to regain the trust of imaginary financial markets. It’s the same game. Capitalism is a religion, capital demands trust and obedience. And we hope to be rewarded. After the former Hungarian prime minister publicly admitted that his government “fucked it up, not a little but a lot”, he again succeeded to gain the trust of the Hungarian PEOPLE at the following elections.

WE ALL TRADE WITH TRUST,
WE ALL NEGOTIATE FOR TRUST,
WE ALL MANIPULATE WITH TRUST.
IN THIS GAME, THERE ARE NO INNOCENT VICTIMS. (more…)

Bertolt Brecht: A RESPECTABLE WEDDING

Kitch: THE OATH

Photo: Kitch

Tonight, dreams are allowed. Tomorrow is a new day.
What happens when two newcomers from the Balkans take this epic wisdom dead serious?

The Oath will give you all, yet demanding nothing from you.

Welcome to our kafana, and let the party start!

(more…)

Bertolt Brecht: A RESPECTABLE WEDDING

photo: Željko Stevanić – IFP and Archive CTF UL AGRFT

If we can find the petty bourgeois in any way similar to us or to our fellow inhabitants of today’s world, it is perhaps in the constant burdening of humankind with the lack of content or the inability to express the content that would be accepted as we would like both in the immediate and in the wider environment. Therefore, we try to cover this non-content by expressing false views and with a worldview that is not really ours, but serves to avoid saying what we really think and what we really feel, as we thereby run the risk of being banished from the safe embrace of our society. Maintaining our reputation. Maintaining our image. Maintaining our impression. Feeding the ego that feeds on our true self. What remains in the end? Emptiness, again. Grim, grim, grim. (more…)

IF YOU ARE HAPPY, anticelebration

The repetitive children’s song that was being diligently taught in kindergartens and primary schools, around the time when the idea of liberalism was being born in the collapsing Yugoslavia. I still remember how I tried to “shout my hurray” and create a feeling of that happiness, one of the first indoctrinations of the new, post-socialist ideology. (more…)