New performance by Katja Legin, with collaborators Tomi Janežič, Branko Hojnik, Marina Sremac and Tomaž Grom was premiered on December 15th 2023 in Krušče Creative Center.
A House A Home is set at home, in the house where the author lives. It steals from film, uses pop and does everything it can to make the theatre happen.
It jugles themes of womanhood and life juices, home, family and absence. Inspiration for the work on the performance were short stories of female authors that deal with these themes.
1978 is a performance by the Hungarian State Theater Csiky Gergely from Timişoara, part of the theater dodecalogy (12 performances), which director Tomi Janežič in collaboration with playwright Simona Semenič, set designer Branko Hojnik, costume designer Marina Sremac, music composer Samo Kutin, video author Carlo Zoratti and a number of other artists is preparing for the European Capital of Culture 2025 GO25!
Below are excerpts of responses to the latest performance…
“no title yet, The Death of Ivan Iljiča, The Seagull, these are the performances that made a large part of the theatre scene in Timisoara develop a real cult of director Tomi Janežič. In March, Sfantu Gheorghe hosted another Janežič: Uncle Vanja. So Tomi came to Timi*, not only as a guest of the festival, but as a director and co-author of the latest premiere 1978, ambitious, large-scale, complex and demanding performance that honors the 2023 Capital of culture. The ensemble of the Hungarian State Theater Csiky Gergely is at its peak and confirms its rise in recent years.
(from the text by Mihai Brezeanu: I was and I was not – 1978)
“I have already seen several performances by the Slovenian director Tomi Janežič, I am a big fan of his, because every time he created something impressive. The last time I watched his almost ten-hour performance no title yet where time stopped and the play absorbed, now he has created another unforgettable performance with the actors of the Csiky Gergely State Hungarian Theater from Timisoara, that is 1978. …
Janežič is a master of creating atmophere, and this with incredible ease. Playing, you might say, isn’t even acting, because they tell a story, that is, many small stories, bypassing the traditional character portraying, like civilians, and yet every little detail comes to life in front of us, thereby triggering our imagination. They sneak in here and there, “acted characters” for just a few sentences. Multigenerational stories of family members are slowly and imperceptibly connected. …
The third part of the performance is different from the first two, and the director illuminates it with two or three spotlights, which conjure up such magical lights on the stage that the scenes played in it create a completely cinematic effect. The water poured on the cold concrete turns into a sea, a sea of blood and turquoise waters. And the water slowly trickling from the slag turns into a stream of ice-cold water flowing from the mountains of Romania. …
We know that we are in a theater, and this awareness is reinforced by all the alienating effects, or the fact that the director repeatedly walks into the picture, blows smoke or speaks into the scene, but the magic still works. We have the feeling that we are there on the battlefield or in the family living room, at other times in school or in the middle of a revolution. …
Janežič and the team of the Csiky Gergely Theater created a wonderful, inspiring show, five hours pass, we watch this family novel, the light plays with the greatest attention, and the cold in the hall takes us to the unheated rooms of the darkest period of Romania.”
(from the text of Szerda Zsófia: And then the phone rang)
From 2021, Studio for the Research on the Art of Acting is part of the international project “The Ways of the Heroes”, which explores the question of the power of the individual in relation to the environmental crisis through various artistic practices such as theater, film, literature and visual art. The project aims to encourage individual environmental activism and create ecologically aware communities.
The main partner of the project is the Macedonian National Theater from Skopje, in cooperation with partners from Italy (La Dramaturgie), Greece (Loop), Slovenia (Studio for the Research on the Art of Acting), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Studio Teatar), Serbia (Eho Animato) and North Macedonia (Gavroche Books). The project is co-financedby the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.
On Wednesday, 19th of April starting at 6pm the documentary film “The Ways of the Heroes” will be screened at the Krušče Creative Center. The film reveals the stories of twelve people from six European countries, who challenge the belief that the change can be achieved only by extreme steps and encourage us to think about our own contribution to the environment.
(…)Dragana Katic from Serbia initiates and organizes large clean-ups in and around Belgrade, Hristina Karaleka from Greece collects old varieties of seeds, Elmedina Abdulahi together with citizens of Tetovo stopped the major factory from polluting, Tea Nikolić organizes forestation in cities in Serbia, Salvatore Fosci cleaned the ancient Etruscan pyramid in Italy using only hand tools, designer Maja Modrijan from Slovenia reveals how we can dress responsibly, Silvo Rozman maintains a biodynamics farm in Slovenia(…).
Omnibus “Ways of the Heroes” was produced by the Eho Animato art collective and creative team includes Ana Konstantinović (director), Tamara Baračkov (screenwriter), Milovan Ilić (director of photography), Marija Kovačina (editor) and Željko Maksimović (assistant director).
On the same occasion, the illustrated book for children The Wind’s Tale written by Nika Gavrovska and illustrated by Nataša Andonova from North Macedonia will be presented.The narrative of the book and the illustrations that will be exhibited, represent the process of transformation of twelve documentary characters mentioned above through a fictional mirror.
