Opening night of THE BIG CONSTRUCTION SITE of ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Director: Ivica Buljan
Music: Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar
Costumes: Ana Savić Gecan
Acting: Ella Besnaïou, Benoît Bregeault, Sylvain Delcourt, Marielle Guerber, Baptiste Guiton, Richard Pinto, Tiphaine Rabaud Fournier, Philippe Tlokinski, Jeanne Vimal
production: Mini teater, Slovenia
co-production: Comedie de Saint Etienne, France
The French national theatre Comédie de Saint-Etienne prepared the opening night of the performance The Big Construction Site which took place three evenings in a row: on June 6, June 7, and June 8. This project created by Ivica Buljan is a unique occurrence. It consists of the staging of Snow White, The Sleeping Beauty, Rosamunde and Jackie from the cycle Dramas of Princesses and of the dramas Goodbye and Bambiland. This eight-hour long spectacle is built from theatre of words, burlesque, political activism, Vienna cabaret and performance. The Big Construction Site of Elfriede Jelinek was presented at Comédie de Saint-Etienne, at Théâtre Andrezieux and in Paris theatres Théâtre du Rond Point and Centre dramatique national de Montreuil. In the end of June, the cycle will be presented in Croatia within the festival Karantena in Dubrovnik and within Gorica Evenings at Velika Gorica, while in Slovenia it will be hosted by Mini teater in Ljubljana, on Saturday, June 28th, in Ljubljana Castle.
Bambiland
Elfriede Jelinek wrote Bambiland a few months after the beginning of the war in Iraqi. The title insinuates to an amusement park built in Požarevac by Marko Milošević, and to the Babilan magazine whose editor was Uday Hussein. The text is not spoken by drama characters but it is organised as a block or a spring whose sources are difficult to recognize. In her ludistic side text (stage instructions) Elfriede Jelinek indicates the inter-textual character of work, where the inspiration of Aeschylus' Persians assembles with Nietsche's philosophy, or most of all with different discourses – ideological, technological, logistic and media, especially those delivered by CNN in the first months of the Iraqi war.
Using heterogeneous material Jelinek creates her perhaps most personal drama text. In it, there is this unlucky collision of an antique army anticipating the defeat, and a modern superpower worshipping two gods – oil and television. The characters parading across Bambiland are Bush jr., Dick Cheney, trained dolphins, children in front of cameras, the Sun God and the Angel of History – all trapped within the maize of future; there are also weapon traders, yet the true heroes are the tanks and the most perfect missiles – some sophisticated military devices superior to mankind. The text stream pumps its material from the registers passing over from sublime to banal, from tragic to comic. As if the Vergil's wheel started madly to spin around in high speed. Everything in this bitter score is non-real, wild and sick, everything: from the humour of the Viennese cabaret to the American variety show scenes.
