Mini teater’s programme for children is carefully prepared as a basis for growing up in an artistic environment. Generations of today’s pupils and students have listened to and watched with us the stories with which their parents and grand parents grew up. Together we entered the worlds of fairytales and the enchanted forest of secrets and experience enabling us to grow and to develop into better people. Our evergreen performances are beautiful and horrifying at the same time. We don’t only find wisdom in them, they also offer questions and they encourage our little ones to evolve into people who will take over this beautiful world we live in. The stories also offer answers and they urge us to be courageous and to question our authorities. In the following season this kind of stories will be enriched by something new and even more challenging and inspirational.
If we wanted to present our new season in a character, we would choose a penguin. A magical bird that doesn’t fly – its wings are like flippers striving for air, but they are at their best in vast waters. Penguin is a symbol of knowledge and adaptability. The way it walks reminds us of humans, but its origins are closer to dinosaurs. It is trying to tell us that this planet does not belong only to people, but also to animals and plants, and we are here to preserve it. Two of our new plays talk about penguins; about those who saved themselves from the Flood and about those who found a friend and thus saved themselves from loneliness. With the play Jurchek and three thieves we go back to the brave time or war when, in the puppet theatre, the Partisans manifested resistance against the occupying forces and faith in the future. The time has come to remember our past and our ancestors who left us art as a form rebellion and as a source of creativity.
We invite you to stay our audience, to spend time with our puppets and actors, and to feel the joys of childhood in our hall in the magical Ljubljana Castle and in the green Križevniška Street.
In the past ten years, Mini teater’s postdrama programme has strongly influenced the Slovene theatrical scene as well as the one of the broader region. We still tour the world with plays like Macbeth after Shakespeare, Bartleby the Scrivener, andMa and Al that have won several awards and are rich and innovative in form and themes. Our previous season was marked by Pascal Rambert’s play Love’s End directed by Ivica Buljan and masterly performed by Pia Zemljič and Marko Mandić. The radical verbal and physical performance united the audience as well as the critics in acclamation. We invited Pascal Rambert to write a new play for Mini teater, and at the moment he is writing a text entitled Revenir (Returning) – it is a continuation of the story about two lovers after their current life. Mark Lawes, an important Canadian director and the manager of the renowned Theatre Junction in Calgary, is preparing for us a series of workshops and a play about pluri-ethnicity. The grand master of direction, professor and literature connoisseur, Janez Pipan will offer us a new interpretation of modernistic classics. He will stage Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, a work that foretold the events of the 20th century and is still relevant in today’s questioning of the drastic deviation of capitalism. This cult novel, a story about an intelligent young man who cannot find a job and is literally dying from starvation, is an archetypal example of fears still threatening us today. Pipan found inspiration for his interpretation in a stage adaptation by the contemporary Norwegian author Jon Foss. We will stage another cult work, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš – a work that greatly transcended the frames in which it had been created. Today it is regarded as one of the most powerful artistic metamorphosis of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century. Ivica Buljan, together with Slovene, Serbian and Croatian artists, will reconstruct in a performative way the life of the revolutionary Novsky as an example of an individual’s fight against the unruly mass
Robert Waltl and Ivica Buljan
