The dramatic work of the Israeli playwright Maya Arad Yasur is a meta-theatrical rhythmic journey from the cruel regions of the past, which left behind collective guilt and the repression of difference, to the uncertain present. Without a cosmic order, with facts and events, it places us in the role of an observer who indifferently observes the unjust unfolding of the lives of seemingly innocent individuals, so that the justice of a corrupt ideology or a man's egomaniacal rampage for his own ideal may be satisfied. The eruption of hidden stories that had been waiting to be revealed for more than seventy years started happening at the best possible time. In an era when the world order is collapsing, harmful ideologies are rising, capital is deeply rooted before human spiritual needs, empathy is almost non-existent - at this point it is even more important to remember, remind and overcome together.
About the author
Maya Arad Yasur (1976) is a dramaturge and playwright. She holds an M.A. in Dramaturgy from the University of Amsterdam where she graduated with distinction. In the years 2007-2012 Maya has been living in the Netherlands, working as a production dramaturge. She has been the dramaturge of several award-winning theatre performances which tour in festivals around Europe. Maya returned to Israel in 2012 and has been working since as a freelance dramaturge and playwright. Her plays have been staged and publicly read in various theatres in Israel, Germany, Austria, Norway and the U.S. and were published in leading theatre magazines in Germany, Poland and Israel. She is the recipient of numerous awards: 1st prize of the international playwriting competition of ITI–UNESCO for Suspended (2011) Habima (Israel’s national theatre) prize for emerging playwrights for God Waits at the Station (2014) Theatertreffen’s Stückemarkt prize for Amsterdam (2018)
About the director
In his theater performances, Aljoša Živadinov Zupančič (1996) follows the theme of the absurdity of power relations between individuals, both in micro and macro social structures. Why does evil approach the realm of evil in terms of exclusive decision-making power, and why must we first understand this evil before we can truly bury it once and for all? When we approach the issue of man in this way, we are implicitly always dealing with politics, in the sense of the meaning of politics as "regulating situations and deciding on them in a certain social sphere". However, Živadinov Zupančič does not characterize his developing theater practice as exclusively political or, even better, realpolitik.
All of his performances so far also thematize the social conditioning of gender and the roles that members of a certain gender must play within society. Within all the texts, perhaps written by Ivan Cankar, Odon von Horvath or Nika Korenjak, the authors consciously or unconsciously affirm, but in reality prefer to deny the given expectations that we have towards the Other (gender, race, class). It is precisely these expectations that produce the main points of conflict in and between individuals. They affirm the collective "dox", which in reality only deepens the "simulation gap" between man and the reality of the world. The most we can always do, in the here-and-now, is to realize our helplessness in the struggle with perfection and, nevertheless, on behalf of ourselves, and even better of the community, "fight against our own nature". The thesis that nowadays plays are only staged, not played, is not understood as a crisis of the theater, but rather as a crisis of the play of mimicry itself.
From the reviews
"An exciting theatre event, especially because it was created by a new generation of theatre artists who are trying to create a new language and who have found in Mini teater a kind of laboratory for experimentation and testing of theatrical practices." Vesna Milek, Delo
"In a somewhat stylised, at the same time sublime and ironic diction, the actors Luka Bokšan, Borut Doljšak and Timotej Novaković, who always maintain the precision of their pronunciation, are extremely lucid interpreters of their content. Apart from them, the protagonist appears in the production as the only figure who is supposed to be actually "acted". The only stage figure, which is therefore a "representation of representation", is boldly portrayed by Nika Korenjak in various fragments of her Amsterdam life (and therefore in different moods). On the one hand, the refined, almost radio-like voices, on the other hand, the much more realistic voice (that is, not insignificantly - a woman's voice!), in which the social tensions that push the protagonist into an increasingly marginal social position are directly interwoven, betray correspondingly different levels of performance." Blaž Gselman, Veza Sigledal
