In Mini teater we started intensive rehearsals for the new theatre performance Amsterdam by Maya Arab Yasur, which is part of the Young Author's Production programme. The play is directed by Aljoša Živadinov Zupančič and the cast includes Nika Korenjak, Luka Bokšan, Timotej Novaković and Borut Doljšak. The stage design is by renowned Slovenian artists Vadim Fiškin and Miran Mohar, the costume designer is Claudi Sovre, the translator and dramaturg is Nika Korenjak and the proofreader is Jože Faganel. The performance is a co-production of Mini teater and the Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana.
Maya Arad Yasur (1976) is an Israeli dramaturge and playwright. She holds an MA in dramaturgy from the University of Amsterdam, where she graduated with honours. She lived in the Netherlands from 2007-2012, where she worked as a dramaturg. In 2012 Maya returned to Israel and has been working as a freelance dramaturge and playwright ever since. Her plays have been produced in various theatres in Israel, Germany, Austria, Norway and the USA and 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). Her plays are Diamond Stars (2010), God Waits at the Station (2014), Ten Minutes from Home (2015), Amsterdam (2018), Bomb (2020), The Exiters (2020).
The play Amsterdam is a meta-theatrical rhythmic journey from the cruel parts of the past, which left behind collective guilt and the repression of otherness, to the unshakable present. Without a cosmic order, it puts us, with facts and events, in the role of an observer, indifferently watching the unjust unravelling of the lives of seemingly innocent individuals, so that the justice of a corrupt ideology or of a man's egomaniacal rampage for his own ideal is done. The eruption of suppressed stories that have been waiting to be exposed for more than seventy years has begun to happen at the best possible time. In an era when the world order is crumbling, harmful ideologies are on the rise, capital is deeply entrenched in front of human spiritual needs, empathy is almost non-existent - at this point it is all the more important to remember, to remind ourselves, and to transcend together.
Director Aljoša Živadinov Zupančič, who is directing for the first time at Mini teater, says that Amsterdam thematises the myth of the Holocaust. Through this story, questions of guilt, remembrance, the genesis of collective trauma are raised, but the drama is by no means heavy-handed. The rhythm is fast-paced, high-energy. There is no time for psychologising, the protagonist is surrounded by public opinion, history, community. And the drama is not afraid to invoke humour, if only to plunge its knives of meaning deeper. Is it not most painful that the absurdity in which humanity finds itself produces pain, and not Daniil Harms?
All of his theatre performances to date have also dealt with the social conditioning of gender and the roles that members of a particular gender are expected to play within society. Within all the texts, whether written by Ivan Cankar, Odon von Horvath or Nika Korenjak, the authors consciously or unconsciously affirm, and in reality even more prefer to demystify, the given expectations we have of the Other (gender, race, class). It is precisely these expectations that produce the main points of conflict within and between individuals. They affirm a 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 realise our powerlessness in the struggle with perfection and yet "fight our own nature" on behalf of ourselves, and even more so on behalf of the community. The thesis that nowadays performances are only staged, not acted, is understood not as a crisis of theatre, but as a crisis of the play of mimicry itself.
