Bojan Jablanovec » Wiki

Bojan Jablanovec Slovenian Theatre Director & Founder / Artistic Director of 'Via Negativa'

Bojan Jablanovec, born on January 23, 1961 in Murska Sobota, Slovenia, graduated from AGRFT in Ljubljana (Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television) - but only after a career shift:

"Before I started theatre studies in Ljubljana, I went to the school for Economics, because my parents were not sure about theatre, and I decided to follow their advice. They said to me: “You need some kind of profession and this is not a profession”. At the school for Economics I gathered a group of people who were interested in theatre and started to do theatre there, which was quite weird. We did it for three years. Then I decided that I had to do it for real. And everything developed into the professional world of theatre."

Born: Murska Sobota, Slovenia.

Founder / Artistic director at VIA NEGATIVA.

Lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Experience: - (2002 - Present) - Artistic director - Via Negativa

As early as his graduation project Helios (a directorial project based on Brecht’s play Galileo Galilei, Cankarjev dom, 1988), Jablanovec revealed his interest in opening the theatrical field and exploring audience perception.

In 1989, he launched another theatre project entitled Triumf smrti (Triumph of Death - performed by SNG Maribor) which synthesized the theatrical trends that characterized the 1980s.

From 1993 to 1999, Jablanovec directed works in most Slovenian theatres. His work during these years included Pierre Corneille’s Odrska utvara (L’Illusion Comique) at SLG Celje (Borštnikova award for best scenery), Federico Garcia Lorca’s Dom Bernarde Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba) at PDG Kranj, Howard Barker’s Ljubezen dobrega moža (The Love of a Good Man) at PDG Nova Gorica (Borštnikova award for best direction).

Also Alfred Jarry’s Kralj Ubu (King Ubu) at MGL, Philip Ridley’s Disnet Razparač at SNG Ljubljana, Werner Schwab’s Predsenice (The Presidents) at SNG Ljubljana, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Romulus Veliki (Romulus the Great) at MGL, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at SSG Trieste, Bertold Brecht’s Gospod Puntila in njebov hlapic Matti (Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti) at PDG Nova Gorica, Eugene Ionesco’s Stoli (The Chairs) at PPF Koper, and Antonin Artaud’s Curek krvi (Jet of Blood) at Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana.

From 1997 to 1999, he taught as an assistant / trainee for theatrical direction and plays at AGRFT in Ljubljana.

In 1999, Jablanovec stopped directing in Slovenian repertory theatres and dedicated himself to theatre research. He did this out of a need to confirm the ideas, meanings, and explanations that underpin the theatre and out of the conviction that dominant production models and the normative standards of creating theatre had become a museum of historical aesthetic

During the period up until 2002, Jablanovec launched three research projects which dealt with the staging of the subject through sexual difference (Evropa – deklica, ki je preveč hitela, Europa – The Girl Who Ran Too Fast), the staging of the subject in relationship to time (Lenora at SNG Ljubljana), and the staging of the subject through the difference between speech and language (Olga Grad vs. Juanna Regina at PG Kranj).

With these projects, Jablanovec successfully developed his directorial method which focuses on the effort to find a process that will effectively lead to artistic creation – a process whereby the person who steps on the stage with his words, his body, his thoughts becomes a theatrical artist. With this goal in mind, he founded an international contemporary theatre arts project called Via Negativa.

Artists who collaborate with the Via Negativa project are made to occupy the position of performer; each participant must be both author and material. Although Via Negativa’s basic creative vehicle is performance, its primary interest remains the exploration of the fundamental mechanisms of theatrical convention. Using a reductive method, Jablanovec focuses on the relationship between the performer and the viewer (the relationship between what is shown and what is seen), and on the question of the real in this relationship. Jablanovec is above all interested in theatre as a method of communication rather than aestheticization.

During the first seven years of the project’s existence (2002-2008), Jablanovec explored the seven human qualities generally known as the seven deadly sins (wrath, gluttony, avarice, lust, sloth, envy, and pride). In this cycle of performances, participants focus each year on one of the seven sins as the basic factor that will dictate the action on the stage and the relationship to the audience.

Jablanovec says this about his decision to do the cycle: “Sin is the eroticism of life. The closer I am to sin, the more life gathers within me. That’s why I always flirt with sin, sit in its lap, and prove that I am stronger than its clinging embrace. My personality is a collection of various tactics on how to outwit myself as regards sin. A variety of more or less successful efforts have formed my character, how to walk on the edge of wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, avarice, lust, and pride. My intelligence develops though rationalization of desire and deferred pleasure. For me, theatre is one of the ways to get close to sin. That’s the game: to be as close as possible to sin but never enter it. This is how we can both enjoy sin: I who put it on stage, and you the viewer who expects it of me, and you, the viewer who watches me, how I do this instead of you. The theatre is a license to sin."

The first two Via Negativa performances pieces – Izhodiščina: jeza (Starting Point: Anger, 2002) and Še (More, 2003) – clearly delineated the creative span of the project. The positive response of the audience and excellent reviews confirmed the direction of both content and form. The rapid international expansion of the project followed.

Jablanovec used workshops to develop a model for the international production of contemporary theatrical works that would not be driven by the logic of limiting the number of permanent members.

The team in the following three performance pieces – Incasso (2004), Bi ne bi (Would Would Not, 2005), and Viva Verdi (2006) – was international and the works were performed at international festivals (among others, at the 2005 Venice Biennale).

Via Negativa is recognized in centres of contemporary arts and in the wider European space as a worthy project dealing with contemporary theatrical creativity.

In 2011, a new cycle of performances begins to emerge under the title Irresolvable, by which Jablanovec wants to upgrade Via Negativa creative processes and staging strategies. Creative interest moved from the research of radical individualization and voluntary subordination to mechanism of modern subjectivation (as a critique of the post-Fordist model of neoliberal subject) to the research of mechanisms of hierarchy, manipulation and subordination of social collectives (law, religion, culture, democracy, equity, etc.), which still represent utopian ideal of every ideology.

In 2012 Jablanovec establish VN Lab, the Via Negativa laboratory for contemporary performing arts. It is a regular education program meant for emerging performers who want to develop their own creative processes and to explore the strategies of contemporary performing arts.

"My story is connected to the institutions. Obviously in the beginning everybody dreams about working in the theatre, on the stages, being actors. I was a student at the academy, and pretty soon I started to direct in the national institutions in Slovenia. They recognised me as a talented young director. They also awarded me. And it became harder and harder for me, because my ideas were stuck and I couldn’t break through with them in this kind of institutions and the way of working there. My performances became weirder and weirder for the general audience, and they started asking themselves: “What is happening with this young director? What is he doing? He is so talented. What’s wrong with him?”

I realised that I had to do something, because it was going nowhere, I was not satisfied, and people around me were not satisfied. I was always trying to push something, but I didn’t really know what I was fighting. Then I realised that I was fighting the production system, it didn’t work for me. I simply cannot fit into it. I decided to make a radical cut and not to have anything to do with them anymore. So I refused all offers of work. It happened while I was an assistant lecturer at the Academy for Acting in Ljubljana.

I was watching the process from the other side, because before I was a student and now I was an assistant of the professor. I could not understand why some people are put into a situation where they are supposed to know so much about how theatre should be done and what it is about. And to lecture young people who are really hungry for knowledge. They were teaching them something that I didn’t believe in from the beginning. And now, after I’d had some experience I realised that this logic didn’t work for me.

I decided that you have to build your own production logic where you can fit in, and then try to develop this logic somehow. Find your own way. I didn’t know from the beginning what my way is and what I actually would like to do and how I would like to do it. I just knew what I hated. So I started from what I didn’t like. I knew a lot about what I didn’t like. I thought if you just go through the things that you don’t like, you will discover something that you like. And this thing that you like, sooner or later you will find out what you don’t like about it - and in this way you can improve your way of thinking, doing, creating. That has now basically become a process of working."

Via Negativa is a platform for research, development and production of contemporary performing arts based in Ljubljana, Slovenia and operates as open creative field, which connects artists who walk on the edge of diverse performing.

Established by the stage director Bojan Jablanovec in 2002 in Ljubljana, Via Negativa is an international platform for the research, development and production of contemporary performing arts. Focused on exploring different performing strategies, with an emphasis on the ethics and liveness of performance practices, procedures and genres, the open-type projects of Via Negativa range from devised theatre pieces, solo and lecture-performances to radical body practices and gallery projects.

The exploration of the relationship between the fictional and the real in projects by ViaNegativa, a performance group from Slovenia, is based on the presumption that the recognition of what we experience as fictional or real is decisively influenced by the perceptualactivity of the spectator. The article argues that the exchange between the elements of fictionand reality takes place in two different concepts of representation: theatricality and absorption.

These are two opposing notions used for defining the relationship between the imagerepresented and the spectator. Theatricality is the effect of the address that the image makes tothe spectators and thus makes them conscious of their own act of perceiving. Absorption, inturn, describes the context in which the image is put to view as a closed, self-sufficientsign-system establishing such conditions of perception that make the spectator focuscompletely upon the object represented; the audience is so overcome by the presented imagethat they experience this as if they were absorbed into the staged world. These two concepts are elaborated on the basis of Denis Diderot?s essays on theatre and fine art.

The essays proveuseful for the argumentation of the thesis since they testify that theatricality and absorption,each in their own way, include the spectator?s personal investment into what comes across asfictional or real. A detailed analysis of selected performances by Via Negativa shows that the real as such (i.e. the authenticity of the real that is confirmed in the identity with its own self ) is impossible to achieve. Under the gaze of the spectator, the real is always compelled to reveal itself through some kind of representation. As also found by Alain Badiou, the authenticity of the real can only be presented through the role of semblance, mask or fiction.