Two modern productions, based upon ancient Greek tragedies, have been hailed as milestones in the history of Slovenian drama. Antigone by Dominik Smole, produced in 1960, is considered one of the ...most significant Slovenian plays of all time, and has been regarded as of great importance not only artistically, but also sociopolitically. The theatrical performance of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, translated by Anton Sovrè and directed by Mile Korun in 1968, at the Slovene National Theatre Drama Ljubljana, proved to be a radical break from the theatrical tradition that focused on drama as a literary text, paving the way for original stage interpretations of plays, and canonical texts in particular. Taking these two cardinal works as a point of departure, emerging when Slovenia was still part of socialist Yugoslavia, this chapter aims to explore the main features of the reception of ancient drama in the Slovenian drama and theater.
Classical Reception in Slovenia Marinčič, Marko
A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe,
03/2017
Book Chapter
The territory of today's Slovenia was to a great degree Romanized by the time of the Slavic invasion. It belonged to the Latin (Catholic) West during the Middle Ages and contributed to Renaissance ...humanism through personalities such as Augustinus Prygl “Tyfernus” (c.1475–1536), the first collector of inscriptions in the Austrian lands, and Baron Sigismund von Herberstein (1486–1566), author of the first important work on Russia in the West. Both Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819), the central figure of Slovenian Enlightenment classicism, and the Romantic bard France Perešeren (1800–1849) were heavily indebted to classical models. Like elsewhere in Europe, Greek myth––in modern clothing or as a political metaphor––was a crucial constituent of twentieth‐century theater. The introductory chapter presents the architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957) and his plan to transform the capital of Slovenia into a “new Athens” as an idiosyncratic case of modernist architecture regressing into neoclassicism.
The 2011 festival that I attended focused in part on the social and moral costs that artists pay when managing their careers, including works that staged the lives of a famous dancer (Nijinsky) and ...an infamous actor (Gustaf Gründgens from the novel Mephisto), and an autobiographical piece by company actor Marusa Geymayer-Oblak. Pavla vividly places the world of mountain climbing onstage by using several indoor climbing walls with holographic images of flocks of birds and snow rippling across the space.
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