The TRANSformacije Collection

Blaž Lukan: Dramaturgical figures – Essays on today’s theatre

If the book Dramaturgical replications (Knjižnica MGL, 1991), the theoretical debut of Blaž Lukan, was anchored in (practical) dramaturgy, even though that dramaturgy was always permeated with distinctively personal, essayistic author’s colouring, her successor Dramaturgical figures (1998) tried to provide its personal aspect with firmer theoretical foundations. The book Dramaturgical figures is actually a biographic episode of a thinker and spectator of different performance forms, his main preoccupation is to provide names, figures, comparatives to that which has sprung up on the stage as Real. The author himself admits that Dramaturgical figures are less dependent on practice, since at the time of their creation, he was winning more and more recognition as one of the main national theatre critics and essayists. The book is divided into three parts: chapters Plateaus, Models and Figures.

Dramaturgicaql figures are “a book of transition” for Lukan as well as for the theatrical environment in which it was created. With Lukan, it means a continuing ‘emancipation’ of position in dialogue with the creators and their work, which is most evident from the last part of the book. Lukan’s speciality is, in contrast with ‘hard theory’, which is dominating in the Slovenia of the last decade and which has especially profiled itself within the field of film, the ‘softness’ of his approach … Lukan’s discourse is a discourse of a stage manager who has exited the theatrical machine in order to fight it with even greater intensity.