Maska journal

On Performance Education

The main topic of this issue is education in performing arts. Numerous national and foreign authors write about the state and perspectives in education from the view of a changed and more and more interdisciplinary field of contemporary performing arts.

Miško Šuvaković writes about the strategies and tactics in the avant-garde, neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde pedagogics in performing arts, Josette Feral is wondering, through a revision of thoughts of the great directors of the 20th century, whether acting can be taught. Anne Bogart answers with six characteristics of an actor that can be stimulated. Susanne Winnacker and Hans-Thies Lehmann ponder on the problem of the ossified academic university programs that still segregate academic discourse from artistic practice. Johannes Birringer talks about the necessity of introducing new technologies into the education of modern performance actors, while Theo van Rompay talks about the importance of theory for the education of a contemporary dancer. Maja Delak reflects on the beginnings of the high-school contemporary dance program, while Meta Hočevar analyses the present state and perspectives inside the AGRFT. Bojana Cvejić writes about The Art Judgment Show project by Boris Groys, in which the professor talks to his students about the criteria of an art evaluator. Taras Kermauner describes the history of dramaturgy teaching in Slovenia by focusing on the main protagonists and his own eliminated position. Maska is developing a concept of post-dramatic theatre with the texts by Steven De Belder on theatre and everyday life, by Luk van den Dries on the new ambientality and the changed position of the spectator, and by Nataša Govedić on the concept of fascination in the works of Maria Ribot and Jérôme Bel.

In the section The Society of Spectacle, Maska examines the “Mengeš syndrome”, that is, the phenomenon of commercial theatre in Slovenia, and evaluates the theatrical and dance program of Cankarjev dom in the year 2001. As far as performances are concerned, there is some talk of the issue of pedophilia in the plays directed by Mateja Koležnik, of two stagings of Sarah Kane, of the new performances by Iztok Kovač, Emil Hrvatin and Rok Vevar, as well as two German performances that politically derive from different points of origin, Peter Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke in Frankfurt (musical scores by Borut Kržišnik), and the controversial Christoph Schlingensief in Zürich.

This issue of Maska has 152 pages and is published partly in English.