Bad Company
This time, Vito Weis, a renowned actor who uncompromisingly steps in front of the audience, strikes with his solo debut. But the suddenness of the pandemic took him by surprise and shattered all his ideas and plans. The pandemic upset the author’s creative peace and approach, because it shook all the basic norms of human activity, including artistic ones, to their very foundations, while at the same time opening up new, unknown horizons and the possibility for contemplation. The isolation brought around an extremely strong psychological insecurity and … a new society. Suddenly we were left alone, alone with ourselves.
Bad Company is thus a pure reflection of the zeitgeist, which is in bloody need of an audience. A reflection stripped of words and almost all stage illusions, but still a full-blooded theatrical experience nonetheless. A reflection that does not impose itself on the spectator but offers him a “multi-coloured” juxtaposition of theatrical images, with which the author touches on many burning questions of the moment in which we are living. Accompanied by music from another time, and another epidemic.
An original project
Directed by Vito Weis
Co-production: New Post Office (Mladinsko Theatre and Maska Ljubljana), Moment
Web premiere: 28 December 2020
Premiere: 11 May 2021
Creators
Directed, designed, costumed and performed by Vito Weis
Directorial consultance: Žiga Divjak
Consultance for movement: Nina Pertot Weis
Music and sound design consultance: Tomaž Grom
Dramaturgical consultancy and conceptual assistance: Žiga Divjak, Nina Pertot Weis, Tomaž Grom
Lighting design: Vito Weis, Igor Remeta
Technical Director: Igor Remeta
Producers: Tina Dobnik (Nova pošta), Nika Bezeljak (Moment)
Bad Company in the Media
Gregor Butala: Independent Theatrical Imageary
Dnevnik / 10 May 2021
But since the beginning of the process, in which Žiga Divjak, Nina Pertot Weis, and Tomaž Grom also participated, the pandemic has changed the situation for work in the theatre. During the autumn when cultural institutions closed again, Weis threw away all the material he had accumulated up to that point and started from scratch. In isolation, the themes of emptiness and loneliness became a new starting point, where, as Weis says, he no longer had to look at what a performance of this kind should be like and what it should offer to the spectator.
Nina Gostiša: Leaving a mark on the viewer is of the greatest value
Delo / interview / 14 May 2021
“I don’t think I’ve ever been as naked on stage as I am in this show. Of course, also because I’m alone, but mostly in terms of deciding what I’m going to do, how I’m going to go about it. In any case, you always have to take risks in the theatre, if you don’t, you can quickly become self-sufficient. Maybe it’s in the sense of being fragile, of not taking a position where you don’t care what the spectator thinks or how something will be received. Everyone is important.”
Petra Tanko: Bad Company
MMC RTV Slovenija and Radio Slovenija / ARS / 12 May 2021
You could say that Bad Company is a devilishly good love story. Devotion, patience, sacrifice, commitment, exploration, small victories, great efforts … all these motifs are intertwined, but the performance is not about the story of two lovers, but about the love of theatre, which does not exist for an actor without an audience.
Gregor Butala: Critique of the original project Bad Company: Everything that is not a performance in theatre
Dnevnik / 12 May 2021
In Bad Company, Weis speaks in a clear, theatre-specific language about everything that precedes (and follows) the performance, be it creative uncertainty, idle moments, the constant testing of possibilities and checking of what has already been created, the questioning of the meaning of what one is doing, the permeation of often contradictory forces, ideas and solutions, or the burden of desires and expectations. Or simply about the sound of the actor’s heartbeat.
A. J.: In “Bad Company”, but at least in front of a live audience
MMC RTV SLO / 11 May 2021
In an interview with SMG dramaturge Urška Brodar, Weis said that the core idea for the project started in 2019 and it was “Empathy, kindness and giving. What does it mean to be a good person, a good artist? I started from a self-reflective position and had the intention to reflect upon myself, on my work so far, on what kind of theatre I want to create and what kind of theatre I am actually creating.”
Anja Radaljac: Rated: Bad Company
Delo / 7 June 2020
The narrative of the play is formed through a series of sequences of conceptually and thematically unified images (images of chairs, a cape, lighting cables, a microphone, etc.), which can be interpreted in different ways – and so the analysis presented in this review should not be understood as the only possible one. But what the images have in common is a sometimes striking, almost ethereal aesthetic, with which Weis convincingly creates the proverbial magic of the theatre.
Evelin Bizjak: The performative potential of raw materiality
Neodvisni / 8 June 2021
Theatre comes to life as a complex space of diverse landscapes. Images are created over time and in time, they are built gradually, through layering. Some fill material spaces, others sonic ones, but all of them come together in the viewer, who gives them their own meaning. In this way, the spectator’s receptive and interpretive apparatus is activated more strongly than in a performance full of illusions.
