Solo

Nina Gostiša: Excursion into the unexplored
Delo / 25 August 2021
Stepping out of one’s comfort zone allows both sides – the one who wants to experience all that the opportunity has to offer and allows themselves to be guided but cannot always get out of their own skin, and the other who is allowed to be guided – to explore another perspective, and at the same time to understand it more easily.

Brina Jenček: Grlom u jagode
Radio Študent / 27 August 2021
Solo acts as a love letter to theatre, the audience, her castmates, and the supporters who have shaped Rajić Kranjac and brought her to this point in her life. At the same time, by critiquing theatre, questioning its meaning, and declaring a pessimistic feeling of powerlessness to actually change anything through theatrical gestures, she creates a theatrical utopia that itself turns into an anti-utopia, and thus becomes a clear expression of devotion to theatre, whatever it may be.

Nina Rajić Kranjac for STA: In Solo, the audience will witness the (in)ability to be oneself in front of others
STA / interview / 20 August 2021
We have been exploring how we can all, in a given “solo”, break down and reassemble the convention of form according to the above-mentioned (in)ability to be with oneself before others. At the same time, Solo is merely a title and perhaps a hint that the performance is about a kind of solitude. We are observing where and in what way one is alone. Alone as a creator, as a partner, as a person in general … And in such situations, the least interesting thing for us was that this eventfulness is triggered by one person; it just did not work.

Ana Rozman: Nina Rajić Kranjac becomes the narrator of her own life / ARS program /19 August 2021

Gregor Butala: Nina Rajić Kranjac, theatre director: Journey towards a living community
Dnevnik / interview / 19 August 2021
“The starting point was actually an invitation to my colleagues, explaining my reasons for taking on this project and indicating which materials I would like to work with. Among these were selected poems by the Serbian poet and playwright Milena Marković. When asked why she was publishing another collection of poems, she once replied that sometimes a poet can save a life; that maybe a poem is the only reason someone won’t kill themself. This simple statement says something important about art – even when the artist feels as if they are the only one dealing with an issue or a topic, that they are therefore alone with their problem, they are in fact already part of the wider society.”

Gregor Butala: Between a plastic pig and baked bell peppers
Dnevnik / 24 August 2021
It is a kind of “recapitulation” of her work so far as well as her relationship to theatre, which at this point seems to be marked by the eternal question of the (un)power of art and, consequently, of its meaning or significance. This is, of course, elusive, as the production is very self-aware, approaching its “subject” in a multifaceted but predominantly ironic way, as a kind of wry case study, mixing performance, improvisation and happenings in an informal atmosphere, occasionally veers into more serious tones, but then soon releases them in a playful string of (auto)biographical titbits, theatrical anecdotes, internal stints, quotations and self-quotes, but also various formative accents that in one way or another define the protagonist’s personality and work.

Magda Tušar: In a collective play about the self, the spectator, and theatre itself

Radio Slovenija / ARS / Oder radio show / 31 August 2021
Solo presents a ground-breaking performance for the director, whose tenth project combines different positions and settings into a hybrid theatrical form, testing what theatre as a medium allows, how to expand it, how to set new challenges with it.

Petra Vidali: “Grlom u jagode” or solo without Nina Rajić Kranjac’s talon
Večer / 1 September 2021
The language of NRK’s childhood has been given an ideological connotation by contemporary Slovenian reality. Speaking Serbian for a large part of the performance could also be a political gesture (which would not be possible in national theatres in such a form.) But in Solo it seems to be above all a choice of the language of spontaneity, of improvisation, of theatre as a game, a circus, a joke. As Tibor Hrs Pandur wrote in the Theatre Journal, “Theatre is a sophisticated circus.”

Zala Dobovšek: Identity crisis or identity boom?
Neodvisni / 8. 9. 2021
Here, the audience joins in with all the prior realities, turning the aesthetics of the political personal outwards into the political public, and the almost four-hour event manages to ignite a collective alliance on the necessity of art despite previous pessimistic doubts about the meaning of theatre. Even more so now, in these times, with this government, with this virus.

Natasha Tripney: SOLO
SEE STAGE / reviews /6 April 2022
It’s hard to articulate the overall impact of the piece, it is a journey, a durational exercise for both performers and audience (past productions of the show talk of a six hour running time and I would have been up for that) a true communal experience, literally feeding its audience. It is intensely theatrical and incredibly exciting. Just really fucking exciting. Theatre as a living art form and a team sport, as an act of trust and risk, breathe and sweat, vulnerability and exposure, chaos and catharsis.

Patricija Maličev: “Living your dream is a capitalist scam” (Nina Rajić Kranjac)
Delo / Sobotna priloga / interview / 18 April 2022
“We’ve titled the event as a solo, but at the same time we are acting as a collective. We talk and build spaces and atmospheres about the terrifying loneliness of the individual, but the latter happens in front of everyone else and maybe because of them. We were interested in the conditioning of the individual in society. We were interested in the responsibility of society towards that individual. Specifically, how can the creator develop, can he or she even get past the environment? And is the environment aware of how much influence it can have on the individual? Is the persistence on the margins of status really a question of the individual, or is it a reflection of a society that needs the individual on the margins? So that the whole field of culture and art can be castrated in political terms, its importance, its task and its power nullified. Even its reach. Less than one per cent of the national budget is devoted to culture … In such an environment, paradoxically, the one who is worthy is the one who is already dead and who has been wronged because they were overlooked during his life and work. Hellish. Such a person is more “alter” for Slovenia, more culturally “authentic”, more “rebellious”, more worthy of the term; talented, self-sacrificing, a “Slovenian artist”. Above all, such an artist is cheap! Posthumously, they become a national commodity, and there was no need to invest in them.”

Jury’s reasoning of the 56th Bitef Festival
1 October 2022
“The first prize goes to a courageous, passionate and unique exploration of the fundamental questions of theatre in the present moment, an exploration that reaches into the past as well as into the future and is presented to us with fierce energy by four extraordinary thinkers, authors, performers. They invite us on an exciting and risky journey through self-discovery, conflicts, memories, scenes, songs, and myths, leading us into different theatrical spaces and forms, and concluding with a ceremony that celebrates connectedness and our human imperfection.”

Haris Pašović, Ana Tomović, Gordana Popović, Ana Tasić and Borka Golubović Trebješanin