The State
How to think of the state at a time when we have become citizens of a global state, a state of consumption and exploitation? How to reflect on community, how to reflect on a sense of belonging? The state is a machine. The state is inscribed through the bodies of those who inhabit it, but also those who flee from it or cannot locate their identity within it. A fiction, which we may or may not choose to believe in, but one that we constantly establish and which constantly defines us. The state is an electric current. Its dynamics are determined by financial and geopolitical interests, endless wars, corporate powers, the measurability and predictability of our habits. A present turning into history, dispersed across fields of silicon. The state is an algorithm. In this, the neural economy is analogous to the economy of theatre, which at its core is the art of anticipation: an anticipation of effect and of the structure of an event.
The devised project The State will shed light on the phenomena of surveillance capitalism and on the narratives of the raw materials that sustain it. Through stories of protests and uprisings that enabled emancipation from the control of algorithms, which confronted a body with the body of the machine, we will attempt to think of the performance as a state: as a temporary autonomous zone, a utopia that exists in parallel with the performance and dissolves with its end. This will be a state that transcends binary logics, that refuses identity but embraces community, tightly knit through the belief in the Event. The Event, a rupture, oil seeping through the fabric of reality. Through stories of resistance, both historical and recent, we will write with our bodies an essay in which documentary accounts overlap with utopian designs, all in order to ask how, and whether, we can still believe in the power of a community that eludes control.
- Devised Project
Director and Author of Concept: Jan Krmelj
Dramaturg: Lučka Neža Peterlin
Authors of the Text: Jan Krmelj, Klara Debeljak, Lučka Neža Peterlin, Diana Kolenc, Miranda Trnjanin, Filip Mramor
Set Designer and Video Designer: Dorian Šilec Petek
Set Design Assistant: Lucija Zuchhiati
Sound Designer: Paloma Pertot
Costume Designer and Graphic Designer: Brina Vidic
Lighting Designer and Technical Director: Igor Remeta
PR: Urška Comino
Producer: Nastja Kotnik Minik
Cast: Diana Kolenc, Filip Mramor, Miranda Trnjanin
Production: Maska Ljubljana
Financial Support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia Public Fund for Cultural Activities
Co-production: Cankarjev dom
Founder and Main Co-financier of Cankarjev dom’s Artistic and Cultural Programme: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
Acknowledgements: Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana and Slovenian National Theatre Nova Gorica
Audience advisory: The performance includes artificial fog, as well as lighting effects with flashing lights and occasional strong flashes.
In Slovenian with English surtitles.
When I enter the theatre, I enter a state. I step into a delimited territory, an autonomous zone, functioning as the consequence of pre-established conventions. When I enter the theatre, I surrender my body to the performative machine that directs my attention; the machine engages in a dialogue, in conflict, with this attention of mine. I yield to the power of belief, to the possibility that through the immeasurability of fiction I might touch upon something that would translate as reality. The State is a performance in time, a story that ends but never begins. The state is your body, each and every night, day in and day out. Nothing is self-evident about it.
The State will dream a territory freed from control. A dialogue with theatre, a hymn to its emancipatory power and to the possibilities of imagination in a time defined by violence.
