Anita Wach, Bojan Jablanovec: Don’t Force Me To Say What I Think

April 14th at 8pm – premiere
April 15th, 16th at 8pm
Old Power Station Ljubljana

Spectacle about the omnipresent dictate of the image and about the freedom hidden in darkness. About art and artifice. About fact and the appearance of a fact. About photophilic culture and dark nature.

Illusionary truths and real fictions
Written by Anita Wach

Don’t force me to say what I think is a performance about spectacle. About the omnipresent dictate of the image and about freedom hidden in darkness. About objectivity of physical phenomena and the nature of perception. About the materiality of thought and the laws of kinetics. About the speed of light and the endurance of muscle. About art and artifice. About fact and the appearance of a fact. About photophilic culture and dark nature. About the physicality of images and the abstraction of the body.
Spectacle as a drug that feeds spectators with light, offering strands of images that are reflections of reality…. which are reflections of the images in our brains…. which are projections of our desires…. which are projections of the desires of others…which are reflections of perversions of illusion. It’s a spectacle driven by a dance of simulacra – bodies, words, things, photos of stray creatures, crumbling monuments, paraphrased slogans and rephrased artworks, illusionary truths and real fictions.

Don’t force me to say what I think. Don’t tell me that I can freely express my opinion. Don’t feed me with the phrase that this is my right as a human being and citizen of the world. Freedom of expression ends up in the spectacle of fights for rights about everything, everywhere, at once. Besides, I don’t speak any language well, my English is poor, my Slovenian is terrible, my mother tongue is in disarray, I can easily be misunderstood.

The spectacle runs faster than my ability to process information. The spectacle is bursting with facts, data, opinions, statements, definitions, presentations, observations, analyses, charts, statistics, interpretations, comments…. Facts become interpretations. Exceptions become stereotypes. Individuals become generic. And where am I in all this? I’m just trying to maneuver my way along the trails of understanding, running as fast as I can and stumbling only at the allowed moments. And hide from time to time in some dark corner where the light of spectacle does not reach me. This is what my freedom is all about.

Performance is based on performative events created by Anita Wach and Bojan Jablanovec with collaborators as part of the 30 Movements project in the period March 2022 – March 2023.

Conceived by Anita Wach & Bojan Jablanovec
Concept and direction: Bojan Jablanovec
Choreography: Kristina Aleksova, Anita Wach
Music: Eduardo Raon
Co-authors of music: Boštjan Gombač, Luís André Ferreira
Music includes excerpts of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”.
Technical director. Martin Lovšin
Set design: Matej Stupica
Construction of set elements: Martin Lovšin
Costume design: Olja Grubić
Public relations: Sara Horžen
Producer: Špela Trošt
Production: Via Negativa
Financial support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and City of Ljubljana

PERFORMERS
Anita Wach, Branko Potočan, Ena Kurtalić, Gregor Luštek, Kristina Aleksova, Loup Abramovici

VIDEO
Script and direction: Bojan Jablanovec
Text: Bojan Jablanovec, Anita Wach
Editing, audio-visual programming, video projection: Stella Ivšek

More: www.vntheatre.com