Jan Krmelj: THE STATE

An original creation blending documentary and ritual with speculative fiction, The State interweaves archival records, philosophical texts, sound compositions, and performative gestures into an unpredictable structure that casts the audience into ever-shifting roles of witnesses, citizens, and participants. The State transforms the theatre into a fragmented archive of history, protest, and imagination. It is a story about the destruction of performance spaces and about the power of the memory of resistance. Fragments of memory spill out: Joseph Beuys, Rosa Luxemburg, Sophie Scholl, an unidentified individual facing tanks in Tiananmen Square, the burning body of Jan Palach, the still body of Antonin Artaud, Aaron Swartz in a room full of servers. Each story constitutes a crosspoint accommodating the human body’s resistance to the machinery of the state; a lightning rod in which imagination collides with violence.
If the state is an algorithm of control, can theatre establish its poetic counter-state? Can theatre establish a different form of sovereignty—temporary, fragile, fluid, and perhaps precisely because of this, absolute? How to think of the country 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.

Warnings: This production will include theatrical haze, strobe like lighting effects and occasional bright flashes of light.

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
Producer: Nastja Kotnik Minik
Cast: Diana Kolenc, Filip Mramor, Miranda Trnjanin
Production: Maska Ljubljana
Co-production: Cankarjev dom
Financial Support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia Public Fund for Cultural Activities
Acknowledgements: Slovenian National Theatre Drama Ljubljana and Slovenian National Theatre Nova Gorica

Ticket reservation and information: info@bunker.si