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Director and Set Designer Diego de BREA
Translation Maja ŠABEC
Costume Designer Leo KULAŠ
Composer Aldo KUMAR
Language coach Jože VOLK
Premiere:
December 5th 2008 |
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CAST |
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Bernarda |
Jagoda |
Maria Josefa |
Anica KUMER |
Angustias |
Barbara MEDVEŠČEK |
Magdalena |
Manca OGOREVC |
Amelia |
Tanja POTOČNIK |
Martirio |
Minca LORENCI |
Adela |
Nina IVANIŠIN |
Poncia |
Lučka POČKAJ |
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| SLOVENE NATIONAL THEATRE - CELJE (Slovenia) |
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Slovene National Theatre Celje is the only professional theatre in the Savinjska-Saleska region. It was founded in 1950. There are top theatre creators working in SNT Celje, actors as well as directors and other contributors. The art staff is made of 23 professional actors with academic education, a resident director, a permanent dramaturge, language coach and manager. The actors of the Celje theatre are recipients of numerous awards, for example two recipients of the Borštnik Ring – Janez Bermež (1998) and Anica Kumer (2003). One should not forget the rest of the staff, who are contributing to the success of the theatre. Every season five premieres for adults and one for children and teenagers are prepared. The theatre is visited by 45,000 spectators per year, who watch around 170 plays by national and foreign theatres in SNT Celje and 60 plays in other parts of Slovenia and abroad. As the only theatre in its region, it covers all theatric genres by national and foreign authors, classical works as well and novelties, and the repertoire is therefore very diverse and colorful.
This year is especially significant for SNT Celje, because it is celebrating 60 years of existence. The theatre has succeeded in developing into one of the leading and particular theatres in Slovenia. For this theatre the highest mission is satisfied audience, and that is why they try even harder to deserve the highest praise. |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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“Only when one realises that Lorca sings to Spain, and not to theatre, one can make a play out of his work”
 Núria ESPERT |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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Powerful and suggestive, almost entirely ascetic, the young director
Diego de Brea, with the brilliant ensemble of Slovene National
Theatre in Celje, has succeeded in bringing in front of the audience
a well known Lorca tragedy in a completely new and exciting manner,
filled with dramatic tension and emotions. Even though the
text is radically omitted (the play is almost unverbal!), the director
and the ensemble have managed to show the full tragedy of women
from the house of Bernarda Alba in an unusual manner, and a
play full of passion that always stays accurately focused and almost
choreographically precise, and thus it penetrates deeper into the
consciousness of the audience than it would in a textual interpretation.
Nikola ZAVIŠIĆ |
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DIEGO DE BREA, director
(born 1969), studied comparative literature and art history at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. In 1995, he started studying theatre direction the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana.
In 1999, his graduation piece, The Birth of Light, won an award at the International Student Production Theatre Festival in Brno. He has authored a number of well-known performances in Slovenian repertory and non-institutional theatres. He tackles many genres ranging from youth pieces and puppet shows (even a puppet opera), to self-authored projects, classical and contemporary texts as well as musical vaudeville. In Italy, he directed a self-authored project Leonora, starring the opera singer Eleonora Jankovich and based on Wagner’s motifs.
His performances toured both in Slovenia and abroad – in Belgrade, at the Varna Festival in Bulgaria, at the Mladi levi and Exodos Festivals, in London, Paris, Antwerp, Mons, Dortmund and at the Iberoamericano Festival in Bogotá, Colombia.
His self-authored project Duel (Glej Theatre), received a special award at the Borštnik Drama Meeting. In 2005, de Brea received the aesthetic breakthrough award at the same festival for his performances Queen Margot and Edward II. He also received the Golden Bird Award for theatre in 2002.
Major works: Pilot – hommage to Srečko Kosovel (1996/7); Federico – poetry by F. G. Lorca (1999); Oton Župančič, Veronica of Desenice (2000); Ionesco, Exit the King (2000); Bob Fosse, Chicago (2002); Roland Schimmelpfennig, Arabian Night (2005); Alfred de Vigny, Chatterton (2004); Cankar, A Scandal in Saint Florian's Valley (2005); A. Dumas, Queen Margot (2005); C. Marlowe, Edward II (2005), C. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (2006); Luchino Visconti, The Damned (2006); J. Genet, The Maids (2007). |
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FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1898–1936)
Federico García Lorca is possibly the most important Spanish poet and dramatist of the twentieth century. García Lorca was born June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles from Granada. His father owned a farm in the fertile vega surrounding Granada and a comfortable mansion in the heart of the city. His mother, whom Lorca idolized, was a gifted pianist. After graduating from secondary school García Lorca attended Sacred Heart University where he took up law along with regular coursework. His first book, Impresiones y Viajes (1919) was inspired by a trip to Castile with his art class in 1917.
In 1919, García Lorca traveled to Madrid, where he remained for the next fifteen years. Giving up university, he devoted himself entirely to his art. He organized theatrical performances, read his poems in public, and collected old folksongs. During this period García Lorca wrote El Maleficio de la mariposa (1920), a play which caused a great scandal when it was produced. He also wrote Libro de poemas (1921), a compilation of poems based on Spanish folklore. Much of García Lorca's work was infused with popular themes such as Flamenco and Gypsy culture. In 1922, García Lorca organized the first "Cante Jondo" festival in which Spain's most famous "deep song" singers and guitarists participated. The deep song form permeated his poems of the early 1920s. During this period, García Lorca became part of a group of artists known as Generación del 27, which included Salvador Dalí and Luis Bunuel, who exposed the young poet to surrealism. In 1928, his book of verse, Romancero Gitano ("The Gypsy Ballads"), brought García Lorca far-reaching fame; it was reprinted seven times during his lifetime.
In 1929, García Lorca came to New York. The poet's favorite neighborhood was Harlem; he loved African-American spirituals, which reminded him of Spain's "deep songs." In 1930, García Lorca returned to Spain after the proclamation of the Spanish republic and participated in the Second Ordinary Congress of the Federal Union of Hispanic Students in November of 1931. The congress decided to build a "Barraca" in central Madrid in which to produce important plays for the public. "La Barraca," the traveling theater company that resulted, toured many Spanish towns, villages, and cities performing Spanish classics on public squares. Some of García Lorca's own plays, including his three great tragedies Bodas de sangre (1933), Yerma (1934), and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), were also produced by the company.
In 1936, García Lorca was staying at Callejones de García, his country home, at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was arrested by Franquist soldiers, and on the 17th or 18th of August, after a few days in jail, soldiers took García Lorca to "visit" his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernandez Montesinos, the Socialist ex-mayor of Granada whom the soldiers had murdered and dragged through the streets. When they arrived at the cemetery, the soldiers forced García Lorca from the car. They struck him with the butts of their rifles and riddled his body with bullets. His books were burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen and were soon banned from Franco's Spain. To this day, no one knows where the body of Federico García Lorca rests. |
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Brutal Magic
...Lorca’s “realism” was transformed by the director Diego de Brea into a hyper-real grotesque travesty, in which the intensity of feelings is pushed to the limit. The project thus steps into the territory of performance, the fragmented text is the basic tissue, and although the illusion of the performance, therefore mediated, never evaporates completely, the tendency of body instrumentalisation, the separation of actors and the characters they play almost disappears, and the “real body” and the “real space” come into focus.
...The exterior visual image creates an impression of black and white negative of a dramatic paradigm with unambiguous associations to the Andalusian environment of the 1930s, and the protagonists are gradually freed from all the temporal and spatial determination. Moreover, in a very powerful rhythm of the play, the basic starting points of the “plot” are erased, the tyranny of the mother towards their daughters, the frustrated female sexuality and the critique of social norms, in the dynamism of the scene the difference between separate character disappears, the protagonists are involved in a powerful spasm of mutual conflicts, which no longer have a real basis in traditions, customs, norms and taboos, and they increasingly become an enclosed world of senseless mental and physical violence...
Form the initial real and symbolical funeral of the father, who epitomised an exterior seeming order in the otherwise completely invalid and dysfunctional family, eight actresses tackle a very demanding task not to subordinate their presence on the stage to the paradigms of the text, but they take positions more adequate to the text, which means they more or less randomly follow it, with constant reshaping into a new context, everything is subordinated to the embodiment of the spirit, overcoming the differences between the sensual and the a-sensual non-dualistic and non-transcendental. Since the play is temporally homogeneous, and every stoppage or pause would cancel the extraordinary energetic charge, the actresses are sentenced to their stage presence throughout the entire play, and both the active and the passive presence are equally trying.
Anica Kumer as Maria Josepha is sentenced almost in the entire play to that silent presence, which she plays with extraordinary concentration, other actresses are, beside short intermezzos, part of a constant merciless conflicting ritual that does not have any final meaning and it is often drowned in the intelligibility of gestures and functions. Apart from gradual equalisation of the characters into an amorphous clew of violence, each protagonist succeeds in keeping certain specificities, Jagoda in the leading role, and equally Barbara Medvešček, Manca Ogorevc, Tanja Potočnik, Minca Lorenci, Nina Ivanišin and Lučka Počkaj; their ability to jump from the phenomenally real body to the fictitious semiotic character and back for an hour and a half is most impressive, and therefore it is not surprising they are so exhausted, both mentally and physically, after the dropping of the curtain.
...the Celje play belongs to the most thoughtful interpretations we had so far, and it shows it is even today possible to achieve complete (albeit brutal) magic on stage without violent inventive directorial, stage and costume procedures. The sensibility of the director and eight excellent actresses are sufficient.
Peter RAK, Delo, Ljubljana, December 11th 2008 |
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