Hortus Coclusus - Garden, (2023)
Dance theatre performance as a part of Muzeum Theatre’s 30th anniversary programme.
Hortus Conclusus is a garden genre, an enclosed space divided into quadrants. The enclosure is simple: a wall or
decorative wall or a woven wool fence. It acts as a curtain, like a veil that covers the nakedness of the body (Dominique
Clévenot writes about the aesthetics of the veil) or perhaps a theatre curtain, an interspace that both separates and
joins two key paradigms of stage art.
Architect and architectural theorist Gottfried Semper, in his Theory of Dressing
(Bekleidungstheorie), identifies fabric as the primal form of art and states that construction began with draping
structures in fabric. Tents are depicted in the stone reliefs of ancient cultures, showing the aberrations of their shapes
in response to various weather conditions. The garden is also a symbol of the soul.
The performance Hortus Conclusus will immerse itself in imaginary spaces where poetry befriends philosophy. The relationships between micro and macro spaces,
whether physical or mental entities, will create a unique visual language embedded into the theatrical world of stage
miniatures and fantastical, vegetative enlargements.
Muzeum 30 Years
Discussion
Cricket in the Fist, the first performance by Muzeum Theatre in 1994 in the former premises of the Viba Film Studio in the
Church of St. Joseph in Ljubljana, marked a turning point for the Ljubljana performance space. A year later came the
performance of Lo Scrittore on the main stage of the SNT Drama Ljubljana, which set the next milestone in Slovenian
theatre with its directorial and scenographic design and secured itself as a Barthesian punctum at the pinnacle of the
theatrical consciousness of the then-generation of viewers and theatre connoisseurs. Over the next three decades, Muzeum
Theatre’s authors’ aesthetics produced constantly new dramaturgical branches, platforms and trilogies. It tested new
production forms at a variety of venues, both in collaboration with members of the original team and with always new
generations of actors and dancers, as well as with a bold avant-la-lettre gesture: placing architects, dramaturgs and
theorists, visual artists or writers in the role of theatre director.
As part of Muzeum Theatre’s 30th-anniversary celebration, Muzeum Institute, in collaboration with SLOGI – Slovenian
Theatre Institute and Cankarjev dom, is organising a discussion that will follow the première of the performance Hortus
Conclusus directed by Barbara Novakovič on 9 September 2020, in Linhart Hall. Participants will include Blaž Lukan, Tomaž
Toporišič, Jana Pavlič, Marijan Rupert and other co-creators of Muzeum Theatre and the publication scheduled for release
by SLOGI in the spring of 2025.
Primož Jesenko will moderate the discussion.
Some questions:
What unites authors such as Chekhov, Godard, Molière, Quignard, Shakespeare, Harms, Spinoza, Picasso, Rodin, Smilevski,
Svetina and Borges? How does the actor’s body connect them, and how does the theatre space link them?
What transformations have the last three decades brought to the production form of dance-theatre art at Muzeum Theatre?