The girl and the doublebass
EXCERPTS
Delo, Blaž Lukan
This endless exeriencing of oneself
and the world is also the main quality of the performance: although it
is entered through different paths by not always identically eloquent
words, music, props and stage relations, its basic tone is pure and can
be called initiation crisis or existential awekenings. The latter is never
ideologically single-minded or thoroughly symbolised, but always leaves
enough space for playfulness, at moments even humor. Four girls, who are
the poetical "parts" of a single woman and who are characterized
on the stage by some kind of tacit alliance, unconditional closeness,
are only at the end ultimately ("ideologically") supressed by
the great Mother.
The heroine of this sparing-at-words poetical picture-book is the Girl
acted by Draga Potočnjak: she seem some sort of perpetual (intuitive)
plan in her head, persistently searching for the meaning and order in
the world. The actrewss Draga Potočnjak has found an intense insight in
her interpretation, she is not interested in the phenomenal world as such
but is always on the look-out for a contact, a relationship with it. Her
contact with the rabbit, acted by Sanja Neškovič, is unique: in a certain
moment both girls are like two schoolgirls whose laughing at the memories
(their own or the authoress's) or their actual experience of each other
is close to a grimace; this is a moment of true "existence"
when the stage form completely disappears. Ms.Neškovič is a quivering
beeing, trubling with a fear and cold, she looks as she was naked in the
world looming around with menace, her body is changing its forms and expressions
and can by no efford reach the (vertical) form it is requested to: ballet
stepping on the toes and then puppet-like dancing make a dredful and absurd
impression, touchingly "beautiful".
TV Slovenija 1, Majda Knap Šembera
Exeptional fairy - tale string of
images, musical cries and verbal wishperings which the authoress, with
the imagination of a child's association, has woven together with the
disciplined and fragile quartete consisting of Neda R. Bric, Damjana Černe,
Sanja Neškovič and Draga Potočnjak, who have been rewarded with a well-deserved
applause. Behind the lovely simplicity hides a thougful work of a whole
range of creators who rounded off a story on a heart, child's dreams,
rabbit, mother and a girl into a meaningful whole with sparks of humore
glittering even in this farewell to the childhood.
Razgledi, Bojana Kunst
It is interesting how the directress
succeeded in filling these images with subtlety and vivacity. We can say
that her feeling for lucid detailing has been fully embodied in thise
performance, also by means of excellent actresses who in their expression
and body present mysterious, half - real and half - dreamlike images.
The directress manages to the attention percisely with some wellstudied
images who walk before us like pictures at the show and who with subtle
imagination exhabit what is hidden in the past. Even if these images may
seem familiar to us, they leave behind them only more consistently so
a sensitive, but also a permanent stamp.
Dnevnik, Tatjana Grief
The performance has very little verbal
communication - where words are concerned, they turn out to be mere whisperings.
The mimicking and movement, emotionally provoked through natural sounds
and music, speak much more expressively.
Radio Student, Jedrt Jež
In my opinion, her theatre Muzeum
is the only one to have built a bridge between the eighties and the ninethies
in the field of the Slovenian stage arts.
Muzeum has desided on the conceptual five - years period ("petletka")
and calls itself the theatre of the concept, but the deviation and the
leap of Barbara Novakovič has landed in a plastic, history-off-art, non-verbal
and atmospheric theatre.
The performances of Barbara Novakovič always question and re-question
themselves on the medium in which they are created.
The specific feature lies in the fairytale-coloured logic; in fairy tales,
dreams and spiritual labyrinths of the brain tissue.
Its magic is in the associative capacitiy of every individual, but the
directress's precision and
Thoughtfullness attend to it that this associative imagination does not
take esoteric - avanturistic paths.
No doubts, before you is a fine hour of fine pictures, melancholically
joyus,at times even fairytale thrilling palettes, but in order to examine
the logical connection which refers to the earlier seen props, more then
just one attendance of the performance will be needed. During your second
performance you will be able to appreciate the study on feminine sensibility
through the characters associated with witches, rabbits, mothers, Alices
and woman-turned instruments and sonorous voices.
