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Julie
DNEVNIK, Debates/Commentaries, 13 November 2010, Primož JesenkoCompletely different sensory code
(...) The performance Julie, which originates from August Strindberg's Miss Julie, fills the proven form of dramatic staging with the content of the present time in all its ambivalent finiteness. The performance, whose primary principle is not language, does not underestimate its audience, yet it does not overestimate them either, it is more an attempt to inure the auditorium to different presenting possibilities of a dramatic classic.
Strindberg's work is a footnote to the performance Julie. Some other content is plastered over implied cliché postures and gestures. The share of the clarified and recapped text without the illustrative is very allotted, Nataša Živković (Julie) asks at first what to do with her feelings of falling; moved to the background, she waveringly wears an aristocratic daintiness; her relationship towards Jean (Uroš Kaurin) is completely intangible. The primary plot is veiled; the same goes for the cutting of the coordinates of the plot. For the most part the action happens in hints. Christine's (Leja Jurišić) snoring as a sign which escapes the stage directions increasingly announces that the whole system of social order functionally wanes. The lapidary summary of the classical play transfers the dramaturgical emphasis elsewhere, yet it does not seem to even attempt to be a somewhat "exemplary modernisation of a classical play" and steps in another interpretative direction. Shifts between not particularly clear meanings come to a surprising turn near the end.
Therefore, there is no drama about power struggle in the taboo field of interclass relationships, and the link between a servant and a mistress is not even felt from represented relationships. The performance is not inhabited by the system of inequality (music by Sašo Kalan): the dramatic lasciviousness of lust, differences and barricades, manipulations and suicidal tendencies are all wrapped in the three characters in pastel cream-coloured costumes (designed by Uroš Belantič) who are joined in the mass of choreographed human flesh and hair. The building of action with words is out of question and seems impossible; the obvious inability of verbal expression veers towards abstraction, even towards the namelessness of characters in a "gaspingly hysterical" time whom the audience decodes gradually. Apparently, the same can be expressed through a completely different code. Indeed, how to actualise the war between the sexes or social differences today, when they no longer touch for there are hollows between them? Or is it better to start working in a completely different field?
The impression of a courageous battle with the tradition and progressive audience which is eager for a new direction alongside the classic (the classic audience wishes for more undisputed completeness) prevails. The performance, which in the first part builds upon the atmosphere, ventures into the unknown there. On the (essentially experimental) pursuit of a contemporary interpretation of the dramatic classic, of the naturalism of contemporary time it abandons the filigree characterisation and no longer examines the characters. The key to the performance seems (considering that the society is based on the bodies which are implied in the performance and determine how, to whom, and what to play) the question of representation that would correspond to the idea of a "new artistic theatre".
The technological infrastructure is lowered to just above the protagonists' heads, the scenic design by duo son:DA supports the described subtext. Besides the pots from which steam rises, there are cables arranged on this building site created through spotlights set about and half-empty water tanks by the sides. In this allegorised kitchen the ending is performed by Jean, who is not manly here, he is a mere player who still performs his role (although the object simply sleeps) and also takes the last word in the form of a metaphorical presentation of a recipe which connects the performance with the ethics of everyday reality. It glorifies youth-splendour, masks-bluffs, the language of marketing and advertising, the design that "makes a man". The surface opens-marks-appropriates everything, hence the slide into mocking, merry babbling, when the audience finds themselves in the middle of the theatre as an amiable (commercial) institution. But the ending remains opens here as well, for a story which will continue.
