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Museum of Letters
PARADA PLESA, 11. 9. 2013, Daliborka PodbojMuseum of Letters written by Barbara Novakovič Kolenc
Ambiental drama plot showcasing ballerina Sanja Neškovič Peršin
(...) The performance Museum of Letters took place on 15 October in a white-clad scenery of clean-cut lines at the Duša Počkaj Hall in the Ljubljana-based Cankarjev dom. The white and cube-shaped scenery with numerous entrances and exits, as well as the circularly rimmed space, is branched enough to clearly imprint the image of a museum ambient with its flat surfaces. Meanwhile, the swing in the forefront romantically links the modern content to the period of two centuries ago, and the text displayed on a side-surface only emphasises the museum vision of the scenography by Uroš Rustja. Into an intensely lit space (lighting design by Borut Lampret) enter the two performers of roughly the same physical size, namely actress Petra Govc and ballerina Sanja Nešković Peršin. In a subtle, dramatically pleasant and warm manner, Petra Govc narrates the written content, her voice poetic, her words suggestively undulating across the space. Sanja Neškovć Peršin assumes the role of a living and palpable reflection of the uttered words. She is an elegant vision of the refined romantic viewpoint and a stylised image of the intimate content tackling the states of fear, anxieties, captivities, melancholies, madness ... In short, the states of the letter signatories. The director has succeeded in narrating the manuscripts, combined with the scene and costumes by Alan Hranitelj, within the framework of a dramatically wholesome new performing content.
The play does not simply narrate the chosen texts, but lets the masks speak as well, along with the slide steps and hard-lined crinolines, the dead cuttlefish elegantly curling in the actress's hands, or the actress on a swing, during which the author builds semantic interspaces, thus inventively deepening the lines of the text itself.
The director gently, almost imperceptibly and with a light hand shades the new, sterile whiteness into the past intimacy. She unifies the past with the present without an imposed succession, but nevertheless manages to include relaxed coffee breaks, portable pot packaging and cake desserts... The atmosphere of museum reality, mostly logged with items of the past in the air-conditioned halls of new architecture hosting present-time crowds, is even deepened through the music scores by Blaž Peršin. With Petra as well as Sanja, movement turns out to process that which is being heard and seen, except that its dosage depends on their individual role. Namely, the words uttered by Petra are matched by Sanja's movements. Furthermore, the dancer Sanja Nešković Peršin with her semantic movements additionally fills the interspace of the social (false) delicacies, pretentions and content moves. Despite that, one could expect a slightly richer dance dictionary with more structural versions. Museum of Letters by Barbara Novakovič Kolenc is an ambiental drama narrative of refined fine arts' content, in which the written sheet of highlights of an individual's life becomes the core to be wrapped into the drama content.
In our 21st century, the Museum of Letters with its undoubtedly innovative scene approaches unravels the historic time and life's intimacies of those human generations which trotted the earth before us, writing and sending letters and witnessing history for the generations to come. The question posed is the following: What will our descendants be left with, considering all the present plastic and huge electronic screen cores? Will they simply turn into a rubbish dump of the useless and the rejected, as the film robotics of Spielberg's movies seems to show?
