press
Rodin 2 / 2006
DELO, 22 August 2007, Blaž Lukan»The project Rodin II through its original associative connotation to the metaphor of the great sculptor and his artistic "biography" smoothes out the sharp edges of society such as we are being forced to live, and chisels into it with its bare hands (the scene with the scintillating hands of protagonists on the edge of the stage is most suggestive) the new ratios which are no longer marked by the oppositions between the round and the angular, the soft and the hard, the true and the false, the normal and the degenerated, but simply contain inscriptions of a bigger or smaller quantity of humanity, of life as such and its poetic shine. The performance offers an example of performance art with strong socially anthropological emphases which is worthy of reflection (...)«
VEČER, 22.11.2006, Rok Vevar
The Muzeum's Rodin project was set about by Boris Mihalj. Mostly he explored the connections among theatre, visual arts and performance. In the project Rodin II Barbara Novakovič Kolenc continues body research of Mihalj's project in a dialogue among various stage presences. On stage appear dancers, actresses and younger individuals with mental retardation. Rodin II thus functions as a performance in the field of special pedagogics, although that is not the binding code of the performance. It is a performance as a polygon of potential Happening (direction procedures of Jovanovič, Hrvatin, Buljan, Jablanovec, Horvat etc.).
MASKA, Performing Arts Journal, Spring 2007, volume XXII, no.105-106, From Poetics to the Politics of Body Images in the Theatre: Rodin II, Mojca Puncer
The special quality of Rodin II is its precise dramaturgy which manages to establish a stunning aesthetical organism through the juxtaposition of the movement of dancers and the developmentally disturbed, and through their stage communication. Namely, the performance is placed into minimalistically furnished staging space of the Old Power Station where, in particular scenes, the performers come to a standstill in a baroque, chiaroscuro lighted tableau which is, again and again, brought to life and taken apart while the movement dynamics of the performers is additionally stirred by a precisely placed authorial music material. On the other hand, we can understand the performance as an attempt to realize the Badiouian 18 event through the singular aesthetic process.
It iis a matter of a special paradigmatic break" taking place as a "Thought intervention into the modes of representation, through the disclosure of the theatre event form and the visibility of the act.and also by the defetishization, processuality and deobjectification of an art product which is especially visible in the transitions to the visual field of art.19
Such eventness aims at a specific (poetic) articulation of (artistic) truth, but also ethical duty, education and the opening of the subject to the "Otherness", leading to compassion and confidence in the bearers of the alternative or minority, marginal social identities and, in this, it extends to the field of the political. Thus, the territory of the performance Rodin II is the place to realize those concepts that are based on the difference and disturbance as the conditions of creativity and, as such, this place essentially concerns the very "material practice of theatre".20
According to Rutar, handicap is a test in opening the field of culture that represents a possible field of people's actions not burdened by a logic of profit. From the viewpoint of preserving power relations, this logic strives for a specific placement of the handicap into the body and mind of the individual. But the handicap Rutar talks about "is not a particular matter of coincidentally determined or chosen individuals who have personal physical or mental characteristic (especially disturbances in physical and mental development) but concerns the symbolic, social and political status of people." 21 And the role of (theatre) art on relation to the image of Otherness such as is conceived in Rodin II can be educational and therapeutics, poetic, aesthetical and pleasurable, and, at the same time, political and emancipatory in a utopian way.
