In total:
13 characters: 7 F, 6 M
32 costumes, 19 F, 13 M

1945 style: 5
1990 style: 13
2011 style: 14

1945.
Rose King (27), Maša and Dunja’s mother
Aleksandar King (28), her husband, Dunja and Maša’s father
Monika Zima (45), Rose’s mother
Karolina Amruš (47)
Marinko (40), a communist official

1990.
Maša Kos (45)
Vlado Kos (46)
Dunja King ( married Dolinar) (42)
Karl Dolinar (43), Dunja’s husband
Karolina Amruš, (92), the original owner of the Kos house
Igor Maljević (44), friend of the family
Aleksandar King (73), Dunja and Maša’s father
Alisa Kos( 15)
Lucija Kos (12)
Marko Horvat (18)

2011.
Alisa Kos, (36)
Lucija Kos, (33), Alisa’s sister
Maša Kos (66), Alisa and Lucija’s mother
Vlado (Vladimir) Kos, (67), Alisa and Lucija’s father
Dunja King, (63), Maša’s sister
Marko Horvat (39), upstairs neighbour

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The history of King Matt the First is a story of an 11-years-old boy forced to become a king after the sudden death of his king-father. Faced with the inefficient and alienated bureaucracy of the existing system, he tries to establish a state with a human face by starting a Children’s Parliament.

STAGE

The stage intended for the performance was “Stage under the stars”, placed at the top of Puppet theatre in Ljubljana. A glass ceiling and metal constructions define a big space, meant to be used for performing or as a conference room. A dramaturgical frame of stage and costume design is based on two ways of using this space, first by “hiding” it and then revealing it in the particular moment of the performance.

The additional performing space inside this one was built, creating a small box with chamber theatre atmosphere, where the story of the past times is being told.

Imagined as the “entrée” to a palace or a parliament in which political decisions are being made, it is defined by a deep honey yellow wooden flooring, a lavish chandelier and dark green velvet curtain, closing it on all four sides. But in the moment of the performance when Matt becomes a king and decides to change the rules by giving a voice to children, the change of the spaces follows. By a sudden movement, curtains are flied to each corner of the bigger room, revealing it. Its clean lines and glass windows immediately brings us back to here and now. The temperature inside the chamber box is changed, the warmth of the reflectors in the previously intimate space of “safe” storytelling is cooled down. The audience is being left seated in newly created opened space, and the comfort and the softness of the velvet belongs to the image of the past. The children from the audience are invited to make working groups. Those are defined by the four spaces outside the chamber box, created and separated by the previous curtain move. In each of these newly created spaces, there is an actor waiting with twenty-five chairs formed in circle and a flipchart stand. Ministries of culture, education and sport, social affairs and labour are thus created.

While they debate ideas and write suggestions for the changes they want to make for the sake of improving the world they live in, their parents are sent to the corridor space. There the situation of a classroom is created by the line of chairs put two in two one behind the other. The test they are asked to solve is a list of questions regarding the interests (music, sport, aims) of their children. The question arising is how much they know about their children while expecting them to fit unquestionably in the world of grown-ups.

I aimed to create the world of the performance which would enable the story to communicate with taste, experiences and wishes of contemporary children. Instead of presenting them of “how exactly (we think) it used to be”, I wanted to make the past look familiar. Being consumed with beauty of cultural artefacts of the times passed, I had a wish to introduce both myself and the audience to certain objects that represent the eras, referential for the performance. In this time-travel quest was to check if and how they preserved their meaning, travelling through the ages of new contexts and knowledge(s). The game was to probe how they can gain humour, daringness or produce fear, when juxtaposed with unexpected way of using or contextualizing them onstage. Baroque era heritage swirled with decorative beauty of the 1920s.

Wind machine was used onstage to introduce the sound of war. Old tin megaphones with speakers, mounted in all four corners of the stage presented the media voice of the kingdom. As in our times, we hear the news coming from outside which don’t match what we saw onstage with our own eyes. Beautifully elaborated throne becomes the battlefield of power-struggle, where everyone secretly tried to sit. Globus cruciger’s pillow is just the pillow to sit on, for a lonely child-king on the cold floor on the bare stage.

COSTUME DESIGN

Our story is to be presented by seven actors only. One of the challenges is to find the language by which it will be possible to create the kingdom from the narrative, inhabited by so many personalities that are able to produce multiple occasions. Given the frame of storytelling, actors they never leave the stage for more than a few seconds. They also need to be able to swop characters faster than an eye blink. The costume I want to make, has many Which costume can be equally useful to tell “the story of the story” (to show that we’re not convincing the audience that we are the actual characters from the very story) (not hiding the fact of acting), while in the same time helps the occasional need for an illusion and attachment to the character? What kind of shape, meaning and impression is able to talk about the past in the way that we end up being mixed-up in nowadays?

At the very beginning of the play, all actors look like a rather homogenous group. Being dressed in equal clothes, they resemble a bunch of semi-clowns, friendly figures whose personalization is yet to come. Dark occasions in the kingdom are to promote some of them into the members of the authoritarian squad they represent.

A grey shirt and a pair of trousers is their uniform, a uniform of the actor who is openly telling the story. An actor-clerk of sorts, who is there to be able to deliver all kinds of duties (parts). The only part of the costume that invites past is a small cloak attached to it. Since it is made of light and fluid viscose fabric, the cloak tends to “appear” only as an adornment from the back side, and in the front, giving the impression of a bit-out-of-the-regular uniform, when actor moves or raises arms. The trousers are a little dedication to the times when the play was written. Striped dark grey fabric, widely used from 19th century on, were to mark a gentleman who gained a sharp distinction from the ladies costume, after the French revolution, in the conservative separation of female and male realm in clothing, fixed in the Victorian era. The world of men to be trusted, of the men ruling the state is to be found here; serious, minimal and understated in a famously British way it serves and protects the given order. The same promise is given by the actors: to protect and serve the conventional theatre presented by the curtain, gorgeous chandelier and lavishly painted cognac-coloured wooden floor. But it is only until the order of things is being shaken: the arrival of the young king, who wants to make the state with a human face, will challenge this seemingly steady architecture of objects and relations.

The fact of telling is preserved by the role of a narrator guiding us through the story as if being the writer himself. He constructs the narrative before our eyes by naming the actors, who seemingly happen to be on the stage by chance in that very moment, into particular characters. The character change is further performed by each actor, by using a different posture, mimics and the ways of speaking. In the time of “becoming” a particular character, an item defining the character is presented along.

After the world that constitutes the kingdom is constructed, the new king is named. He and his fellow friends will not change their characters anymore, and the rest will stay “free” from the fix character meaning and be able to continue to “flow”, creating different personalities appearing in the play.

PROPS

Children from the audience are being given the props to keep safe, while the actor doesn’t need it or is hiding into another character inside the story itself. Intention to provide audience with the ability to touch them and look at them from very closely, together with the fact of the space being staged as chamber theatre, brought up the importance of the props being minutiously made and adorned.

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What I recognized in Lotz’s craftiness is a perfectly contemporary Rabelaisian approach to the characters. In situations given, it is densely inwrought with the best heritage of The theater of the absurd. The same level of outrageous, crude and stubbornly non-hypocritical language performed by costumes is what I tried to achieve.

By exposing the labels and stigmas imposed on some communities and inhabitants of certain areas of the world, costumes walk on a thin line. On one hand, the embarrassing stereotypes of Europocentric point of view. On the other, the very notion of political correctness. A question that may arise is what exactly is left untold or again – hidden – thanks to a very oppression of carefully chosen, diplomatic and inclusive, multiculturally sensitive language we are trying to use. Applied to those on its margins or outside its borders, well hidden by cautiously chosen words, the western view of surprise and disgust with habits of the strange, savage, outdated, under educated is still among us. The notion of otherness as a constitutive of the “European self” is heightened through a darkly ironic, almost disturbing play, a certain “offer” of what is allowed and what is almost banished from the world of what is perceived as cultured.

It is a silliness of the chosen obvious tropes that shows the ineffable senselessness and absurdity of the existing constellations of power. The final costume design can be described as a particular “costume macabre”. It is consisted of the freaky characters and their victims, with the world we’re living in, as, sadly, the truest source of references. -Maja Mirković

“Anja Susa, on Helsingborgs Stadsteater, treats Lotz’s text with a forceful, contemporary theatrical approach. Maja Mirkovic’s costumes with their beautifully precise description of the characters is an important addition to the overall impression of the play. (…)The dark irony covers everything as a thick blanket but the ensemble is on top of things and play with a great sense of humour.” – Aftonbladet, September 20, 2016

“Joseph Conrad’s classic novel “Heart of Darkness” and Francis Ford Coppola’s equally famous movie “Apocalypse Now” inspired the German playwright Wolfram Lotz to write his play “The Ridiculous Darkness”. The “Ridiculous Darkness” is a critical commentary on our times and a story of prejudice and xenophobia in which reality and imagination float together in a jumble of global misconceptions, and collective delusions. This performance doesn’t really see “The Other” from the perspective of a post-colonial discourse sugar coated in a superficial political correctness, but pinpoints the Western European disability to really see and understand anything or anybody stepping outside of the European political project in which “some animals are more equal than the others”. This is the first opening of this play in Scandinavia.” – Anja Suša

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If we agree that every identity inside society is not naturally but socially constructed, so is what we perceive as natural and further on human.

The actors start being dressed in theatrically made “human skin” envisioning the idea of natural through neutral. A bunch in tan-coloured suits, entangled as if some pre-creational mass, slowly ejects one by one from this united body. By putting on differently shaped and coloured costumes they become more clearly recognisable; singularized and thus seen as individual, they are produced into members of a society. By swapping most recognizable items, ascribed to particular characters, they change the roles. The clothing object contains the idea of a subject. Being strongly established as the character itself, the hat of the Girl being mistreated is experienced as abuse of the girl itself. – Maja Mirković

“We’ve tried not to challenge the accuracy of diagnoses theatre and not to deprive of their credibility. But for years the theatre has not started any revolution. It has not created any patterns for new institutions.

It has not reformed the language of a public debate, has not eliminated social inequalities. This is not the theatre that brings people to streets. We must have overestimated the strength of its impact. Or we may have been questioning it too rarely.

The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, known for his distrust of conventional languages of art, easily used to give his films a gangster, melodrama or science-fiction frame,used to explore genre cliches and reveal their violent structure

It is a story of violence and fascism emerging in small communities, in individual relationships, on the set – seemingly ephemeral and interpersonal relations free from consequences. Blood on the cat’s neck invites the audience and actors to participate in a hyper-realistic game. Is any look woven through the grid of glances thrown from the stage onto the audience and from the audience onto the stage  innocent? How are the roles in the theatrical reality assigned? And why do theatrical revolutions tend to be doomed to failure?” – Anja Suša

The post BLOOD ON THE CAT’S THROAT OR MARILYN MONROE VERSUS VAMPIRES / KREW NA KOCIM GARDLE, CZYLI MARILYN MONROE KONTRA WAMPIRY / 2016 appeared first on Maja Mirković.