I FEAR SLOVENIA

EN

In I Fear Slovenia, Leja Jurišić and Petra Veber continue their political critique of the "West and the rest", which started through Ballet of Revolt (Pekinpah 2012). This time they build it from a particularly fictitious local-global perspective. Namely, the performance envisages Slovenia, an Eastern-European country and a member of both EU and N.A.T.O. alliance, as an imperial superpower spreading its tentacles across the globe. While the Ballet of Revolt, which was in large inspired by the Arab Spring, somewhat anticipated the nation-wide revolt against corruption which led to the fall of Slovenia's government, the I Fear Slovenia performance predicted, as it were, the re-militarisation of Slovenia in the wake of the European Refugee Crisis. I Fear Slovenia employs a range of Slovenian national symbols, including the 'Three-Headed Mountain', as well as eighty military tanks in order to question and gauge both individual and collective responses to the ideology of nationalism, Eurocentrism, racism, fear, war and nihilism. It turns the global role of a small country - both in terms of its political impact and economic and geographical size - on its head: Slovenia is now the dominant world leader, basing its power on a democracy-and-free-market-promoting empire fuelled by natural resources and sweatshops strewn across the global south. In I Fear Slovenia, Leja Jurišić occupies a series of (mostly female) roles placed within the imagined Slovenian Empire. She depicts persons whose emotional adaptation to the realities brought about by the mighty sward of the Slovenian military, economic and ideological conquest of the world range from perfect to disastrous. Through this role-playing, she imagines the resistance against the fear most of us share in current climate of barbed wire fenced Europe, proxy wars and global unrest. Her resistance is both lyrical and physical, both symbolic and real.
It is as if Milena Dravić's monologue on free love and orgasmic revolution from Dušan Makavejev's Mysteries of the Organism has turned into a choreography of tasks women are supposed to complete in the times of War on Terror.

CREDITS

Created by Leja Jurišić & Petra Veber; Performed by Leja Jurišić; Scenography, Light Design & Costumes by Petra Veber; Music by Drago Ivanuša; Producer: Žiga Predan; Produced by Pekinpah; Coproduced by Kino Šiška; Supported by: Ministry of Cuture Republic of Slovenia, City of Ljubljana - Department of Culture
Photo by Matija Lukić

SHOWS

KRANJ (Kalejdoskop), 3 June 2017
KOPER (Rumene noči), 30 July 2016
KOPER (Rumene noči), 29 July 2016
KOPER (Rumene noči), 28 July 2016
LJUBLJANA (Old Power Plant), 17 March 2015
LJUBLJANA (Old Power Plant), 18 February 2015
LJUBLJANA (Kino Šiška), 5 December 2014

PRESS

EN

Fears and depression are not the only starters of our existence here and now; there is also the ability to play in the midst of widespread repression and the countering of it by "positive schizophrenia" as philosopher Jacques Rancière would say.
Nenad Jelesijević, MMC RTV Slovenia, 9 December 2014

Leja Jurišić is both a comment and a position embodied in one person. Her latest work, I Fear Slovenia, in co-authorship with Petra Veber, talks about her relationship to her own country, about manifest or covert messages regarding us, Slovenians, (not) being good enough, capable enough, successful enough.
Jedrt Jež Furlan, Napovednik, 14 April 2014

SI

Na koncu predstave se zgodi pomemben obrat, ki po svoje naredi smiselna vsa potencialna vprašanja, ki jih predstava sicer pušča odprta; obrat poudari neko absurdno, humorno in igrivo plat ... predstava nam tako "zmedeno", a zaradi tega nič manj duhovito nakaže dejstvo, da brez nenehnega upora vendarle ni obstoja.
Nenad Jelesijević, RTV MMC, 9. december 2014

Leja Jurišić je komentar in stališče v eni osebi. Njene zadnje delo I Fear Slovenia, v soavtorstvu s Petro Veber, govori o odnosu do lastne države, o očitnih ali pa prikritih sporočilih, da Slovenci nis(m)o dovolj dobri, dovolj sposobni, dovolj uspešni.
Jedrt Jež Furlan: Naježeno in jedrnato v živo: Leja Jurišić, Napovednik, 14. april 2015



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