Bitef

VITO TAUFER is one of the most exciting theatre directors in Europe today. Here you have a brief resume of his recent work and the cassette with video clips from his performance is available at your request. He was born in 1959 in Ljubljana, where he graduated in theatre directing at the Academy of Peforming Arts. In 15 years of his professional work he has directed 30 performances, most of them in Theatre Mladinsko in Ljubljana, including two operas and three television adaptations. He received a number of Slovenian, Yugoslavian and international awards, and performed at several international festivals. Every Taufer’s performance is a search for a new theatre language, using erudition and intuition, combining radical theatre methods with analysing historical theatre forms. Tartuffe (1993) by Andrej Rozman for instance is a play about the tragicomic outcome of bringing to life the idea of the man-machine, through a story of a businessman lost in a haunting game of virtual realities. ■ Boris Pintar

SILENCE SILENCE SILENCE is his new work, premiered in February 1996 in Theatre Mladinsko and will be performed at the Exodos Festival in Ljubljana (from May 25 to June 6 1996) on Sunday May 26. Taufer keeps reaching for the basic theatrical glossary. He is intrigued by the subconscious hidden behind emotions, thoughts, social conduct, stage acting. Each of the six actors shose their particular mask as a specific pathway to their individual subconscious truth and its medium of expression - voice, mime, rhythm, movement, acrobatics, screaming... Instead of the method of free interplay of associations, the psyshoanalytical approach, the body language with its dimensions of both wholeness and separateness is used as a visual component. The reality of the subconscious remains unspoken and confronted with words of silence. It is not a therapy, nor a disintegration of stage illusion through the truth of the subconscious, but rather a reflection on the enigma of illusion and reality which deeply affects contemporary theatrical discoures. Within this dimension Silence Silence Silence is a freudian performance. Performers arive to their common symbols and metaphors that define human beings through mechanisms of the unconscious. These were marked by Freud as common

denominators - regardless of their basic diversity and multiplicity - of gender difference, symbolic castration, or child’s sexuality. Relations between the sexes are generated by physical difference, which is perceived by the eye before the mind comprehends it. The woman is »castrated«, but in the proces of symbolisation both male and female are castrated; both are incomplete, and lack the object of their desire. Individual sexual orientation is conditioned by his or her attitude towards symbolic castration: acceptance of the loss of phallus and the search for its substitutes. Theatre director the analyst - allows the actors to articulate their subconscious material, and to give it collectively a personal artistic expression with mime as its organic part, by leading them in an altogether uninterfering manner. The dramaturgy of weaving six individual expressions into a mythological narration of the creation of the world, as it appears variously modified in different mythological and religious structures, has made this performance an exceptional achievement. The mask of Janja Majzelj are the eyes, bulging, but with limited vision. Castrated vision is the real castration implied in Greek tragedy, with anticipation of wisdom as a final outcome. Wrapped in the shimmer of aluminium foil like the crystal clearness of human eyes she attracts attention which may be even more tangible and concrete than objects. The missing object is shaped by the voice which thus makes her complete within mythology that goes back from pop culture to its very beginnings, and becomes Gaia, the Earth, the selfshaping female, created out of chaos, out of the dark and indistinct abyss, the one who brings forth from her own wholeness Uranus, the Sky, and so becomes the Cosmos which sets all the differences jn order. The shrouded head of Janez Škof represents the mistenveloped celestial firmament, a mask symbolising birth, mother, creation, perfection, and his strength. He portrays the birth of the Sky God through artistic metaphor of the body, as he descends on the Earth, and unites with it. The actor has succeeded in achieving exquisite harmony of the expression of the subconscious and of stage articulation and created a sublime artistic experience for the audience. Titans are born of Gaia’s and Uranus’ union, for incest is not forbidden to the gods, and four brothers marry their sisters among them Chronos and Rea, the foreparents of Olympic gods. Chronos usurps the throne of his father, Uranus. Ravil and Natasha Sultanov, a couple of male/female, were doomed to longing and fear from the very beginning. The son will castrate his father, like the father had done before. The female, closed in a box, is a mask of the male. The male is the primordial principle, in human form made of condensed dust, and the female is his soul, a white swan, a phantasm. The woman, chained with one leg into an iron ring, is streed