Glej,
»S samimi samotami obdana samota«

Gallery

About the Performance

READING AS INSPIRATION, PERFORMANCE AS TRIBUTE: MILAN KUNDERA

The performance Solitude Composed of Sole Solitudes is not meant as a staging of Milan Kundera’s works, but rather as a tribute and a gesture of gratitude for his literary opus, which has profoundly shaped us—both biographically and artistically—allowing us to draw inspiration from it. This is an intimate and reflective engagement with the essence and tone of his works, a deeply personal acknowledgment of the impact his writings have had on a particular period of my life.

By selecting excerpts from several of his novels that have been particularly influential to me, we aim to capture and distill the essence of the central themes that characterize Kundera’s literary production—constant and dominant throughout his works. These include existential questions of being and the inherent binaries within: lightness/heaviness, slowness/speed, immortality/transience, forgetting/memory, unconscious/conscious, invisibility/visibility, significance/insignificance…

At the same time, the performance opens up questions about the deeply personal experience of solitude, loneliness, and disorientation in today’s world, which we explore as material and gesture throughout the creative process.

The selected excerpts from four of Kundera’s novels serve as a kind of musical score for our composition, in which the performers—acting as a moving orchestra—form the central fabric of the performance, expressing motifs and variations on the theme through dance, speech, and song.

What can emerge from the intersection of non-verbal, dance expression and the captured thoughts of the Author, who, in the words of Jaroslav Skrušný, “listens closely and faithfully records the subtlest variations of individual life compositions—not dictated by the necessity of historical laws, but rather charted by the birds of chance” (Skrušný, afterword to The Unbearable Lightness of Being)?

OBSERVING HUMAN COEXISTENCE THROUGH LITERATURE AND DANCE

In The Art of the Novel, Kundera wrote that “he has, in fact, been writing a single novel all his life—variations on a few fundamental existential themes, key situations, or even just words” (Jaroslav Skrušný, afterword to Immortality).

In a similar way, I could say that I have been creating the same performance throughout my career—one that continuously explores variations on the theme of human coexistence. The focus and response, however, shift and adapt to my present perception. Each new phase of life, each experience, invites fresh contemplation—whether it is a different perspective on the same theme or a further development of a particular motif. With every new period, a different emphasis emerges within the interconnected themes of the elusive human condition.

Using dance as the primary expressive medium of my performances—one that resists narrative—I attempt to capture fragments of these experiences on an intuitive and immersive level.

Where does the abstract meet the written word—the word into which the writer so subtly captures the fleeting nature of human existence, with all its contradictions and the complex mystery of its tragicomic essence? What does revisiting his novels bring me now? How do they speak to me today, in the wake of his passing, twenty years after my first encounter with his work? I feel much the same as I did then.

And still, we remain simply human—again and again caught in everyday, even banal, yet also deeply existential questions. Despite listening, we rarely truly hear, making it difficult to fully accept the other and their personal experience of reality. Even with all our knowledge, insights, and historical lessons, we continue to repeat the same patterns—woven from intolerance, polarization, and the many faces of ego and superego.

It seems that our capacity for understanding, for communicating with one another, for embracing difference and coexistence, progresses at a much slower pace than the material world evolving around us…

The performance lasts 65 minutes.

CREDITS

CONCEPT, DIRECTION, CHOREOGRAPHY:
Maša Kagao Knez

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR:
Borut Veselko

TEXT SELECTION:
Borut Veselko, Maša Kagao Knez

Translator of excerpts from Milan Kundera’s works:
Jaroslav Skrušný

CO-CREATORS AND PERFORMERS:
Borut Veselko, Anja Möderndorfer, Tanita Rose, Miha Furlan, Jan Marolt, Leticia Slapnik Yebuah

CO-CREATORS OF CHOREOGRAPHY:
Anja Möderndorfer, Tanita Rose, Miha Furlan, Jan Marolt

MUSIC COMPOSER:
Kristijan Korat

COSTUME DESIGN:
Jelena and Svetlana Proković (JSP)

LIGHTING DESIGN:
Danilo Pečar

SPACE DESIGN AND CHOREOGRAPHY ASSISTANT:
Kjara Wurst

SET CONSTRUCTION:
Damir Jerković

MUSIC ASSISTANT:
Irena Yebuah Tiran

COSTUME ASSISTANT:
Saša Dragaš

MUSICIANS (RECORDED MUSIC):
Kristijan Korat (piano), Matjaž Antončič (violin), Gorazd Strlič (cello), Irena Yebuah Tiran (mezzo-soprano) / Sound Engineer: Danilo Ženko (recorded at Studio Bejsmen)

CO-PRODUCTION:
Anton Podbevšek Theatre & Glej Theatre

Gallery