Performance(s)
Venue and date:
Jászai Mari Folk Theater, Tatabánya
2023. 04. 06., 19:00
Company:
Slovene National Theatre Maribor
Fotó: Špela Lešnik
Theatre

The Immaculate

Performance(s)
Venue and date:
Jászai Mari Folk Theater, Tatabánya
2023. 04. 06., 19:00
Company:
Slovene National Theatre Maribor
Author:
Colm Tóibín, Livija Pandur, Tomaž Pandur
Director:
Livija Pandur
Stage designer: 
Marko Japelj
Costume designer: 
Leo Kulaš
Choreographer: 
Edward Clug
Dramaturge: 
Livija Pandur
Composer: 
Boris Benko, Primož Hladnik (Silence)
Light design: 
Vesna Kolarec
Coworkers: 
Branko Jordan, Tibor Hrs Pandur, Edward Clug, Andreja Japelj, Marjeta Borštnar Mini, Janez Balažic
Synopsis

The theatre programme Immaculata comprises articles dedicated to the memory of Tomaž Pandur and to the main theme of production. The staged adaptation of Colm Toíbín’s novel is published in the middle section of the programme. The photographs by Aljoša Rebolj are taken from Tomaž Pandur’s life and work, and from Immaculata (performed by Nataša Matjašec Rošker).

Livija Pandur and Branko Jordan have made a selection from Tomaž Pandur’s artistic opus, together with a list of awards and bibliographic data. Ivo Svetina in his article Dr. Heinrich Faust:'The beauty shall be my undoing' discusses Pandur’s understanding of the theatre as a space of dreams, and tries to answer the question, why the great stories and mythological themes constantly occupied Pandur, arguing that 'Tomaž Pandur was Faust. At the cost of his life, he wanted to say the ineffable, to portray the other intangible dream, and yearn for a different world.' Svetina also answers the question why Pandur found his theatre domicile in Spain, which, together with the Middle and South America, represents a frame of 'secular mysticism' and 'magic realism'.

Livija Pandur in the beginning of her article states that 'Immaculata is the performance that we started to adapt from Colm Tóibín’s novel a year ago for the Maribor Slovene National Theatre, weaving together fourteen thought-scapes, an altar of love, of loss, of solitude, of the search for meaning in wounds that never heal', then she continues with reflections of Mary and women throughout the history. 'The clamor of history is made from their silences. In this silence today, Mary tries to remember some of the words, faces and parts of the story. Mary, who boldly challenged all great and sacred ideas. This is how she kept them. Because ideas die if they are not challenged.'

Tibor Hrs Pandur in his article Hommage à Tomaž Pandur in the first place exposes Pandur’s 'immense capability of connecting people and establishing autonomous zones of creative exchange within a chosen team, regardless of the circumstances of production (…) His constant struggle was simply in wanting to do what he liked most: to dream his performances alive and to generate communities through them.' In continuation, he analyses the myth of Mary and the history of Christianity in the context of Nietzsche’s philosophy from the book Antichrist. 'Immaculata is a woman misused into an image, a dogma, an instrument of faith. It is the confession of a woman erased from history and turned into an image to serve the establishment of a violent religion, which in turn falsified Christ’s original teachings, turning them into a means for the tyrannization of the masses.'

Maja Borin has chosen fragments from Marina Warner’s book, Alone of All Her Sex, which discusses the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary. Janez Balažic in his article Imago Mariae presents the artistic and historical course of portraying the Mother of God in the Eastern and Western Christianity.

In the introductory note to the production of Immaculata and to Pandur’s artistic biography, Livija Pandur and Branko Jordan wrote (translated by Tibor Hrs Pandur): 

'I  fervently believe in the power o theater and all my works are archetypes of ritual.' Tomaž Pandur

It is extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to bring to a close the biography of Tomaž Pandur. A director, whose artistic opus marked Slovene and global theater, and who remained faithful to his creative credo and unique style to the very end, sharing his visions, dreams, solitudes, fears and enthusiasm selflessly with his co-workers and fellow travellers. His Immaculata would have opened this year’s season of Drama in Maribor, and he would have, at least a little, returned to where it all began more than thirty years ago, first with Tespisov voz (Thespis Caravan), and then with the seven years when he ran this theater before he journeyed on to all those places already conquered or places to where he was invited for the first time.

Since his first professional performance, Scheherazade, to his last, Faust, in Drama Ljubljana, he experimented with the quintessence of theatrical material. In his laboratory of thought, he connected, deconstructed and discovered landscapes of the mythic, archetypal and transcendental, and in the process of performance-making revealed the anatomy and beauty of every moment. Whoever is so fiercely driven to transcend the forms of reality labors as well in research of the human and the divine, that is to say, of the relationship between the living and the dead, between concepts of time and space, mortality, flight into fantasy and conflicts between infinity and finitude.

Next to all the titles of his performances, which have marked generations of artists and audiences and unsettled calm, common, steady waters against which he constantly rebelled, those that we will never see on stage in perfected, purified images driven to extreme sensation and feeling, those which we will never find signed in his name, have left the heaviest of seals: next to Immaculata, King Lear in Skopje, A Hundred Years of Solitude in Madrid and Guadalajara, Melancholia at the Ballet Ljubljana, Clytemnestra in Merida—the 2016/2018 repertoire, written on a piece of paper before he left for the land of Alexander the Great.

Tomaž Pandur has, through his global vision, proclaimed his will in order to realize the truth, his own will to power and his will to live, the meaning of life in any given circumstance, where beyond silence lies … imagination. And beauty.

 

Cast
Nataša Matjašec Rošker
Infos
Runtime: 80 min
Acts: 1
Age limit: 12
The Director
Livija Pandur

After studying dramaturgy at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television in Ljubljana, she worked as a dramaturge in various theatres in Ljubljana. From 1991 to 1996 she was the dramaturge of the Drama of the Slovene National Theatre Maribor.

Among others, she was the dramaturge for all of Tomaž Pandur's productions (Scheherazade at the Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana; Faust, Hamlet, Carmen, La Divina Commedia, Russian Mission, Babylon at the Slovene National Theater Maribor; the Hazara Dictionary, One Hundred Minutes, Tesla Electric Company, Caligula in the production of Pandur. The Divine Comedy at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg; Inferno, Baroque, Hamlet, Medea, Twilight of the Gods, Faust in the Spanish Opus Theatre; the ballet Symphony of Sorrowful Songs at the Berlin Staatsoper; War and Peace, Medea, Michelangelo at the HNK in Zagreb; Richard III, Faust at the SNG Drama Ljubljana; King Lear in Athens, for which she was also the author of the adaptations and editor of the accompanying theatre publications.

In 1997 she published and edited the theatre monograph Pandur's Theatre of Dreams. In 2016, she completed Immaculata/Brezmadežna, Hommage á Tomaž Pandur at the Maribor Drama Theatre. Since 2002 she has been the executive producer and director of the theatre organization Pandur.

Inviting Theater
Jászai Mari Folk Theater, Tatabánya
Awards and prizes
Festival Mittelfest, 2021 - Best actress (Nataša Matjašec Rošker)