About the programme
Glej Theatre introduced Glej, Resident Programme in 2013. This is a production model that enables a theatre director/author to develop a project or several related projects within our theatre over the course of three years. Porgramme started as a one-year programme, but we decided to prolonge it into 3 year scheme.
As a production form Glej, resident programme is a response to the notion in which theatres started coming ever closer to the cost reduction capitalist production model, which emphasises the efficiency of the final product with a short rehearsal process. With the three year residency Glej enables the chosen author or group of authors a relaxed and unburdened production process, and we believe that this represents an excellent antipode to the current fast production models.
Glej, Resident Programme is a three year programme of wholesome approach towards development of artists and their projects. It encourages artists to produce new art works, enagage in in-depth research and develop open process and new methodology. We wish for artists to explore, participate and develop field research, study visits and workshops, connected with the topic of their work, both home and abroad. We also nurture their skills of media relations, contextualizing and placing their art work as well as production and financial development of the project.
The resident programme brings back a refreshed production model into Glej Theatre, and with it our theatre returned to the core of experimental practices from which it emerged over fifty years ago.
Glej, residents:
2019-2021: Leja Jurišić (current resident)
2018: Hana Vodeb and Tin Grabnar
2017: sz3
2016: Eva Nina Lampič and Urška Brodar
2015: Nina Rajić Kranjac
2014: Jaša Koceli
2013: G-FART
2019-2021: Leja Jurišić
It is Impossible to Wait in Vain by Miklavž Komelj and Leja Jurišić is a co-authored project of two artists, who never collaborated before. They have decided to share their yearlong creative process, but refused to make any compromise within their final artistic product. Therefore they created autonomous works with a common title It is Impossible to Wait in Vain.
It is Impossible to Wait in Vain is a part of Glej, Resident programme. Leja Jurišić is Glej Resident between 2019 and 2021. She invited Miklavž Komelj and Petra Veber to join the project.
Opening night of a devised performance It Is Impossible to Wait in Vain / Practical Mystery, co-authored by Leja Jurišić and Miklavž Komelj, happened on December 4, 2020. Due to pandemic of COVID-19 it was too dangerous for people to attend the show. Therefore they were replaced by stones. People could buy tickets and send their stones to the show instead of them.
On the same day, two books by Miklavž Komelj, titled It Is impossible to Wait in Vain (book of paintings and Statical Mystery) were published by publishing house Pekinpah. You can find more information about the books here.
2018: Hana Vodeb and Tin Grabnar
Tin Grabnar and Hana Vodeb, the brains behind the project Seniors, decided to dedicate their year of residency in Glej to the stories of everyday people, for they firmly believe that thousands of dramatic, honest and relevant memories, incidents and confessions can be found under the surface of everyday lives.
Together with their team they will focus on the ignored generation, which is currently being pushed ever further towards the margins. Throughout the year they will get to know old people in their living environments. They will listen to their stories and metaphorically walk through the vast achieves of their almost forgotten memories. The elderly carry within them a rich hidden tradition, but nobody takes the time to listen to them anymore. In a period in which youth is glorified, we will take our time and hand the stage over to the elderly.
We all face the aging process. With every moment we are closer to having wrinkled skin, grey hair, a curved posture and trembling hands. Maybe this is why we are terrified of the thought of old age. We are afraid of the thought that we will - at a certain moment in time - witness the slow decay of our bodies. The team will discuss the aging process and the participating elderly are going to share their intimate experiences from the third life period. Does our society truly have a negative attitude towards old age? Are we infected with ageism? Maybe we are scared of contemplating the moment when we will, just before our lives reach the inevitable end, look back and ask ourselves: What sort of life did we live? What will we take with us to the grave? Or even better … What are we leaving behind?
The team will invite the elderly participants to choose one of their memories which they will re-enact on film. The elderly will be given the opportunity to become film directors, script writers, cameramen as well as actors in the re-enactment of their own memory. They will travel to locations where their memories took place. Search for people who are long gone. They will create spaces, which are today in ruins and play out the long bygone stories there. In this way they will be able - at least for a brief moment - to capture the transient memory. With the use of common procedures from documentary theatre they will bring to stage the fragility of their personal stories, disclose the treachery of brain cells and confront the transience of life.
The short film episodes that will emerge will become the central part of the performance entitled Seniors. The participating elderly, who will share and record their memories, will have the opportunity to present and describe the background to their life stories. In this way the film and theatre format will merge into a complex whole, in which they will intertwine and add to each other. The cinematic way of thinking will cross into theatre and vice versa. We are convinced that the theatre project will come to life on stage in an unconventional format, as the participants will not deal with classic theatre procedures, but will be present on stage in all of their life quality. At this all embarrassments, clumsiness and mistakes, which would function as shortcomings in classical theatre, will become charming in the direct, almost documentary-realistic presences of the performers.
In the spirit of documentary theatre, which combines reality with stage fiction, the team of the residency project has performed a vast research of retirement homes over the last year. Throughout the year they have organised narrative workshops for the elderly in various Slovene regions. Together with the participants they contemplated the aging process, the stigmatisation, the importance of dialogue and the long forgotten oral histories. They opened up their own memories and discussed the deceptiveness of thoughts. The results are - together with the documentary photographs (taken by the participants) - posted on Glej Theatre’s webpage.
The theatre stage is one of the last refuges, where the fast rhythm of our everyday lives can slow down for a moment. It offers us a priceless opportunity to discuss topics that are otherwise not discussed. This time we will listen to the ignored generation of the elderly.
2017: sz3
(slavoj zizek trio)
sz3 is the project/group/initiative, which is - within the frame of Glej’s 2017 residency programme - led by Ivan Mijačević and Aleš Zorec.
This year’s residency concept differs from the previous ones essentially in the relation to the position of the resident: if Nina Rajić Kranjac, Urška Brodar and Eva Nina Lampič took advantage of their one year residency to develop their poetics and performances and experiment within these frames, sz3 opted for a more curatorial or one could say enabling position. They believe “The residency is a community manual”. They also state they will not focus on themselves nor on the development of the performance, as they will rather become the “co-organisers of the situation in Glej.” They will achieve this by inviting other creators, groups, producers to cooperate in Glej “so that they will work and socialise like a community and leave traces of the various processes on each other.”
They expect this will enable them to create “something”, something in the sense of a good practice, a manual, a book of procedures, a model. sz3 will address tasks, initiation (apart from itself it will also initiate the inability crew, the international collective, which operates on a similar basis), groups and communities. “How can this community coexist for a longer period of time, or even spread? This might be a form of postproduction that we are not even aware of.”
sz3 will address the mentioned themes by researching various media, which Mijačević and Zorec are already using: video productions (teasers and trailers), theatre music and the musicality of theatre and movement/body in performance art. They will also deal with media they might not be that acquainted with, but they have invited experts and enthusiasts to join them: directors, set designers, performance audiences, computer interfaces. Participation was confirmed by: Kaja Lorenci and her team, Katja Legin and her tam, Žigan Kranjčan, Vlado Vlaškalič, Jožica Avbelj, Katie Duck, Susan Rethorst, Mira Mijačević, Ma’ayan Danoch, Marja Christians, Rok Vevar, Miha Horvat son:DA, Miha Bezeljak, Liza Marija Grašič and others.
In this newly emerged community the invited artists, producers and theoreticians will either develop processes upon which they are working already, or they will try out new principles. They do not see their position as leaders, but as enablers.
The residents will keep opening their work to the public throughout the year (through video, texts, performances, workshops, debates). At the end of the year the process will culminate in something that they currently call The Second Etude for the Slavoj Zizek Trio.
What is it going to be all about? What did they do during the first etude, performed for platforma.hr in Zagreb?
“Oh, you should have seen it.”
“This that we are now doing here.”
“Yes, this that we are doing here now.”
“But we were silent throughout. We had a ban on talking.”
“Aha.”
“And I for instance, didn’t have a chair.”
2016: Eva Nina Lampič & Urška Brodar
During the 2016 residency Eva Nina Lampič and Urška Brodar have, together with their co-creators, developed a project entitled A Potential Performance.
A Potential Performance researched the relation between audience – performers – imagination. The authors developed a specific form of a performance, which mediated (a different) performance, which will as such (as it was described and presented) never take place on stage. It will always exist merely through various types of fragmented mediation and group imagining of scenes. A potential Performance is a performance about a performance, which does not exist, nor does it ever intend to, but all of us can easily imagine and thus it exists in its own way.
The residents also prepared a webpage, on which they recorded their work as they went along.
A part of the residency took place in Berlin, where they cooperated with the Berlin independent theatre Ballhaus Ost, and where it was also supported by the Art Residency of the Ministry of Culture.
More on the performance.
2015: Nina Rajić Kranjac
At the beginning of her residency Nina Rajić Kranjac decided that her research will focus on the study of the story’s relationship through sound/music. In her first step she staged a public showing of her work in progress entitled Beloved song which was performed by singers chosen at an audition. Her view of directing as an idea which places a certain work into specific circumstances, atmospheres, space, time, context, which leads to the final message and change in perception, led her to the in-depth treatment of the text by the poet, hagiographer and Sufism theoretician Farid ud-Din Attar, which was transformed into a play by Jean-Claude Carrière and Peter Brook in 1979. In November 2015 The Conference of the Birds, a play about the Simorgh, the Sufism teacher and the journey of the birds was staged in Theatre Glej in three parts. The performance followed Nina’s view of the theatre as a space in which the visitors constantly play with their imagination and experience the world that cannot be experienced outside of the theatre.
2014: Jaša Koceli
In 2014 the resident director was Jaša Koceli (1984), who staged his theatrical debut entitled No, there is no Shore in Glej in 2013. Koceli spent his year as resident developing his project Silent City.
The project joined young professional creative people working in the fields of poetry, theatre, costume and set design, film and music. The only condition that Koceli set for participating in the team (apart from the appropriateness as regards the contents) was the age limit of 30. The project Silent City was set up as a generational, international and multimedia cooperation between young artists.
During his residency Jaša Koceli focused on the transformation of poetry into theatre – the texts were written by four young Slovene poets (Ana Svetel, Aja Zamolo, Mitja Drab and Gašper Torkar) in cooperation with their peers from four European cities (Barcelona, Berlin, Lille and London). Silent City consisted of four individual parts, the performance Me Me Me Me, a site specific event On the Bridge, the performance For Us and the photographic exhibition Silent City which emerged as a result of the photographer Mankica Kranjec following the entire residency process through her photographic lens.
2013: G-FART
The group G-FART was Glej’s first resident. The group consisted of students participated in the theatre directing seminar headed by Sebastjan Horvat.
This heterogeneous group started its residency with a series of three ludist cabarets entitled Cabaret Prick, which carried the following subtitles: Superheroes, Demons and Lumber room. In these cabarets they addressed the individual and his/her position in society, the role and function of theatre today and the relation between the artists and their audience. In the second part of their residency they staged the following four performances: Prometheus: an Apology for a Split Personality and a Choir of Hungry Men; Thursday; Course of events and What do I Get if I Add Blue to the World?
G-FART were: Zala Sajko, Nina Zupančič, Sandi Jesenik, Simon Belak, Eva Kokalj, Vid Klemenc, Nina Šorak, Aleš Zorec.