Birds of a Kind

Original title Tous des oiseaux
Première 11. oktober 2020, Križevniška cerkev, Ljubljana
The first Slovenian performance
Running time 2 hours 30 minutes. One intermission.

Director Ivica Buljan
Translator Ignac Fock
Dramaturg Diana Koloini
Stage designer Aleksandar Denić
Costume designer Alan Hranitelj
Composer Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar
Lighting and video designers Sonda 13, Toni Soprano Meneglejte
Sound designer Igor Mitrov
Language consultant Jože Faganel
Assistant dramaturg Manca Majeršič Sevšek
Assistant costume designer Slavica Janošević
Prompter Nika Korenjak
Executive producers Branislav Cerović, Sandra Ristić

Cast
Milena Zupančič
Ivo Ban
Nataša Barbara Gračner
Robert Waltl
Saša Pavlin Stošić
Aleksandra Balmazović
Jose
Gal Oblak
Lina Akif

One of the world’s most exciting plays, Birds of a Kind, written by Wajdi Mouawad, a Lebanese-born author from Quebec who lives in France, can be defined as a family saga, thriller and current political puzzle that begins in the library of a New York university, where a young geneticist meets a doctoral student in history. In the next scene, we hear the sound of a terrible blow; suddenly, we are in the middle of a terrorist attack in Jerusalem, and the library chair turns into a hospital bed. What were young Eitan and Wahida looking for in Israel? At the border checkpoint, Wahida patiently explains that Hassan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzân, whom she studies as a historian, is not a terrorist but the protagonist of her doctoral thesis: he was an Arabian diplomat who died five hundred years ago. The wounded Eitan came to Israel to look for his lost grandmother. Part of the family moved to Berlin, but the terrorist attack brought them back to Jerusalem for a short time, where they will discover at the same time the terrible and sobering truth about their origins. It is also a love story that is not afraid of strong emotions, a remake of Romeo and Juliet at a time that hates lavish stories and swears in minimalism. The questions we want to ask the audience and ourselves: is heredity genetically defined, are memories and forgetfulness equivalent? Are family secrets revealed and passed down from one descendant to another, or can we free ourselves from them? How many generations must take responsibility for Auschwitz? Can humanity live in a brotherhood as known to the genera of birds?

Mini teater (1999), founded by Robert Waltl and Ivica Buljan, set up its house in the landscape of Slovenian art at a time when the aesthetics of the eighties, after the zenith of the nineties, began to live in a new generation of directors. Baroque-visual theater, retro-avant-garde, post-political theater and formalist research on the one hand, and Mini teater as a new, extreme border place, set in the tradition of European art theater, by authors such as Peter Brook, Ariana Mnouschkina, Giorgio Strehler, Patrice Chereau, Anatoly Vasilyev, and the American avant-garde from the Living Theater to Ellen Stewart and her La Mama.