Celebration

Première 30. september 2020, Mali oder SNG Maribor
The first Slovenian performance
Running time 1 hour 10 minutes. No intermission.

Director, set and lighting designer Jan Krmelj
Translator Mojca Marič
Dramaturg Vili Ravnjak
Costume designer Špela Ema Veble
Composers Gašper Torkar, Julija Đorđević
Language consultant Mojca Marič

Cast
Ksenija Mišič
Maša Žilavec
Vojko Belšak
Matevž Biber
Petja Labović

The performance Celebration was created within the framework of the international project Port of Dreamers, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme, which took on the acute and almost omnipresent migration problem as its starting point for socially engaged research. The play’s content – which we can understand as a diptych of social criticism penned by Croatian playwright Ivor Martinić and the personal experience of an Iranian migrant living in Slovenia – reveals all the hypocrisy, impotence and paradoxicality of European migration policy. The festive event, hosted by an unnamed political party, soon becomes the epitome of everything that seems wrong in present-day politics. However, in the second part of the story, based on the writings of anthropologist and sociologist Mojca Marič, who interviewed Iranian political refugee Navid Fadaee Nazer, the painful and tragic experience of an individual on his way to the "free" West comes to life. The story’s dynamism, driven by numerous contrasts and differences between rich and poor, East and West, and not the least between the free and all who live in constant fear of losing their freedom and their lives, reveals the global dimension of the principle of manipulating people who almost always come second after the interest of the capital and the illusion of a democratic system to which we constantly turn as political universalism, even though it always leaves us at the mercy of power-hungry "political animals".