Declarations

Première 19. 6. 2025, Old Power Station

Running time 1 hour and 25 minutes, no intermission. 

Choreographer and director Maja Delak 

Translator Pino Pograjc

Programing, sound design and composer Luka Prinčič

Set designer Urša Vidic

Dramaturg Benjamin Zajc

Language consultant Tjaša Pirnar

Lighting designer Janko Oven

Costume designer Andrej Vrhovnik

Graphic designer Mauricio Ferlin

Programming Raspberry Pi Jurij Podgoršek

Photo documentation Nada Žgank

Video documentation Vid Hajnšek

Executive production and organisation Maja Delak, Tamara Pepelnik

Cast Nataša Živković, Mark Jacob Cavazza, Staša Popovič, Leon Marič, Loup Abramovici

Partner Secondary Preschool Education, Grammar School and Performing Arts Grammar School Ljubljana

Financial support City of Ljubljana, Ministry of Culture Republic of Slovenia

Acknowledgements Ljubljana Puppet Theatre, Maruša Freya Voglar, Anja Bornšek, Jana Jevtović, Žarko Prinčič, Samo Kovač, www.1240.si

Declarations was first produced in 2018 by Canadian Stage (Toronto, ON) directed by Jordan Tannahill. Declarations is produced by permission of the Playwright and Marquis Literary (Colin Rivers) www.MQlit.ca.

The Golden Bolt for an outstanding event awarded to the creative team of the production Declarations (2024/2025 season).

“This is the thing” is the first sentence of the dramatic text Declarations by the flamboyant Jordan Tannahill, which he wrote almost in the blink of an eye during a flight in 2018. Maja Delak’s new performance now offers Slovenian audiences the opportunity to discover for the first time the enfant terrible of Canadian theatre. This first staging of one of Tannahill's texts in Slovenia is one of his most emotionally charged plays, in open format that requires both the performers and the audience to create a new field of associations each time.

Performance is conceived as a composition of movement, as an embodiment of the space of grief that is uncompromisingly inherent in the five performers, sometimes in movement, sometimes in words. Their bodies become vessels of memory, of grief. Every gesture, every spoken word acts as a kind of invasion into the relentlessness of loss, both personal and universal. The performance does not search for solutions or firmly coded choreographic elements, but remains in the space of absence and thus also of openness, reaching for what has already disappeared. The word interrupts the movement and the movement interrupts the word – like an echo in an empty space, like an echo of the unsaid.