June 15th – Guest Journal: Kata Győrfi (Day 7): Those who remained 

This will be a short entry because – as artistic director Aleš Novak put it – Slovenians like long performances, and although I like them too, they still tire me out.

During Žiga Divjak and Katarina Morano’s Anhovo, I wrote down five ideas for a production in which we are working on a very similar subject. And I was heartwarmed to realize that the inspiring creators are people from my own generation, who handled such a loaded, layered subject, full of secrets, distortions, half-truths, lies, and aggression, with sensitivity, professionalism, and patience.

During the almost four-hour performance, we travelled through a little more than one hundred years in the orchard, attic, kitchen, kindergartens, Christmas candle-lightings of a town of a few thousand inhabitants, through the hearts, lungs, oxygen tanks, medical records, anger, funerals, and helplessness of its residents and of the workers of the Salonit Anhovo factory – like dust, endless dust.

Since yesterday I have been unsettled, and I imagine that those who lose their lives in such a deceived, manipulated, and unjust way remain here, not to haunt, but to support the living, those still alive, so that justice may be done in their name and in the names of the dead.

History offers many terrible examples of injustice, but fortunately there are performances like this one, in which those who “remained here” are given a voice, and their story is told.