We are excited to announce Maja Delak's new performance Declarations, based on a text by Jordan Tannahill, which will premiere on 19 June 2025 at The Old Power Station – Elektro Ljubljana.
We are constantly taking leave; our entire existence is an (un)conscious process of saying goodbye. We leave behind the roles we have played, the challenges that were important to us. As individuals, we pause for a brief moment in the wave of change and are then propelled forward again. As humanity, we are now saying goodbye to another layer of humanity, to the world and the way of life as we knew it, and we are revealing ourselves in a terrifying void where we are very much alone.
“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, whose performative and literary work has had a profound influence on the Canadian cultural landscape. This first staging of one of Tannahill's texts in Slovenia is one of his most emotionally charged plays, strongly codified in its form and yet with a seemingly completely open format that requires both the performers and the audience to create a new field of associations each time.
An ode to life, an archive of fleeting moments, develops as a lyrical inventory of the banal and everyday – every detail is imbued with a quiet meaning, interwoven with nostalgia, memory and the ineffable beauty of everyday life. At the centre is the anchored but absent presence of a loved one, which becomes a living metaphor for home, belonging and finding roots in the world. Home is no longer just a physical space or the embrace of family, but becomes a universal symbol of security and love. “Where is my home” echoes through the text like an incantation, a plea, a lament. In a raw emotional excavation, Tannahill dissects his hero into five equal parts and scatters him among the rubble of his own memories, contradictions and grief.
Maja Delak's 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.
This is what's possible in the time we have left.
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