To Last
Slovenia / 2018
A durational performance, premiere
To Last, a durational performance by the playwright and performer Simona Semenič, is her public reading of her complete works, ensuring the writing to be heard in her precarious voice.
Simona Semenič is a playwright whose writing has drastically changed the written play form in Slovenia; she invented new drama techniques and provided them with an ambivalent relationship between the voice of the drama and the voice of the playwright, which often intertwine and conceal their source, as well as with meta-dramatic speech to establish a corpus. The reader of this corpus cannot escape the feeling that the language speaks to her (generic gender usage) in a bodily manner; to be more precise: that Semenič’s drama language is body. The trans-drama or trans-literary form of her texts can at times be seen as monstrous: they generate a presence that we perceive as a present yet radical otherness, which is so organic that it escapes the order of representation, despite using a semiotic instrument.
This is why the reading of her corpus can be understood as an act that ensures that the language is given its original medium: the body.
The performance title, To Last, symbolizes a certain cleansing ritual: to the last viewer, to the last text, to the last meaning, to the last wish, to the last atom of strength … And finally, it is a process through which the accumulated time of rigid cultural and societal codes will regain a piece of the future.
Tickets: €10 / €7
Written and performed by: Simona Semenič
Dramaturge: Simona Hamer
Lighting design: Igor Remeta
Space Design: Petra Veber, Igor Remeta
Production: City of Women.
