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the no

25.11.2010 |

The No, journal is the 29th book in Maska’s Transformacije series and brings an extensive reflection on one of the most interesting performing arts projects in the last decade, Via Negativa. The project that opened many questions of contemporary performing arts and, in a radical way, introduced into the theatre elements of performance art and body art received great affirmation in Slovenia and abroad. Via Negativa managed to make the theme of the seven deadly sins a theme of contemporary theatre and at the same time address numerous questions: an implicit and explicit metaperformative and metatheatrical dialogue into which the performers and authors enter with historical poetics or concrete performance art works (body art and autobiographical performance); the testing of the effects of the performing arts performative, the staging of theory (of theatre, performance art, etc.); the interaction between the performers and the spectators at seemingly opposing sides of the performance situation; the strategy of the politicalness of the performance; the contextualisation of aesthetics, ethics and work policies…

“Originally, the book was conceived as a collection of theoretical, analytical and critical texts. But in time, it became increasingly clearer that such a format would establish the predomination of a discourse that Via Negativa certainly provokes, even more, often also includes (although in its germs and always ironically), but at the same time resists – already with the fact that, as an art project, it primarily operates in other spheres of experience, work, production, interests, institutional frameworks and the market. What the book edited as a collection of texts on Via Negativa lacked was the voice of Via Negativa itself, its performers-authors, a view from the process of creating the performances, the view from the other side of the stage apron. Already during the preparation of the conversation with Via Negativa, it became clear that the originally planned factual survey of the project’s development would not suffice as a possible reference frame and guideline for the conversation, the essays and studies by theoreticians and critics. The inclusion of the excerpts of texts used in Via Negativa’s performances, reviews and a number of photos opened the possibility to – metaphorically speaking – co-create a third dimension of reading the book: now, it is no longer merely a discussion of the questions of forming, devising, performing, presenting, perceiving, analytically treating, interpreting and, if you like, consuming the Via Negativa project, but also a challenge of its reconstruction from multilayered sources that the book provides, that is, the challenge of the reader’s commitment in creating (at least) the visual idea.”

(From Marin Blažević's Introduction) 

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