Matjaž Zorec on Saint Joan of the Stockyards, “Radio Študent”, November 19 2024

Notes on Saint Joan of the Stockyards
Matjaž Zorec, “Radio Študent”, November 19th 2024
https://radiostudent.si/kultura/teater-v-eter/opombe-k-sveti-ivani-klavniski
“[…] The piece was written in 1930, at the same time as the subject being analyzed, the economic crisis, financial speculation, false prophets, and the crisis of workers’ organization. It is, so to speak, of political topicality. But it does not reproduce events in a mimetic way; the many dimensions and seemingly contingent factors are connected in a coherent macro-frame and are guided by Marxist political insight. All this within the avant-garde process of Brechtian theater. […] Thus, we dare to argue that the general cosmopolitanism of the performance, the multilingualism, the international performers, the pre-recorded zoom calls in dialogue with the live action on the stage, the Laibachs themselves with their extraordinary sound image, and so on; that all this does not come from the internal conception of the performance, but from a necessity of the project. That the necessity of the project is actually the internal conception of the show. And it is precisely these elements, at first glance completely unrelated to the concreteness of the work of art, which are perceived in the performance on a purely technical and design level, that perhaps make our St. Joan of the Slaughterhouses so contemporary. For in one way or another it exemplarily demonstrates the dimensions of a design work. This may be a Brechtian unconscious, emerging from the performance rather than from the execution of Brecht’s text. […]”