The Art of War/The Art of Peace

Most of the performers are young people from the audition, mixed with professional actors and actresses from Mladinsko. The young actors are excellent in their performances, both in movement and in singing and dancing, a little less so in speech. The show begins with a party and music, with a cheerful feast that becomes increasingly military. We seem to be in Sarajevo under siege from the 1990s. The story of two brothers who have been conscripted into the army, the elder Amir and the younger, 16-year-old Adi, takes centre stage. Chubby and awkward, Adi is viciously picked on by the other soldiers: he is made fun of, humiliated and sadistically abused. Soldierly drill and repetition to the point of exhaustion try to nullify the fear and nervousness of the soldiers in the face of the enemy attack they are waiting for. [...] The working process, into which the young performers peered and during which they sweated, was certainly more valuable than the final product. And the weight of today's world is not so much in the final products, but rather in the processuality, the becoming.

The creators decided to approach the subject of war in a universal way. In doing so, they avoided ideological definitions and emphasised the sense of a suffocating state of war, which all the characters in the play seem to experience with the same intensity. [...] It is important to talk about the horrors of war, but it is even more important to find moments of peace within war. And it is also important to give young people a space to express and develop themselves artistically. [...] The main ingredients of The Art of War/The Art of Peace are certainly the innovation in the scenes, the listening to each other during the process of the production, and also the convincing acting. The latter is evident, for example, in Natan Pajić's portrayal of the dedicated young soldier Amir and in the intensity of April Kotnik's movement. The youth were supported both in the process of creating the performance and on stage by the members of the Mladinsko Theatre's ensemble, Blaž Šef, Janja Majzelj, Vito Weis and Matej Recer.

Poetry in conception holds the performance above the surface of the stage, gently lifting it into a space of shift, an interspace without text, built by playful bodies, their singing opening it up so that our entrances into the in-betweenness are possible, where, through triggered feelings, a living interplay of two phenomena, instincts, ideas is created: to love and to kill. And the love-kill dichotomy is embodied in front of us. Is there anything more to be achieved?  Especially when it's done by such a young group of performers (participants of the Maldinsko Youth stage training). [...] When it comes to the question of living or dying, every decision is 'right', 'legitimate'. To survive is both meaningful and meaningless. This contradiction will continue as long as we accept hierarchies designed to mutually exploit one another. Every fighter knows this. As well as that empathy is the force that transforms internal and external warfare into brighter forms of life.

The young actors are extremely skilled in dialogue, physical action, singing and dancing. But the sequence of scenes is a succession of already seen (though still no less tragic) representations of what war is supposed to be: the masculine violence, the lives of civilians in tragic deprivation, the refugees waiting for help. [...] In the performance, the only thing that stands out is the choral singing (choirmaster Jera Topolovec, music by Mitja Vrhovnik Smrekar ), which every now and then interrupts the sequence of events on stage. [...] It is true that sometimes we look at the world through black and white glasses, as the performers say at the end of the performance, but it is theatre that should look for shades of shadows in such views.