Director Bojan Jablanovec and dramaturg Nana Milčinski began the project Via Negativa in 2002 to research basic relations of theatricality. However, the theatre itself as a media for organising illusion is not the subject of this research. It’s based on a method of reduction, but the crucial elements of the research are the performers and spectators. The starting points of their research, each developed over one year, are the seven mortal sins (anger, sloth, lust, greed, gluttony, envy and pride). In the eighth year of this research, Via Negativa will conclude with the performance Via Nova which gathers all the performers and materials from the past seven years.



The research is primarily oriented to the connection between the character and the negative traits on which s/he builds her/his identity, with the seven mortal sins chosen as a basic human agitator. The performer is at the same time the modelling material and the author of his performance, whose duty is both to recognize the point where the sin begins to build a personality and to present it to the audience.

Via Negativa will present two episodes from this cycle at Eurokaz - More and Anger and Olga Grad vs. Juanna Regina.

In More, each of the seven actors deal with a nutritionist rebus imposed by the audience. This is done in thirteen scenes in an imaginary mini-market revealing the actor’s greed or fallacious ways of defending himself or herself from it.

In Starting Point: Anger, the performance is situated in relation to different visual arts contexts. Seven performers present themselves as gallery exhibits in fifteen minute anger invasions. Each of their own part of the gallery, the performers repeat scenes seven times and the spectator chooses in which direction to follow the exhibition.

Olga Grad vs. Juanna Regina develops conflict between the text as a rational system of signs and the performer as an emotional bearer of their signification. Olga Grad is an actress and represents all 57 characters she played in her career. Performance is a paraphrase of the chapter from the novel of Carlos Fuentes "Memory On The Lips", and it is structured on Olga Grad's abilities of memorising. The basic parts of the text Olga Grad learns orally through another performer and in the process of memorizing she makes 988 mistakes which give a basic rhythm to 11 scenes. At the same time we regard Olga as a real being and as a performer in a meta-theatre presentation. Through this development she becomes a character from literature, and then finally a dramatic character in a process of existential transference.