Janez Janša 

Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks – Reconstruction 

Spectators’ vote, 2006

Production: Maska, Ljubljana, video still courtesy of the artist

“After the management of Stara elektrarna (The Old Power Plant) in Ljubljana, where the reconstruction was staged, prohibited us from performing the final scene – that of slaughtering the chicken – we decided to replace enacting the historical fact with the current fact of the prohibition. We left it up to the spectators to choose the closing scene of the performance from among four options: three different videos (footage of the reconstruction of slaughtering the chicken; statements by Junoš Miklavc and Dušan Rogelj, who did the killing in the original Pupilija; and the relevant section of the Regulations on the Protection of Animals at the Time of Slaughter) and as the fourth option, live slaughter. This way we made the spectators responsible for executing the event. While this participatory aspect was thought-provoking in itself, we were much more interested in the tension between the legal and the legitimate. The law permits the butchering of animals only in specially designated places (slaughterhouses) and at home, for domestic use. In order to legally slaughter the chicken we would have had to stage the performance in a slaughterhouse or else transform the theater into our home. Instead, we gave the micro-community of the audience an opportunity to oppose a legal regulation, and as a rule, they took it up: with just a single exception, all of the audiences [in Slovenia and internationally] chose live slaughter. However, we never jumped to the conclusion that all audiences are out for blood or that we live in times much like the Roman era. The way the performance unfolded, its dramaturgy, which is predominantly playful and in places lighthearted, made the audience want to play a trick on the performers. What we wanted to show was precisely that the final scene made the performance here and now, it made the reconstruction cut into the time in which it originated and thus perform the present.” 

Excerpted from: Janez Janša, »Rekonstrukcija2«, in: Prišli so Pupilčki (Ljubljana: Maska, Slovenski gledališki muzej, 2009), pp. 261–286. 

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Janez Janša is a writer, director, performer and researcher of contemporary arts. He has produced more than 25 independent scenic works, for which he has received awards at home and abroad. He also creates interdisciplinary and visual works, either on his own or in collaboration with Janez Janša and Janez Janša. His artistic production has a markedly socially critical and interdisciplinary note and is focused on questioning the status of art in society. He wrote a monograph about the Belgian artist Jan Fabre Ponavljanje, norost, disciplina – celostna umetnina Fabre (Repetition, Madness, Discipline – Gesamtkunstwerk Fabre), which has been translated into French, Dutch and Italian. He served as the editor of the Maska journal for scenic arts between 1998 and 2006. He is the director of Maska, a Ljubljana-based organisation for publishing, production, education and research, an associate professor of theatre directing at the University of Ljubljana, and one of the authors of the theoretical program of Tanzquartier in Vienna.