The Visible and the Invisible

Two talks with Tone Partljič, the audience and the backstage staff of the Maribor Theatre Festival

21 and 23 October 2015 | 16.00 | Salon of Applied Arts

Theatre is an intricate mechanism and it is only once we get to know its laws that we discover the vastness and complexity necessary for the actor to perform an episode from our lives onstage. The actor is the most exposed one and the one that is immediately in front of our eyes. Yet two foundations are essential for his/her acting existence: the audience and the backstage staff. The same goes for the festival mechanism, which is also a creative time-space dimension: it may manifest itself only through the interaction between the audience and the event. Even though it takes place for only a few days in a year, it is in constant motion in-between each festival edition. 

That is why, for this year’s edition, the Maribor Theatre Festival has prepared two special talks. The first one will gather the most faithful representatives of the festival audience, as we are eager to learn their perspective on the simultaneous presence of spectators and actors, the "visible” part of the theatre. The second talk will be with the "invisible” people from the backstage who invest their knowledge, energy and devotion to set in motion the customary and impeccable mechanism enabling the birth of the divine spark between the audience and the festival event.

The moderator of the talks will be Tone Partljič, the long-time President of the Board of the Maribor Theatre Festival, a renowned Slovenian playwright and writer as well as a charismatic personality of the city on the river Drava.