Walls, Move Apart and Make Way for Human Dreams!

A scientific symposium on the dramatic and theatre opus of Vitomil Zupan organised by the Association of Theatre Critics and Researchers of Slovenia and the Maribor Theatre Festival in collaboration with the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television of the University of Ljubljana (AGRFT UL), the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana and the Slovenian Theatre Institute

Compared to the interest for the soul-stirring life story of Vitomil Zupan and his prose work, Zupan’s dramatic opus is less researched. Therefore, this time it will be the focus of an academic debate. The dramatic opus of Vitomil Zupan is marked by a certain paradox: on the one hand, he was the author awarded with highest prizes (the Prešeren Award for Birth in the Storm, a victory in the anonymous competition of Yugoslav theatres with the text White Rockets Fly Towards Amsterdam); on the other hand, his texts have usually reached the stage with a delay of several decades. Some of them haven’t been published or staged to this day and the last staging of one of his plays took place almost thirty years ago. His dramatic texts were bold, often featuring unconventional ideas and formal solutions, and were thus never included in the dominating literary currents. At the same time, they are exceptionally diverse in their forms, languages, styles, motives, themes, ideas and genre orientations. They are inspiring stage-wise, with many time and space jumps, an unusual choice of characters and the usage of pronounced theatrical elements. Politically-charged texts with a socially-critical attitude interchange with texts dealing with an intimate questioning of human happiness, dreams and gruelling existential choices between good and evil. As the Angel says in Zupan’s dramatic allegory A Ship With No Name: "Walls, move apart and make way for human dreams!”
The intention of the symposium is to reflect upon Zupan’s role in the development of Slovene dramatic literature and theatre and evaluate it. We will take a special interest in the analysis of plays, theatre productions, dramatisations, Zupan’s thoughts on theatre compiled in the collection Sholion as well as a deliberation on the already existing treatises on his dramatic opus. We will strive to answer the question whether Vitomil Zupan is a dramatist and theatre person for our time.
The symposium will be followed by a round table where the phenomenon of Vitomil Zupan will be presented through his creative work for different media. Directors, actors, editors and other co-travellers on his creative journey will speak about his dramatic texts, theatre productions, radio plays, and screenplays for TV and film.

Subsequently, students of AGRFT UL will prepare a staged reading of a yet-unpublished and unstaged play from Zupan’s legacy, The Third Embryo, from 1941.