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The Maribor Theatre Festival

The 58th Maribor Theatre Festival will take place from 5 to 18 June 2023. It will host a number of professional theatre performances, as well as music concerts and discussions. The festival will close with the awarding of the festival prizes and the golden Borštnik Ring, the highest prize for life-time achievement in stage acting in Slovenia.

The Maribor Theatre Festival is the main Slovenian theatre festival, which has enriched the Slovenian theatre and cultural space for more than half a century. It was introduced in 1966 on the initiative of Fran Žižek, then director of the Maribor Drama. Initially called the Week of SlovenianTheatres, it was named Borštnikovo srečanje in 1970, after the great Slovenian actor and director Ignacij Borštnik. It was then that the Borštnik Ring award was presented for the first time.

In the early 1970s, the awards began to be presented by an expert jury. In 1994, Rudi Šeligo, as chairman of the festival, introduced a selector for the competition programme, and in 2005, under the chairmanship of Tone Partljič, the festival’s rules of procedure were adopted. Four years later, when Alja Predan became the festival’s artistic director, the festival began to open up to the international space. In 2018, Aleš Novak took over the artistic direction of the festival.