Quite a few famous lines from Ivan Cankar's now-canonized drama already caused violent reactions when they were created, which affected the staging of the work itself. In fact, Cankar already predicted complications when designing the Servants. He wrote to his publisher in September 1909: "Drama will make a bigger mess than Za narodov blagor." I have made a faithful portrait of our present extremely dirty political situation. If he comes on stage, they will howl; and he must come!”
As he writes elsewhere, the government censorship "suspected whole - 62 cities", "paragraphs that are dangerous for public peace and order", and thus prevented the planned performance in Ljubljana. When the drama was released at the end of January 1910, it got even worse: one of the unfavorable critical opinions encouraged the clerical teachers to publish a protest with a public appeal to the provincial government "to forbid that the mentioned insulting of the teachers should not be performed publicly". Polemical reactions followed and the fate of Hlapce was decided: they did not see the light of the stage for a long time.
Cankar never experienced a performance during his lifetime, and the Ljubljana theater, whose fresh start was marked by the relocation of operations from the present-day Opera building to the present-day Drama, did not decide to perform it in the first post-war season. The Servants finally saw their stage baptism in the renovated Slovenian Theater in Trieste on May 31, 1919, directed by Milan Skrbinšek.
"It is only a matter of discovering in Hlapci what our time can discover in them - and what the past time could not yet discover - and what the future time will no longer be able to discover. Because he will be discovering something new again, for his time!"
Mile Korun, 1967
In the year of Cankar, when we are commemorating the centenary of the playwright's death, we will review the almost century of staging of the Slovenian canonical text at an occasional symposium; a period in which over 30 productions of Servants took place in Slovenian professional theaters. We want to look at their performance from different perspectives (interpretive, broader and narrower theatrical, socially contextual, etc.) and, following individual approaches, more or less radical authorial treatments of the play, as well as the phenomenon of re-directed readings of the same text, give a picture of the centuries-old theatrical realization of Servants, which also marked the development path of Slovenian theater in its milestones.
They will participate: Rok Andres, Blaž Lukan, Ana Kocjančič, Nina Žavbi Milojević, Tomaž Toporišič, Igor Žunkovič, Aldo Milohnić, Janez Pipan, Sebastijan Horvat, Benjamin Zajc, Eva Kučera Šmon
Symposium leaders: Ana Perne (SLOGI) and Blaž Lukan (UL AGRFT)
9:30 a.m. Registration of symposium participants
9.45 Opening of the symposium
10.00–10.20 ROK ANDRES: One hundred years of critical reception of the performance of Cankar's Servants
10.20–10.40 dr. BLAŽ LUKAN: Performing Servants throughout the century (a few marginalia)
10.40–11.00 a.m. mag. ANA KOCJANČIČ: Various scenographic settings of Cankar's Servants
11.00–11.20 dr. NINA ŽAVBI MILOJEVIĆ: Stage speech then and now on the example of Cankar's Servants
11:20–11:30 Break
11.30–11.50 dr. TOMAŽ TOPORIŠIČ: Interpreters and reinterpreters of Servants
11.50–12.10 dr. IGOR ŽUNKOVIĆ: The reception of Korun's performances of Hlapcev: social resonance and impact
12.10–13.00 Discussion of the contributions of the morning part of the symposium (Leader: Ana Perne)
13:00–14:00 Lunch break
14.00–14.20 dr. ALDO MILOHNIĆ: Servants of Paris
14.20–14.50 conversation with JANEZ PIPANO, director of the last performance of Hlapce
14.50–15.10 mag. SEBASTIJAN HORVAT: Servants and modern theatrical reality
15.10–15.20 Break
3:20 p.m.–3:50 p.m. Screening of excerpts from various productions of Servants
15.50–16.10 BENJAMIN ZAJC: Korun and Jovanović's vision of Servants: a comparative analysis of two productions from 1980
16.10–16.30 EVA KUČERA ŠMON: Cankar's Servants in the format of modern direction
16.30–17.00 Discussion on the contributions of the afternoon part of the symposium (Leader: Blaž Lukan)
17.00 Closing of the symposium
Symposium organizers: Slovenian Theater Institute (SLOGI) and the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (UL AGRFT)
The symposium was held in cooperation with UL AGRFT within the framework of the research program Theater and inter-art research (P6-0376), which is co-financed by the Public Research Agency of the Republic of Slovenia from the state budget.
