Countdown to the 59th Maribor Theatre Festival

From 3 to 16 June 2024, the Slovenian National Theatre Maribor and other locations in the city will once again host the 59th Maribor Theatre Festival, a concentrated celebration of the performing arts. Tickets for the festival events are on sale.

Interesting foreign tours

This year, the main Slovenian theatre festival offers 12 of the best theatre performances in the competition programme, as selected by selector Blaž Lukan, and the accompanying programme enriches them with a variety of additional stage events. The opening performance is Soul Chain by the choreographer Sharon Eyal, performed by the tanzmainz group of the Staatstheater Mainz.

First festival production this Friday with the premiere in Zagreb

On Tuesday, 4 June, at 8 pm, the Slovenian premiere of The End of the World in three acts, directed by Selma Spahić, will take place - the first international co-production of the Maribor Theatre Festival, Zagreb Youth Theatre and Belgrade Drama Theatre, which is part of the two-year European project Shadow Pandemic: Hidden Voices, and deals with the problem of violence against women during the epidemic. The project as an example of good practice was also discussed by Artistic Director Aleš Novak at the Creative Europe event in Maribor on Monday, and the premiere will take place in Zagreb this Friday, 17 May, at 19:00.

A wide range of accompanying programme

In addition to the theatre performances, this year's festival offers a rich and varied accompanying programme. In cooperation with Maska Ljubljana, we are organising a two-day international conference on Documentary Theatre, which will also include a performance by Spanish artist María San Miguel entitled The Big Crunch.

We are preparing a round table on young dramaturgy, we will ask whether theatre criticism is disappearing, and we will talk about the temporality and simultaneity of dramatic translations. In the additional programme we will present publications by Barbara Orel, Marko Košir, Vili Ravnjak and Jan Krmelj and, on the occasion of the publication of an autobiography, we will pay tribute to the actor Jurij Souček, who died this year and was awarded the Borštnik Ring in 1994. There will be exhibitions of theatre photography by Tone Stojko and Damjan Švarc, and now the traditional behind-the-scenes exhibition by festival photographer Boštjan Lah.

With young people for young people

Maribor will host many theatre artists, professionals and theatre lovers, selectors, journalists from Slovenia and abroad. Students of the UL AGRFT will also actively participate in the Festival with their productions, as well as some students of the Secondary School of Design, who will use the Festival to gain practical experience.

To keep track of festival news, the programme and to make it easier to plan your visits to performances and other festival events, we have again this year launched a mobile app that makes it easy to buy tickets. For Android on GooglePlay and for iOS on the AppStore!

Today, the new festival website has been launched, providing a modern and easy user experience.