Vesna Furlanič Valentinčič

Alone, Face to Face with Death

Alone, Face to Face with Death is a selection of lyrics, prose fragments and theatre plays, written between 1992-2017. The staging of The Mother was rewarded by Grand Prix for the best performance at the international Skopje theater festival and has received several other festival awards wherever was performed, as well as an outstanding reception of the audiences around the world. In this drama for one actor and one dancer, representing subconscious mind, a motive of daughter’s hatred towards her mother is conveyed through a fierce, bewitching monologue, disclosing selfish motives behind mother’s unscrupulous and emotionally destructive behaviour. The society assesses the daughter’s opposition and her self-hatred as a social inadequacy, and confines her behind the walls. Other plays included in the book are The Invisible Man, A Dark Twin Brother, Something-for-everyone-nothing-for-anyone and Solitudes of Mary S., the latter being available in English translation.

Vesna Furlanič Valentinčič

Vesna Furlanič Valentinčič (1957) is a poet and a dramatist that can’t be easily defined from the genre standpoint. Her poetic inclination radiates throughout her writing, thus constantly crossing the boundaries between lyricism, narrative and drama. One of her central thematic preoccupations is the individual’s longing for a different world and a new life, which points out at the urge to reveal the true essence of things in relation to which the subject is established. Oscillating between the shadow of death and the joy of life, she always observes the context, primarily other people, who with time gradually transform into what they really are, thus penetrating profoundly through the core of relationships. In a world where the desire for personal integrity is considered sick and is forbidden, those who dream are evading control and remain strangers. Here the resistance to the system, or the setting of social demands, does not appear to be a solution: instead, the dramatist perceives the characters in their nudity, driven to the edge, losing themselves to extremes, desperately trying to find their way between the fall into the void of abyss and acceptance of imposed reality.
2021
copyright owner and contact:
Gašper Malej
helia.zrakogled@gmail.com
Excerpts in English available