TRIBUTE TO TOMAŽ PANDUR

I fervently believe in the power of theater

and all my works are archetypes of ritual.

Tomaž Pandur

It is extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to bring to a close the biography of Tomaž Pandur. A director whose artistic opus marked Slovene and global theater, who remained faithful to his creative credo and unique style to the very end, sharing his visions, dreams, solitudes, fears and enthusiasm selflessly with his co-workers and fellow travellers. His Immaculata would have opened the season 2016 of Drama in Maribor, and he would have, at least a little, returned to where it all began more than thirty years ago, first with Tespisov voz (Thespis Caravan), and then with the seven years when he ran this theater before he journeyed on to all those places already conquered or places to where he was invited for the first time.

Since his first professional performance,Scheherazade, to his last, Faust, in Drama Ljubljana, he experimented with the quintessence of theatrical material.In his laboratory of thought he connected, deconstructed and discovered landscapes of the mythic, archetypal and transcendental, and in the process of performance-making revealed the anatomy and beauty of every moment. Whoever is so fiercely driven to transcend the forms of reality labors as well in research of the human and the divine, that is to say, of the relationship between the living and the dead, between concepts of time and space, mortality, flight into fantasy and conflicts between infinity and finitude.

Next to all the titles of his performances, which have marked generations of artists and audiences and unsettled calm, common, steady waters against which he constantly rebelled, those that we will never see on stage in perfected, purified images driven toextreme sensation and feeling, those which we will never find signed in his name, have left the heaviest of seals: next to Immaculata, King Lear in Skopje, A Hundred Years of Solitude in Madrid and Guadalajara, Melancholia in Ballet Ljubljana, Clytemnestra in Merida—the 2016 / 2018 repertoire, written on a piece of paper before he left for the land of Alexander the Great.

Tomaž Pandur has, through his global vision, proclaimed his will in order to realize the truth, his own will to power and his will to live, the meaning of life in any given circumstance, where beyond silence lies … imagination. And beauty. And dreams.

This is why the team of authors dedicates the performance, the journey of ours through the Khazar dreams, to the greatest dream hunter of all.

                                                                                                          Livija Pandur