Nox et solitudo

Nox et Solitudo - Stage Collage of Rastislav Ballek from the poems and texts of Ivan Krask
13.6.2025 at 19:00 - Pre -premiere
14.6.2025 at 19:00 - premiere

Organizer's text:

nox et solitudo, poetic collection of writer and chemical engineer Ivan Kraska, serves director Rastislav Ballek as a starting point for the dark symbolist ferry. Like many times before, even now, Ballek proves that reader literature is actually an unexplored mysterious place where the author's intimate statement encounters the power of the language and the weakness of the society that tells him. This is a transformation that we cannot describe or even understand. Why are Krask's verses neuralgic points of Slovak literature and culture? Why did they become part of the Slovak literary canon and the curriculum? The alchemy of the symbols and the chemistry of the elements. Why the educated urban intellectual decides to name their special relationship to tradition, to the countryside, to life, to work and the holiday that are connected to the earth. Modern is not only reflected here by the reflection of an ambivalent or negative relationship to tradition, the rupture between the old and the new, between generations and between the epochs of the end of the 19th and the coming 20th century. Modernism does not only mean defining, but at the same time a statement of fascination, irrational captivation and disturbing misunderstanding of those outwardly primitive elements of traditional life anchored in the country, in the natural and agricultural cycle. Various tricky esotericians, mystifiers of history and political populists are fuel. It is all the more important to seek the meaning of our own place in modern and our own relationship to tradition.