Amerikanci

Director Jernej Potočan
Dramaturg Brina Jenček
Scenographer Dan Pikalo
Costumographer Nika Dolgan
Light design Domen Lušin

Cast
Mina Švajger
Filip Štepec
Suzana Krevh
Svit Stefanija
Mojka Končar
Jan Slapar
Nika Manevski
Matevž Sluga

The Play "Amerikanci" by Zofka Kveder addresses the migrations of Slovenes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. America is portrayed as an empty signifier onto which citizens of a rural village in Slovenia can project all their fantasies, as they feel constrained and without prospects in their home environment. America becomes an imaginative playground, an escape where all their problems disappear. In the world inhabited by the characters of the play, it is not possible to live, but they have no other world left. They seem to be left only with the world of desires, hopes for a better future, which, when faced with their everyday reality, takes on a menacing, unfamiliar face. In 2023, it is believed that there are no longer any unexplored territories in the world, and our everyday life is saturated with information about all the distant worlds that exist as well as those that do not, giving rise to a sense that we know everything that can be known. The performance explores the hidden corners of the "skulls" where hope and imagination resided during the time of the "Amerikanci," as well as questioning where these corners of hope are today. The question that Zofka Kveder poses to us is how to think of a better world while at the same time protecting dreams from an environment that tries to turn every shred of desire into a commodity and disguise every shred of hope as the American dream, the front side of the exploitation circuit.