Cultural struggles in Slovenian institutional and independent theatre1

Abstract

This chapter presents how the Slovenian institutional and non-institutional theatres responded to the global financial crisis. It analyses its consequences reflect the amalgam of aesthetic, media, and political problems in Slovenian theatre production in selected cases. The chapter provides the Slovenian theatre system, the aspects of crisis in Slovenian national theatres as reflected in Ubu the King, and the picture of the cultural struggle with a sketch of the independent theatre scene. One significant problem of the independent theatre scene is the lack of rehearsal and performance spaces: most of these spaces are owned by the city of Ljubljana and managed by selected organisations; the nongovernmental companies can apply to use some of them via tenders. In the media, Ubu the King called into question the mission, identity, and aesthetic and value hierarchy of public cultural institutions as it embraced methods and content that were largely staged in the independent scene.