little women

About the performance

The production is 1 hour and 15 minutes long.

The performance of two little girls is the first staging of the text by playwright Nina Kuclar Stiković, who puts two parallel stories on stage: Andersen’s fairytale The Little Match Girl and the autobiographical confession of the author in the long process of obtaining the status of a self-employed cultural worker with the rights to have their contributions paid from the national budget between 2020 and 2022. The drama text, nominated for the Slavko Grum Award at the 53rd Week of Slovenian Drama, follows two young women involved in precarious production relationships in which they experience domineering violence from the position of an authoritarian ruler or father. Although their subordinate positions are related, they confront them in completely different ways, as the text and the performance also thematise the change in forms of resistance that took place between the time of Andersen’s girl and the time of the autobiographical confession.

In the justification for the nomination, the jury of experts for the Slavko Grum Award stated: " In this dialectics of similaritiescand differences, the text reveals a certainccontinuity in the gender and class identity ofcthose who are the victims of such precarious existential conditions and of the dominant structures of authority. Yet this continuity is today somewhat modified. Because of that, the forms of rebellion – the kinds that the girl from Andersen sees at the bottom of her plate – must probably also be different today."

If, in the time of Andersen’s fairytale, there was still the possibility of revolt through, for example, popular uprising and subversion, today, we can no longer even imagine such revolt. Nor can we conceive of an authority that would openly use physical violence to achieve its goals since "it seems that today, even more effectively than by repressive means, power implements its will through the structural and systemic violence of ideological apparatuses, including, if necessary, by violating or at least arbitrarily circumventing legal procedures." What is a legitimate means of resistance today? Is it a rebellion to write a play based on one’s own experience of a ruthless official apparatus that is, on top of all that, completely blinded by ideology?

"The story of a playwright at the beginning of her career, for whom the greatest stress is an epidemic that completely paralyses her field of work, and of course, the struggle with a bureaucratic machine that works in such a way that – on purpose? – crushes her, is presented with a nice escalation, both on the level of character development and on the level of the development of events, as well as on the atmospheric level and the level of the performance’s rhythm." Anja Radaljac, Delo, 20 April 2023

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