The 56th Week of Slovenian Drama to Begin

The 56th Week of Slovenian Drama is set to begin on World Theatre Day, 27 March 2026.

The 56th Week of Slovenian Drama is set to begin on World Theatre Day, 27 March 2026. Through 11 April, the audience will be able to see twelve outstanding productions in the Competition and Accompanying Programmes, curated by this year’s selector, Zala Dobovšek. The productions were first created on the stages of many Slovenian institutional and independent theatres.

The opening ceremony of the festival will begin with the presentation of guild awards from the Slovenian Association of Drama Artists (SADA), followed by the baptismal performance of the award-winning contemporary play, The Text of the Body, written by Anja Novak – Anjuta, directed by Tjaša Črnigoj and produced by the Prešeren Theatre Kranj. 

"It is a great joy when imagination takes on material form, but it is particularly precious that we will open the 56th Week of Slovenian Drama with the première of the Grum Award-winning text, which is the best way of confirming the festival’s important mission. I am looking forward to the festival’s bustle and lively encounters with the creators and audiences because it is in this intertwining that the theatre comes to life as a connective and reflective space of community and society," explained Rok Bozovičar, the director of the Prešeren Theatre Kranj.

The 56th Week of Slovenian Drama brings an extremely rich Additional Programme. In collaboration with Program Ars of Radio Slovenia, we are preparing a live staging of a radio drama based on Neža Lučka Peterlin’s play The Lamb, which won last year’s Young Playwright Award. The Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (UL AGRFT) will present reading performances of short plays by dramaturgy and theatre directing students and, together with UL AGRFT and the Slovenian Theatre Institute (SLOGI), we are organising the traditional Day of the Nominees for the Zofka Kveder Award (for Young Playwrights) and the Day of the Nominees for the Slavko Grum Award. The readings of the nominated plays will be accompanied by dramaturgical insights into the texts and discussions with their authors. 

Zofka Kveder: A Playwright and an Intermediary of Theatre Culture is an evening dedicated to author Zofka Kveder. In this event, we will get to know her short plays through staged readings; afterwards, a round table discussion with invited experts will focus on her drama texts and her role as an intermediary of theatre culture, through her work as a translator and a reviewer. We will also discuss how she enacted alternative images of femininity, both in life and in art.

We will host the Playwrights’ Unit of the Slovenian Association of Dramatic Artists (SADA) and their round table, entitled Between the Drama Text and the Theatre Text, where we will discuss drama texts as a carrier of literary value that works also outside of a theatre event, in the field of reading, reflection or history.

A round table prepared in collaboration with the Association of Theatre Critics and Researchers of Slovenia on the topic of The Representation of Women: An Overview of the Slovenian Theatre Landscape, will shed light on the current situation in Slovenian performing arts from the perspective of the representation of women. The debate will focus on the questions of inclusion, the representation of so-called women’s topics and how these topics are presented in contemporary theatre and drama production.

At the round table The Guest House: Artistic Freedom on the Line – Theatre in Politically Charged Contexts, which we are preparing together with the Slovenian Centre of the International Theatre Institute (SC ITI) and international partners ACAR ITI (Action Committee for Artists Rights ITI Worldwide), the Hungarian Centre ITI and the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna, we will reflect on how the currently governing politics shapes artistic creativity – from censorship, self-censorship and employment pressures to funding limitations and interference with artistic programmes. With guests from the region, we will compare experiences from Serbia (ne:Bitef), Slovakia and Hungary and open a broader contemplation about the freedom of artistic expression in Europe.

We will also present the première of St. Peter’s Passion or The Long Way Home by Peter Alojz Marn and Ula Talija Pollak as part of the festival’s Additional Programme. The production, created for the Master’s degree in Stage Acting at UL AGRFT explores the position of young people in the interspace between their home environment that they are leaving and the city, or the cultural milieu into which they’re entering.

In the midst of the festival bustle, we will watch Toni Cahunek’s documentary, Novi sošolci / New Classmates / Shokët e rinj të klasës, which provides a background view of migration from Kosovo to Slovenia and the challenges children face in integrating into their new country. It focuses on the stories of four migrant children and their parents from Kosovo who, because of their nationality and insufficient mastery of the Slovenian language, face obstacles in different areas. Before the screening, Simona Hamer will discuss the project, Slovenian as a Second and Foreign Language with Anđelka Nikolić. Following the screening will be a discussion with the film crew.

One hour before each production, the stand of the Slovenian Theatre Publishers network will be open and their latest print editions of books and journals about theatre will be available for sale. In collaboration with the MGL Library, we are preparing a discussion about the book Urjenja v nestrinjanju (Training in Disagreement) in which Tery Žeželj and Jaka Smerkolj Simoneti and their interlocutors ask how to think directing today and how to determine its zone of activity on the intersection of different fields.

This year’s festival will host four concerts. We will close the first festival week with a double concert in collaboration with TrainStation SubArt, the inter-genre sextet MRK led by Gaj Bostič and a surprise guest. Towards the end of the second week, the indie folk band Čedahuči will give us something to dance about at the Škrlovec Tower, and the festival will close with the beats of the witty singing-songwriting duo Zajtrk.

The Layer House will host an exhibition of Slovenian drama translated into and published in several languages, which we organise together with the Slovenian Theatre Institute. The oldest exhibited item is Ivan Cankar’s Jakob Ruda which Ignac Borštnik translated into Croatian in 1900. We will also open two exhibitions in public spaces: The Productions at the 56th Week of Slovenian Drama, in the square in front of the theatre, and Gallery in the City: Zofija and Ethics, opposite the Kranj City Library.
 
"This year’s Week of Slovenian Drama is presented under the umbrella theme Zofija and Ethics. In their concrete festival manifestation, Zofija and Ethics can be seen, on the one hand, as Zofka (Zofija) Kveder and K. S. Stanislavski with his indispensable Ethics. Their wise thoughts will be on display everywhere throughout the festival: on festival T-shirts, in the Gallery in the City, during the festival events and in the catalogue of the 56th Week of Slovenian Drama," says Nika Leskovšek, assistant to the managing director of the Prešeren Theatre Kranj and the Week of Slovenian Drama.

We invite you to the closing ceremony on the final day of the festival, 11 April, where we will announce the winners of the Slavko Grum Award for the Best New Slovenian Play and the Zofka Kveder Award (for Young Playwrights). Five texts were nominated for the Slavko Grum Award (Katarina Morano and Žiga Divjak: Anhovo; Lina Akif: The Devil Sharpens a Woman’s Tongue; Matjaž Zupančič: The Hurricane; Tereza Gregorič, Jakob Šfiligoj, Borut Petrović: It Was All Possible; and Katarina Morano: Why We Got Divorced) and three for the Zofka Kveder Award (Maruša Freya Voglar: Beans Blossom in Winter; Samo Podkrajšek: Dog and Pony Show; Iva Š. Slosar: Democracy Was Invented in the Agora the First Time Around and at the Fire Station the Second).

"This year’s nominees are distinguished by their diverse approaches and a heightened sensitivity for the contemporary social moment. The works cover the range from comedy to intimate and documentary drama, and they often originate in the local environments that acquire a universal dimension. The texts convince with their strong social engagement, thoughtful staging procedures and effective intertwining of humour and earnestness. Together, they sketch a vital and daring image of contemporary drama that opens important questions of the community and the individual," explained Maja Šorli, the president of the Slavko Grum Award and the Zofka Kveder Award expert jury, whose other two members are Petra Vidali and Dino Pešut.

For all the undiscovered voices, the 56th Week of Slovenian Drama will organise an Open Mic event and we are inviting drama artists to apply. Playwrights will also be able to join a festival workshop led by the German playwright Gesa Geue. She will be in Kranj as a part of a pilot project of festival exchange between the Week of Slovenian Drama and the Berlin festival Autor:innenTheaterTage (ATT) by Deutsches Theater, to which one of the nominees for the Slavko Grum Award and Zofka Kveder Award will be invited in exchange in June. At the closing ceremony, we will present the Rudi Šeligo Award, two acting awards and the special jury award of the 56th Week of Slovenian Drama. The four awards will be bestowed by the expert jury consisting of Nika Arhar, Alja Predan and Maximilian Zahn. A fifth award, the traditional audience award for the best production at the Week of Slovenian Drama, will also be bestowed.

The opening and the closing ceremonies of the 56th Week of Slovenian Drama will be directed by Gabrijel Lazić. The opening will be enriched with a music performance by artists Drago Ivanuša and Anja Novak – Anjuta, and the closing by the ethno-chanson duo Zajtrk. 

We invite you to visit and celebrate this holiday of Slovenian drama! You can read more about the programme at www.tsd.si.

After the festival, we will travel abroad – in April, the production The Text of the Body will be presented in Malta. The partners of the international project Drama of Smaller European Languages (DoSEL) are preparing the second International Festival of Productions, Created in Smaller European Languages to take place there between 16 and 22 April. It will be hosted by Teatru Malta and the National Agency for the Performing Arts in Malta. The DoSEL project, led by the Prešeren Theatre Kranj and financially supported by the European Union as a part of the Creative Europe programme, aims to raise the international recognisability and accessibility of drama works, originally written in smaller languages. In addition to the presentation of the Slovenian production in La Valletta, we are also preparing a reading performance of Slovenian plays and a presentation of authors, and, together with the partners, a book with the first twenty-four translations of plays written in smaller European languages. It will include two Slovenian plays and will come out in the autumn.