Jernej Šmid: Sliding (2025)
Friday, 4 December 2026, at 8:00 pm
Kino Šiška, Katedrala
performance
Duration: 49 min.
Tickets: 10/12 EUR (this ticket is also valid for the performance Nira)
What happens if we try to see our actions, embodiments, everyday environment and objects as grammar (as sentences, for instance), and language or speech as a body? With Sliding, Jernej Šmid carries out a distinctive semiological queering by disembodying language and lending the body a language of its own, offering local audiences one of the largest doses of stage ludism since the era of our homegrown neo-avant-gardes.
A descent from the level of semiotic structures to the level of the material in performance and dance; the realm of the acousmatic in vocal performances or in choreo-vocal works; linguistic ludism in the neo-avant-garde theatre works of the 1960s and ’70s − the work of Jernej Šmid situates itself, in its own way, within this territory between the material and the linguistic. From Pupilija, papa Pupilo in Pupilčki (1969) and Potohodec (1971) by Gledališče pekarna, through Vito Taufer’s Silence Silence Silence (1996), to the choreo-vocal performances of Irena Tomažin and the debut solo of Leja Jurišič, to name only a few, we can trace, within our own local scene, a particular lineage of performances that, through voice and ludism, broke out of their own entrenched artistic system of production. Theatre studies have never quite registered what these works share and what makes them unusual, but at CoFestival we initiated an issue of the journal Maska on this very subject, titled The Voice of Dance (guest editor Dr Jasmina Založnik).
In his performance Sliding (sliding, hovering, openness and emptiness, here understood in relation to signifiers and meanings from the classifications of structural linguistics), Jernej Šmid examines “the stability of non-meaning through the materiality of language […]. He establishes a temporary system in which order and chance do not exclude one another, but instead produce one another and jointly generate disorder.” The field of imagination that opens up in Sliding, through the breakdown of the ordinary semiotic system, establishes its own material syntax. It does not seem to be random, and yet we do not know its properties. It strips us of the usual interpretive power we normally derive from coded forms of language. Whatever meaning may arise from this, we are left to grapple with it − powerless.
Creators and performers: Jernej Kobi Šmid, Jovica Novković, Dan Sebastjan Zorko
Costume Design: Zala Florjančič
Consulting: Saša Lončar
Dramaturgy: Ana Romih
Speech Advisor: Zala Julija Kavčič
Production: KUD Qulenium
Co-production: KD Qulenium in/and Pionirski dom – Center za kulturo mladih/Center for the Youth Culture
Organised by NDA Slovenija and Kino Šiška