Mladi Levi festival to open in a forest

The 27th iteration of the festival, described as a mix of tradition and innovation, will mark the 20th anniversary since the Old Power Station became a venue for contemporary performing arts, managed by Bunker, an non-profit behind the Mladi Levi festival.

"We haven't lost the courage to try something new ... Perhaps the festival must change too, or else it may go to the dogs," Bunker director Alma R. Selimović told the pre-festival press conference on Tuesday.

The festival will open on 22 August with the international project Shared Landscapes where artists from various countries have been invited to create on-site projects in nature that could be performed in various landscapes.

In Ljubljana, visitors will be invited to the Koseze forest (Koseški boršt), an area between the Koseze Pond, the section of the circular path where Ljubljana was locked out by barbed wire during WWII and the Večna Pot road that runs past the Ljubljana Zoo.

Diverse projects in seven formats that are intended for broad audiences will be on show for four days in the forest. In one of them visitors will be able to listen to a weather forecaster, a forester, a girl, a musician and a psychoanalyst talk about the forest.

Shared Landscapes is a project by Caroline Barneaud, the artistic project director at the Theatre Vidy-Lausanne, and Stefan Kaegi, a Berlin-based artist who has presented several of his projects at Mladi Levi before.

He and director Tjaša Črnigoj created the show where the four different people talk about the forest.

Between 26 and 31 August, the festival will see various dance shows, performances and installations at the Old Power Station, the Ljubljana Dance Theatre (PTL) and Tabor Park.

One of them, Third Dialogue: In a Landscape, is a dance production by Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni and the art collective ColletivO CineticO that has been inspired by John Cage's song.

Another dance production on the programme is Pardon, Petals by Norwegian-Bulgarian artist Fredrik Petrov.

The Norwegian theatre collective Susie Wang will stage the Hum, the first part of a trilogy about human nature, which the festival describes as a chilling, strange and disturbing thriller of the summer.

Haribo Kimchi by the Belgian-based South Korean theatre and music artist Jaha Koo will offer insights into contemporary societies and the relationships between and within them through food.

The Slovenian-Estonian co-production Fun Fact is looking into political and historical reality of the two countries through a fun quiz.

The festival will also see debate cafés discuss common spaces and spaces of the future, and a school on culture for educators and a workshop for young critics.

The festival will wrap up with an award ceremony to honour production and creative work at the Old Town Power Station over the past 20 years.