Reviews 1969
“To hell with you, members of the independent theatre group Pupilija Ferkeverk, I wish I’d never laid eyes on you: fed up greenhorns, presumptuous know-it-all adolescents, violators of bread, love and homeland, perverts, degenerates, sadists – in the Knight’s Hall at Križanke you and your director Dušan Jovanović have achieved with calculated cabaret shocks your prime intent of the performance …”
Jože Snoj, “Conscious or Unconscious Executioners?”, Delo, October 31, 1969, p. 8.
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“…at that moment I would give all in the world only to stop them in their public torturing of the animal.”
“Yet in both cases it comes to the same thing: to the sweet feeling of superiority, when from a safe distance, unpunished and just for the pleasure of it, one takes the life of a defenceless being; and if one, at the same time, succeeds in hurting those standing nearby, one may have a taste of his power over them as well. Everything else is merely words, words, words.”
Rapa Šuklje, “What’s It All About?”, Delo, November 4, 1969.
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“A performance built out of ‘shocks’, (rather tasteless undressing, the slaughter of a hen) without a dramaturgically conceived text, with a much too poor basis, can in no respect present an artistic experience, it can be found only in the so called ‘theatres with pants down’.”
“It would be hopeless and comical to rejoice that we have come to such freedom that anyone can say just whatever crosses one’s mind.”
“The performance shocks with vulgarity, artfully disguised with aesthetics, ethics and moral norms: to undress out of protest, to kill a hen out of protest, to roll over, leap and dance around out of protest … What a cheap protest, is it not? (...) To break and attack the norms, which people were building through the centuries, is so very easy (one cannot achieve anything with only one performance, but can still attract attention, not so?), but it is much more difficult to approve of such ‘destruction’.”
Drago Marušič, “Who Killed Pupilija Ferkeverk?”, Katedra, December 2, 1969.
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“When the rape of a globe becomes a bizarre comical event and a grotesque metaphor, it is at once also a horrifying symbol of a certain meaning pertaining to today; the slaughter of a hen is a banal everyday event of death before a meal, and at the same time a sad ending, a dramatic ending with death, of a certain theatre performance; bathing in a tub is already a very common commercial phenomenon, yet it becomes radically intimate in its genuine immediacy; the rhythm of puzzles, caught in the rhythm of the step and pulse, attains a metaphysical dimension …”
“Whether we agree or not, or even if we throw a scrap of a pear on stage, as it happened on the premiere night, the death of the white hen was also the death of literary, solely aesthetically functional theatre in Slovenia.”
Veno Taufer, “Experimental Theatre at Križanke: Pupilija, papa Pupilo pa Pupilčki”, Naši razgledi, November 7, 1969.
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“In the Knight’s Hall at Križanke they slaughtered a hen in front of a numerous audience, who were till that bloodstained moment firmly convinced that they were in the theatre and, consequently, that they were perfectly safe from being affected by something as displeasing as this, let alone by something as repulsive. (...) This time they were not spared even in the theatre. And the slaughtering of the hen was even more repulsive precisely because it was committed in the theatre, in a cultural institution, and not at some chicken farm or a slaughterhouse, which is the place for this kind of thing and where they do it on an assembly-line.”
Marjan Rožanc, “Is Death – Death?”, Problemi, No. 83-84, November–December 1969.
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“Yet there is no need for Pupilija 443, its presence is superfluous already today. Because everyone can make his own Pupilija by himself, at any time, any place and in any way, his own intentionally (or coincidentally) selected collection of elements from life; everybody can play around with the selected elements by himself.”
Denis Poniž, “Corporum Sectio of Pupilija 443”, Mladina, November 11, 1969.