The Five

A group of five high-school students will watch the performances and then discuss their experience with their mentor, director Mateja Kokol. They will write down their thoughts and this record shall serve as a starting point for the debate.

Davorin, Janja, Julija, Sara and Tia have participated in the project The First Scene: Theatre as a Place of Learning Symbolic Languages in the season 2017/18. The students on the classics track at the First Grammar School Maribor developed the forms and methods of peer talks and checked the model on the performance Medea (dir. Oliver Frljić, Drama SNT Maribor 2017).

Mateja Kokol
... belongs to the youngest generation of theatre directors. She received her bachelor's degree from the UL AGRFT with the direction of Ionesco's The Chairs, an excellent performance which toured to international festivals in Russia, Mexico and Slovakia. At the St. Petersburg theatre festival ArtOkraina (ArtSkirts) she received the award for the most promising young director; the direction of The Chairs brought her the Student Prešeren Award. She directed several performances, among them the piece she created as her master's degree requirement Medeja, Medeja, Medeja, based on Seneca's and Euripides's Medea (co-produced by Ljubljana City Theatre and AGRFT, 2015), 24 hours (Maribor Puppet theatre LGM, 2015), the authorial project 3.600 Seconds of Longing (Los Cosmicomicos, Zacatecas Mexica, 2015), Apocalyptic Moonlight (co-produced by Glej, Maribor Puppet Theatre and Pekinpah, 2014). Reasons to be Happy (SNT Maribor, 2016) was followed by A Boy, a Girl and a Gentleman and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time at the same theatre (2018), in the meantime, she staged Julia Donaldson's popular book The Snail and the Whale (Maribor Puppet Theatre, 2018). She works frequently as a theatre educator and is a permanent collaborator of the project The First Scene: Theatre as a Place of Learning Symbolic Languages.