Where did our dreams escape to?

"Slovenians and Slovenia … It’s not necessary that those two terms always correspond. There were always conflicts between them. And it wasn’t Slovenia’s fault. The state was always here, officially only about 20 years, unsuspecting and it wasn’t Slovenia’s fault that it became infected with Slovenians.“ That is how yesterday Boris Kobal was pondering during the show In my opinion Slovenians … accompanied by the melodic tunes played by pianist Polona Janežič. Kobal was discussing the status quo in our dear homeland and by dissecting politics, (pop)culture and ideology he was exposing the symptoms in a tragicomic manner and searching for the origin of the problems that pester us. And although he made the audience cry with laughter during his almost 2-hour-long performance, the show is not only here to cheer you up – it is a reflection of the past twenty years of our independent state and it is searching for a catharsis for the committed mistakes due to which the dreams about independency turned into a nightmare about individualism and alienation.

Did we, the people, really become sheep for the rulers? “We live, bleat, strip grass and are being screwed on a regular basis,” Kobal hinted while exploring our home and what it even means. He contemplated that we want to be hairsplitting like the Germanic peoples, yet we are sloppy like the Balkan ones. He argued that we are not farmhands anymore, born to be farmhands, but are arses, born to be arses and raised to be arses. Because we are a very erotic nation - "You have to f*** a Slovenian, so he/she can function.” Although he often uttered a biting or juicy remark, the performance is not build on cursing and complaints, but on a sophisticated abstraction of reality, taken from real situations and daily thoughts of the quiet majority.

At the end he summed up that everything has its end, even dreams. But that this end is not always death … The human turns into a philosopher when dreaming. And on stage Kobal was more of a philosopher than an actor. More a humanist than a humourist. And more a herald of the beginning of something new than the ending of something old.