Premiere DANGEROUS LIAISONSPierre Choderlos de Laclos
Special thanks to the City Theater of Ljubljana, the Miketa Center and Mila Čuljak.
In the modern world, Juliette and Valmont are a married couple who belong to high society; they do not write letters to each other, but rather choose lovers for each other and easily involve them in their erotic games. Their alliance is firm and unwavering until a person appears in Valmont’s life who brings him an experience different from any previous ones.
Inspired by the film adaptation of the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses by director Roger Vadim, this play directed by Olja Lozica opens a world of desires, love promises and violence. Built from poetic images and poetic language, the play focuses on various unspeakable states inherent in every Homo sapiens, states in which the unspoken itself is a call to reinvent love, to reinvent invention.
Why do love stories excite us? From ecstasy, sexual contact, falling in love, asking why you don’t love me, reuniting, committing suicide, or repeating it all over again with the same or a new person, love stories carry with them an uncertainty of the outcome. Alan Badiou, a French philosopher, suggests this answer: Because every love carries a new experience of the truth of what it means to be two, not one. Every love gives us new proof that the world can be different and experienced differently than just a consciousness that belongs to only one person, only one view of the world. Badiou sees love as a reinvention of life because reinventing love means reinventing that reinvention. Every time two different people meet and want to be united for a while and share truths with each other, a new truth about the world is born precisely because the truth of these two people, individually, abruptly changes. That’s why love stories excite us.
In this sense, the triangle of Valmont, Juliette and Marianne, a triangle that expands into a network of desires, power and control, contains precisely the uncertainty of how each of the new encounters changes the one who is exposed to them, and what creates this change in relation to all the other love relationships that were previously established. The network of characters in our version expands depending on the characters’ curiosity to inspire new truths about themselves and even about the world. The search sometimes ends in relief and sometimes in pain.
Sponsor of the play “Dangerous Liaisons”
