DERT
endemic songs
concept and text: Karmina Šilec
music: Tellu Turkka
performed by: CHOREGIE New Music Theater
narrated by: Nežka Struc
AVAIABLE: https://www.carmina-slovenica.si/en/webshop/
Concert/ CD/ Book
Slepica, Medi and other characters could be over a hundred years old. They were deeply asleep for a long time, but are awake now. They were summoned from the past and from afar. They stare at us with their piercing eyes, as if they were half alive and half dead. Their stories are an echo of howling remorse that the heroines awaited for years, decades, even centuries in the invincible despair of forced muteness. Their tempo is different, time flows at a strange pace: decades for the birth of a son, a few days for a fatal shot, one day for the victory in the greatest war, a moment only for a wedding, a dance, or a funeral. The milk of ancient melodies and epics drips from the narrative like the greatest miracle, like a healing topping for women whose tied breasts and mouths are drained from fatigue.
We share habitats and habituses with the heroines of DERT in an extended time through the experience of touching and overlapping on some edges, and thus creating a secret commitment to belonging – the same coordinates, sometimes the same codes. We belong to what we understand, both present and absent. They are our rearview mirror – everything seems to be close here and far behind simultaneously. Real and unreal at the same time.
DERT is a canvas on which the contents of the consciousness of our society, its fears, beliefs, doubts, states, questions, problems, pleasures, the history and the present, behaviors and nonsense, desires are projected.
DERT is also reminiscent of a deadacholicsocial narrow-mindedness that condemns every step and every action; it sang the last praises to the heroines with a vocabulary adorned with wonderful notions such as tradition, family, heroism..., and hid behind them the primitivism, mythomania, misogyny, as well as perversion and lies.
It reminds us of who created and buried the heroines – sworn virgins, virdžinas – Liljana, Suni, Lindita.