Isabelle Kralj has
received five grants from the Slovenian government and the U.S. Embassy to
create new works in Ljubljana,
Slovenia, with
dancers and composers from the European nation. In 2006, she created a
performance using the music of Vlado
Kreslin, Slovenia’s
most beloved singer/songwriter. Now, with her co-director in Theatre Gigante,
Mark Anderson, and two esteemed Milwaukee
dance artists, Janet Lilly and Simone Ferro, Kralj has made a new
hybrid-theater piece to Kreslin’s music. Thanks to the Slovenian government,
Kreslin is here to perform the score live with Seth Warren-Crow adding drums. Three Other Sisters premieres March
11-13 at the Off-Broadway Theatre with shows at 8 p.m. In addition, Kreslin
will give a solo concert of his music and the Slovenian folk music that
influenced him 3 p.m. Sunday, March 14, also at Off-Broadway. It’s no small thing: The Slovenian
consul general is coming and Slovenia’s
president is famously a fan.
A new work by Kralj and
Anderson is also no small thing, and their partnership with Lilly and Ferro is
exciting. Three Other Sisters is
based on a Montenegrin tale, unrelated to Chekhov’s play, of three sisters in
love with a sailor who promised himself to each of them, unbeknownst to the
others, then went to sea, never to return. In a mansion on the coast, the
sisters wait until death for their Godot.
Kreslin also stands in
for the missing sailor. Fragments of text, movement and music are arranged like
the stanzas of an epic poem or ballad. Why choose this story? Kralj said,
“Because we all deal with yearning.” The creators imagined all the
possibilities of the women’s experiences, suspicions, dreams. The spoken texts
came from the dancers answering questions in character: What did you do after
one year of waiting? Ten years? Twenty?
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