This festival of performance art in Maribor has a long tradition – the first one entitled Dream of the wire (Sen žice) took place in Maribor in the old Media Nox gallery in Orožnova ulica in 1993 under the management of Beno Artnak and the organization of the Youth Cultural Centre Maribor (Mladinski kulturni center Maribor), in 2000 Tomaž Brenk took over the festival – then for the first time under the name Performa. Performa was designed as a different, bold festival of modern performing arts. The home audience was addressed through a prism of fresh, for many even shocking modern multimedia and scenic approaches and forms. It is one of those festivals, that broke new ground being different and provoking the creation of similar festivals in Maribor and it’s direct surroundings through its design (Drugajanje, intended for high school youth, NagiB, festival of experimental movement, Fronta, Platforma). After Brenk left the organisation, the festival tried out different programme concepts over several years. From that reason Performa gave a greater emphasis to productions of contemporary dance between 2004 and 2009. After the emergence of a new festival Prestopi in Maribor, which was too similar to Performa, it was decided to redirect the focus a bit, yet still consider the primary vision of the festival – to show hybrid, multimedia and experimental, mostly non-institutional artistic projects that test the genre limits and seek new expressions and communications according to the tendencies in designing the modern world, whether they are technological, ecological, scientific, social, aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, ideological or economic. This year’s Performa offers performances, video projections, video and performance lectures, street performances, discussions with artists and concerts.
After the redefined and re-profiled festival of 2010, the festival started to include performances from various artistic fields in the program, not only from the field of performing art. The organisers are interested in authors, who develop a specific and individual language, even beyond the boundaries of a specific media, and are present in international areas through their works. Therefore there is an interest in performative music, literature, photography, fine art …
Two permanent programmes within the framework of Performa are video-performa and a series of performance lectures; the authors of latter are Katarina Stegnar and Miha Horvat (son:DA).
Already by 2010, Performa had turned from the stages to the galleries, onto the street and into non-institutional spaces. There are many reasons for such a decision: less financial resources from the Performa budget is now intended for technical performance of productions and guest appearances – MKC Maribor as is known has no stage of it’s own – more budget remains for more qualitative production execution. It is also a matter of identification of potentials, restrictions or specifics of certain places and environments. The premiere of performative installation by Janja Rakuš entitled Click my wounds (Klikni moje rane) for example was prepared in the Evangelical church, through which the project obtained a completely different connotation, than if the project had been held in a gallery or other similarly conventional performance site. Through the years, it was discovered, that by organizing the events merely in the conventional premises, only the audience that was otherwise bound to such premises were attracted – that is the »already convinced«. Through the choice of unconventional locations and sites the intention is to populate the performance area and the festival itself over a wider area.