Slava Klavora – The Monument

The central platform of the performance is the communist movement in Maribor, where the audience comes into contact with Maribor activists, later national heroes/heroines. The action is set in the unstable times of the late 1930s, when Yugoslavia was torn by international conflicts, and Nazi fascism was already reigning in the vicinity, closing in on Yugoslavia year after year like a dark shadow.

The performance takes the audience back to the time of the upbringing, schooling and political activity of Slava Klavora and her comrades. A group of educated and trained communist women and men as well as young members of SKOJ became an important source of inspiration for rebellion, because with an elaborate programme, organisation and vision, the communist women and men represented an alternative to the existing capitalist system. With the outbreak of the war, they were the only ones to continue their activities underground. They did not surrender and recognise the Nazi occupation. The struggle began. The revolution had begun.

Despite her exceptional courage and good organisation, the Gestapo arrested Slava Klavora and her comrades on 7 August 1941. For eighteen days, Slava defied inhuman violence with an indomitable will. She did not betray anything to them. On 24 August, she was shot together with other comrades in the Maribor judicial prisons. Executed at the age of only twenty, Slava Klavora became a symbol of courage and resistance of Slovenian partisanship. This year marks the 100th anniversary of her birth and the 80th anniversary of her execution.

As ideas, places, events and people whose images we no longer recognise on monuments are fading into oblivion, we wanted to revive the significance of Marxist theory and revolutionary struggle on the theatre stage on the basis of Milica Ostrovška’s Even Still Resistance and other historical sources.

The revolution bears their names.