Sanja Nešković Peršin: Short Stories

Short Stories, a performance by choreographer and director Sanja Nešković Peršin, is coming to the City Museum of Ljubljana. A production by Anton Podbevšek Theatre, in co-production with the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, the performance will transform the exhibition space on the museum’s first floor into a unique labyrinth of scenes and images. The performance will take the audience on a visual and spatial journey exploring questions of freedom, love, desire, control, violence and the search for ways out of the labyrinths shaped by our thoughts, relationships and the times we live in.
Short Stories by Sanja Nešković Peršin unfolds like a walk through an exhibition, confronting us with questions of confinement and the traps of contemporary life. Each scene functions as a conceptually independent whole – like an artefact of a particular moment, reflecting our struggles, our longings and our realizations. Yet these images merge into a unified narrative: the journey of a protagonist wandering through a labyrinth in which every section conceals a new trap, a new mirror of the times, refracting our relationship to freedom, love, resistance, desire, control, violence and emotion.
The conceptual starting point for the performance is the short story The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In it, Borges creates a tension between the material and the spiritual – between the stone labyrinth, a magnificent work of human ingenuity and arrogance, and its opposite, God’s labyrinth, the desert, infinite and uncontrollable. This tension between humanity’s desire for control and the inevitable openness of the world also permeates the performance, in which the labyrinth is not merely a metaphor for space, but above all a state of being.
The labyrinth is therefore not simply a stage observed by the audience from a distance, but a sequence of spaces that unfolds as a striking reflection on our everyday lives. The path is conceived not only horizontally, but also vertically, something revealed most subtly through the performance’s visual design. Each scene establishes a moment – whether fleeting or prolonged – a kind of reminiscence of the rules, relationships and turning points that have occurred within the field of art and that continue to shape our relationship with it today. In this way, the vertical path becomes a kind of immaterial labyrinth through which each spectator travels individually, seeking to recognise a hidden visual moment.
Through these stories, Sanja Nešković Peršin creates a tension between the material and the immaterial: the horizontal path emerges as a metaphor for the labyrinth of contemporary traps, while the vertical path unfolds as an ultimate space in which all human attempts at control fall away. Perhaps it is precisely there, when all sense of direction is lost, that the possibility of freedom emerges – a small yet invaluable step out of the labyrinth.
The performance lasts 50 minutes.
Choreography and direction: Sanja Nešković Peršin
Co-creators and performers: Mateja Železnik, Luka Ostrež, Filip Mramor, Luka Bokšan, Andrej Tomše
Curator: Tevž Logar
Set and video design: Atej Tutta
Costume design: Uroš Belantič
Music: Sašo Kalan
Lighting design: Jaka Šimenc
Authors of the texts featured in the performance: Filip Mramor, Luka Bokšan, Andrej Tomše, Tevž Logar
The performance features music by J. S. Bach.
Production: Anton Podbevšek Theatre
Co-production: Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana
Free tickets for the performance will be available from 7 September 2026 at mojekarte.si.