Love You and Take Care

The name of NUDE theatre company can be read in several different ways. Nude in the sense of naked corresponds to the way in which the members of this (mostly female) artistic collective reveal themselves on stage – this does not involve physical nudity but rather an exposure of the intimate recesses of their being. Although they do not oppose interpretive theatre programatically, their work is akin to performance in that their presence on stage is authentic and based on personal experience. But NUDE is also an abbreviation for ‘Nezávislý útvar divadelnej energie’ (Slovak for ‘Independent Collective of Dramatic Energy’), which more than anything expresses their guiding temperament – director Veronika Malgot, actor Lýdia Ondrušová and visual artist Laura Štorcelová, who form the stable core of the company, as well as poet Mirka Ábelová and actor Lena Libjaková, are young, bold creators with a healthy dose of cheeky who unashamedly tackle themes usually considered private or too banal head on.

Love You and Take Care is another instalment in the company’s programmatic exploration of various aspects of the life of women. In the present case it is motherhood, a topic that mainly echoes in public discourse in attempts to legislate limitations on the rights of women freely to choose whether and when they are to become mothers. The four performers almost literally invite the audience into their home – the production is a site-specific piece made for the space of a real flat in Bratislava (at Divadelná Nitra, the four separate storylines will play out in the premises of the functionalist Vila K, called after the Kollmann family, who commissioned it from architect Oskar Singer in 1934). Each story broaches further aspects of the theme, although these are usually only brought up in private conversations or on anonymous message boards – infertility, unplanned parenthood, postpartum depression, or the life of a single mother. It is congenial that the performers do not idealise or romanticize motherhood, but instead through their own or indirect experience of an ordinary woman render honest confessions about all that pregnancy, labour, lying-in and raising children has in store. Each story is couched in a different type of artistic expression, and although the word takes centre stage in each, it is interesting to observe how diversely it is handled. What speaks to us more powerfully: simple reading, performance, musical-visual installation or ordinary speech rehearsed in verbatim?

Although it might be misleading to describe the productions of NUDE as feminist, the company is one of a few in Slovakia to pay systematic attention to the theme of women and female issues. In contrast, the spectatorial experience which the production offers is certainly not meant solely for the allegedly gentler sex – rather the opposite.

Martina Mašlárová