INTIMA performans
Published on October 29th, 2025
Author and performer: Benjamin Zajc
Artistic advisor and MC: Ajda Schmidt
Photographer: Voranc Vogel
3 November 2025
20.00
Reservations are required to attend the event. Please send an email to: benjamin.zajc@gmail.com
Intimacy is an uncertain negotiation between spectacle and sincerity, between aggression and care, between public performance and private gesture. It happens somewhere between a party and a nervous breakdown, between celebration and catastrophe. It is elegant, possessing all the qualities of expected refinement. But things have a way of not staying elegant for long. What do we really share when the usual codes of comfort and politeness break down? Perhaps only some sparkling wine, the décor, and a few questionable life choices wrapped in performative art.
Benjamin Zajc’s latest performance, too, unfolds as an artistic moment, but also as evidence that he still hasn’t started going to therapy. It’s driven by a desire to isolate emotion, to search for that primary something that must remain hidden in society so it doesn’t scare people. The result is an attempt to understand what happens when that emotion nonetheless escapes; Intimacy is a neatly arranged nervous breakdown, a mix of self-reflection, performance, and a somewhat suspicious way of spending one’s free time. It plays with the boundaries between empathy and embarrassment, between the need for connection and the horror of actually achieving it.
There’s a chance you’ll find yourself in a situation where you feel compassionate, confused, and slightly tempted to run away. But that’s a normal response to intimacy.
Benjamin Zajc (1997) is a practical dramaturg, critic, and performer. Since 2020, he has been employed as a dramaturge at the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre. He publishes his thoughts on the performing arts in various professional magazines, anthologies and playbills, and has also published reviews on various online portals. His reviews are currently published in the daily newspaper Delo. He is a member of the selection committee for the international biennial festival of contemporary puppetry arts LUTKE and an external advisor for the international program of the Czech festival Spectaculo Interesse.
