The article deals with relations between the institutional-repertory theatre scene and experimental, alternative, and later non-institutional performing arts, often related to as "amateur and dilettante" by the "drama theatre" critics. It explores how, at the turn of the 1960s to the 1970s, a specific form of student experimental theatres emerged in Slovenia in interaction with the student and civil movements and alternative culture (Pupilija Ferkeverk Theatre, Pekarna (Bakery) Theatre, Vlado Šav and Vetrnica (Windmill)). The new movement consciously decided to exclude classical theatre actors from its circle and to replace them with non-professionally-trained staff. Thus, the phenomenon of student experimental theatre blurred the boundaries between artistic genres, high and low cultures, professional and non-professional actors. It created a new, liberated performative territory, from which the alternative theatre and culture of the 1980s and the non-institutional performing arts scene of the 1990s emerged. The article aims to establish to what extent the theory and practice of American theatre avant-garde (Richard Schechner, The Performance Group, etc.) as well as the theatre of Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski influenced these movements.
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