Mladinsko Theatre (SLO)

Director: Boris Nikitin

Overreacting, parody, provocation and subversive playing with borders between the real and the fake have become finely tuned props of populism in the competition for political attention. The borders of the agreed are constantly moved and questioned. It is almost as if we’d dragged the western philosophy over a Dadaist pit and that the question of what is reality and who determines it would become fuel for the next transgression. Non-fiction in a feverish state, a parody as the paradigm of our time! And the consequences, as always, real: winning the elections, triggering crises, making political decisions, wars, selling products. The victim of this is a little man and his probably greatest political ability: his vulnerability. Vulner-ability. How can we deal with all of this on stage, this probably most ambiguous space the evolution has ever produced? Perhaps only as a bad slapstick, as the opposition of things. In his works, Boris Nikitin explores the boundaries between reality and fiction, the document and its forgery, and he prefers to blow up these categories. The theater thus created is raw, rough, frontal, and direct. He plays with rhetoric and propaganda in a creepy way. First you identify with the fascistoid discourse on stage, the next moment you are overwhelmed by the fact that you have fallen for it, then you wonder how it happened. What reality is actually represented on stage? The categories are blurred, everything is called into question. This is a great feature of Boris Nikitin’s theater, it is the opposite of things, at the same time.