For more than ten years, the director and author Boris Nikitin has been negotiating in his theater works the question of how we create realities and identities by representing them. The plays walk the fine line between documentary and illusion, between facts and their staging. The real biographies of the performers always play a special, central role. Works such as Imitation of Life or Hamlet are at the same time portraits of the performers on stage, which are created in the course of an evening before the eyes of the audience.
In his new piece Versuch über das Sterben (Attempt at Dying) Nikitin now changes sides: for the first time he negotiates his own biography. At the center is the story of his father's ALS disease and his open deliberations about leaving life by means of an assisted suicide. Nikitin connects the story of this outing with the story of his own coming out as a gay man 20 years ago. All he needs is an empty stage, a chair and the text itself. In this reduced setting, Nikitin develops an evening of theater, radical in its intimacy, about what it means to dare to take the step into the public eye.
Versuch über das Sterben is a play about the gaze of others and about the utopia of a vulnerability that is not a lack of being human, but a revolutionary ability.
Artist
Boris Nikitin
