The Opposite

Original title Das Gegenteil der Dinge

Première: 28 March 2019, the upper hall of the Mladinsko Theatre
Running time 2 hours. One interval.

Director Boris Nikitin
Dramaturg Goran Injac
Assistant director/Co-director Jan Krmelj
Costume and mask designers Vanja Djuran, Lea Bratušek 
Music selection Boris Nikitin, Jan Krmelj
Musical arranger and répétiteur Uroš Buh 
Language consultant Mateja Dermelj
Translator Tanja Petrič (from German to Slovenian), Urška Daly (from German to English and from English to Slovenian)
Sound designer Marijan Sajovic
Special effects consultant Klemen Stare
Stage manager Gašper Tesner

The final version of the text was created in collaboration with the entire team.

Cast
Primož Bezjak
Janja Majzelj
Ivan Peternelj
Blaž Šef
Stane Tomazin

On stage, there are five clowns trying to do an avantgarde neofascist piece. Or are there five actors that just haven't noticed yet that they themselves are part of a fascist mindset already? Or both at the same time, as they can only exist as their own opposite, the opposite of things? If we appropriate the tools of the opposite side, its mechanisms and the way of thinking, we can overwrite them, turn them into something completely different. We negotiate with our own fears, we become playful, even with the things that we fear or are opposed to the most – it's only through a game than they can be disarmed. What if we imagined a neo-fascist as a sentimental, vulnerable person who questions the reality? In times when everyone has become satirical, when they appropriated tools of exaggeration, like provocation, caricature, polemic, the theatre is forced to re-claim these tools.

Boris Nikitin investigates the line between reality and fiction, between document and its fake, and just loves to blow up those categories. He plays with the rhetoric and propaganda. At first, you identify with the fascistic discourse on stage, then the fact you bought it chills you to the bone, then you ask yourself how could this happen in the first place. What is the reality represented on stage? The categories are blurred, everything is questioned.

Boris Nikitin’s The Oppositeoriginates from a very important element of contemporary reality. The satire and the pompousness in the skeletal structure of neofascism, which inside an individual rise to an irrational impulse, are rapidly penetrating into the craters of society. […] But by totally sucking in and caricaturing the right-wing mentality, The Oppositeat the same time disarms it. The space of engaged theatre at least for a moment becomes naked, purified space of reflection, empowered with satire. 

Tjaša Škorjanc, Radio Študent, 2 April 2019

Director

The theatre director and author Boris Nikitin (1979), born in Basel and a son of Ukrainian-Slovakian-French-Jewish immigrants, writes and directs in the international independent theatre scene as well as in established city theatres. He is the initiator and artistic director of the Basel festival It’s The Real Thing. For the last ten years his theatre works have been reflecting the representation and production of reality and identity in politics, economy, religion, personal stories and in the arts. His pieces always look for the dazzling boundary between performance and illusion-theatre highlighting the ambiguous and the potential in which individuality and the capacity to act become thinkable newly. In 2017 he was given the J. M. R. Lenz-dramatist award by the city of Jena.

Producer

The Mladinsko story started in 1955 and it reached one of its peaks in 2008 with the title of the European Ambassador of Culture bestowed upon the theatre by the European Commission. In our new projects, we are dealing with the symptomisation of the society, and we show the recorded symptoms using the appropriate performative procedures. For this reason, public space, to us, becomes an equal performance space.

www.mladinsko.com
info@mladinsko-gl.si