BORIS KADIN – THE ORESTEA #1 #2 #3
Boris Kadin is a versatile and internationally active Croatian performer, for years in artistic and productive dialogue with the Artistic Direction of Lenz Foundation.
In his independent projects he radicalizes the position of the artist and the viewer. Kadin creates performative actions, media-art and film Through the study of history and philosophy, Kadin produces works that generate multiple meanings. He has performed and conducted numerous workshops at many international festivals and venues in Marseille, New York, Athens, Barcelona, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Prague, Parma, Düsseldorf. After ten years of work with the collective Via Negativa and two with Happy Gorilla, he continues his artistic path with solo projects, pushing the boundaries between theatre, performance, visual art and public art in the direction of a collective work, belonging to the community, crossing the line between stage and real life, between museums and streets, between private and public, between connection and disconnection.
Many times guest of the Festival Natura Dèi Teatri, since 2018 he is in creative residence in Lenz Teatro within the project on Aeschylus’ Oresteia for the creation of three performances, currently on international tour: ORESTEA The Post-truth, THE ORESTEA. Dystopian. and ORESTEA Paranoid Android.
ORESTEIA The Post-truth
2018
As Nancy says in Allitérations “We are faced with a new demand in artistic terms”: the demand that art be “made by everyone”. On the same front, Beuys states that every human being is an artist. The Orestea / The Post-truth project confronts the same idea, focusing on the “posthumous spectator” as an active and collective / community performer.
The questions that feed the engine of the project are: what is Aeschylus’ Oresteia still touching and teaching us? How to transform the spectator into a posthumous spectator? What is a tender role of theatre for today’s community? What is our posthumous truth about the first written trilogy? Oresteia / The post-truth requires individuality, singularity and difference or community and community? How to move from the stage to the city, how to mark / how to make a scar in the fabric of public space, how to leave a material rehearsal of the play after the live performance, how to expand the body of Oresta / The Post-truth from theatre to the “real” world?
The Orestea / The Post-truth project will also explore aspects of our general difficulty with equality and democracy, as well as aspects of Aeschylus’ tragedy in the contemporary context: what is a process today? Who is the culprit? Are we, as a society, able to recover, rewrite, relive our future?
In November 2019 Boris Kadin was in Matera, European Capital of Culture 2019, to present at AltoFest by TeatrInGestAzione a human-specific re-enactment of the first chapter of the multi-year project dedicated to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Oresteia. Post-Truth, realized in creative dialogue with the Artistic Directors of Lenz Fondazione Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto starting from some questions: “What touches us and what does Aeschylus teach us again in the Orestea? How to transform the spectator into a post-spectator? What is the role of theatre for the community today?”.
ORESTEIA. Dystopian.
2019
Dystopian is a performance based on the idea of an invincible DNA, source of eternal repetition: conditions that cannot be solved even by the Aeschylus Gods, especially today, when we are all connected and (mobile) technology has become part of our being, of who (we are not).
Dystopian is also a soft cyborg. That’s why the poetry repeated by Dystopian is a generic pattern of magical realism that expels words every single minute. Poetry is from a machine, using a limited amount of words.
Dystopian is also a murderer. In a postmodern way. The question is: is it more noble to kill a parent or to passively observe the disappearance of body and mind in an institution that takes care of the elderly?
Dystopian is the performance that takes the form of a semi-concert with generic poetry narration, using visual samples and stage actions related to the intimate story of the performance artist.
ORESTEIA. Paranoid Android
2020
Paranoid Android is a multimedia performance based on lyrics (sounds and screams) of alternative rock band Radiohead, while the title is taken from Marvin the Paranoid Android (Douglas Adams‘ series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
By using body, sound and video, Paranoid Android is dealing with ideas of futility, starting from Eschylus Orestea to mental bombs from Slavoj Zizek > Humanity? Yes, it’s OK. Concrete people? No, 99% are boring idiots.
Just like Tom York said “‘Paranoid Android’ is about the dullest fucking people on Earth,” performance ORESTEA.PARANOID ANDROID is about two dullest fucking people on Earth, Orestea and Boris Kadin. One is real and one is not.
Concept and realization | Boris Kadin
Performer | Boris Kadin
Direction and set design | Boris Kadin
Production | Lenz Foundation
Dystopian is a contemporary aedo that hybridizes the rhythmic phrasing of rap with Balkan nostalgia, Dadaist non-sense and a sound carpet of strident acoustic effects. But Dystopian is also, like many of us, a postmodern killer who condemns his father to intellectual and physical obsolescence by delegating his care to unrelated professionals. He too is a “misplaced organ” of the system because he refuses to anesthetize his guilt with an ethical hygiene facade and emphasizes it by tracing it back to a genetic predestination to kill that is passed down from one generation to the next. Very successful the scenic setting that, projecting the interpreter on a Pompeian red digital background, assimilates him to a vascular painting character immersed in a narrative marked by emblematic objects. (more)
Emanuela Zanon, Juliet Art Magazine
