Keep it real: Boris Nikitin's festival of documentary performance
On a Swiss director whose work critiques the portrayal of reality on stage.
Hello! I’m back in Belgrade but this week’s newsletter takes us to Basel, in the northwest of Switzerland, which has a lot going on culturally for a city of its size, including It’s the Real Thing, a festival exploring the documentary form, curated by Swiss director Boris Nikitin.
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Early in his career, as part of his 2009 show Imitation of Life, the Swiss director and author Boris Nikitin created an ‘anti-documentary manifesto’ in which he stated that “documentary is the highest form of illusion, of propaganda. It does not simply portray reality - it manufactures it.”
From the outset his work has interrogated documentary performance and the construction and representation of reality on stage. This desire to critique the form led to the creation and curation of It’s the Real Thing, a platform for the documentary arts, the fifth edition of which starts in Basel today.
The initial idea for the festival came about in 2010, following Imitation of Life, which Nikitin describes as a pastiche of the kind of work made by German collective Rimini Protokoll. He’d experienced a couple of pieces of documentary theatre that had left him feeling unsatisfied, upset even, and he thought it would be good to have a moment of self-reflection. The original idea was to stage an event in Berlin with a proposed title of ‘Against Documentation,’ but not everyone viewed this in the humorous spirit in which it was intended and the project was shelved.
A couple of years later Nikitin was able to restart the conversation at Kaserne in his hometown of Basel. “The idea was just to have a closer look at this genre, at the means of production and the performative strategies,” he says. The form of documentary popular at the time placed real people in front of audiences. But the very act of putting real people on stage has an impact on their ‘realness.’ “My criticism from the beginning is that I felt like people were being reduced to certain identities as a means to an end.” One could argue, he says, that these “people are being used and maybe even exploited.” Though, he clarifies, he doesn’t mean that in a moral sense, rather in a dramaturgical one. “Real people on stage are actually not that interesting.”
“I wanted to address the problem that, in the documentary genre, people in most cases HAVE to be “themselves.” My question was how to address this problem—so that people don’t have to be themselves but can be themselves. As a possibility.”
“My suggestion was: by trying not to be oneself, paradoxically, only then can one be oneself.” he says, “or at least have the capacity to be oneself.”
The inaugural edition of It’s the Real Thing took place in 2013 and featured work by She She Pop, Gob Squad, Milo Rau and Jerome Bel. Later editions have featured work by Marta Gornicka, Tim Etchells, Kim Noble, Ursula Martinez and Jaha Koo, the programming intended to invite questions about the documentary form, about illusion, authenticity and the act of placing oneself - or others - on stage. For Nikitin, ‘real people theatre’ can be creatively limiting. It can make the world feel narrower, whereas he wants to leave a show feeling “wow, now the world is bigger.”
There’s an impish quality to Nikitin, which might account for why he followed the inaugural Basel platform with a piece called Don’t Be Yourself which placed five real people on stage and had them tell their stories, only to subvert and play with the audience expectations on the use of biographical material in a performance of this nature, with people’s stories finding their way into other performers’ mouths.
During the creation of the piece, the idea for Nikitin’s 2016 production of Hamlet came about. As you may have gathered this was not a straightforward reworking of Shakespeare. It was a fusion of experimental documentary play and gig theatre featuring performer and musician Julia*n Meding as a modern Hamlet who revolts against reality.
While it took its cues from Hamlet, it was also, he tells me, semi-biographical. “All my work, in the end, is based on the depressive phases that I have from time to time,” he says, “and these feelings of impotence and powerlessness and not being able to decide, not being able to act, being in a narcissistic loop with yourself and wishing to break out of that.”
All of Nikitin’s thinking about reality and potentiality coalesced in his 2019 piece Essay on Dying, a solo show about his father’s death from ALS which he performed himself (you can see a trailer here). “After having been so critical about documentary theatre for so many years,” he says “and, at the same time, having worked with the biographical material of performers in so many projects and knowing that it’s a delicate thing to do, I decided to do exactly that of which I was critical. I had to question my own critique. And I felt like I can do it only by going on stage myself.”
“To work on Essay on Dying was also to reflect on the power of documentary,” he says, “on its systems and structures.” He talks about this process more in this interview. Essay on Dying also contains reflections on coming out as a gay man in his early 20s. Nikitin views coming out as a “form of performative documentation: it changes reality in the very act of describing it. At least for the person and maybe for the people to whom the person is coming out.”
“I was hiding, and I invested so much energy in hiding,” he says. “The world I grew up in made me believe that to be gay is a punishment. I internalised this ideology, then at some point I realised this wasn’t true.” This realisation helped him to see that: “reality can be changed. Reality is a construct, though we tend to forget that.”
Given his career-long fixation on ideas of the real, it was perhaps a given that he would one day end up making a piece about the daddy of reality shows, Big Brother, the show in which a group of ordinary people are filmed 24 hours a day, doing everything brushing their teeth to having sex. First broadcast in February 2000, the German iteration was the second series to air after the show premiered in the Netherlands (the UK version would debut later in the summer). Initially Nikitin was “one of those people who thought: what the fuck is this?”
Then, during his studies, he became more interested in it as a phenomenon. At a time when the media landscape was dominated by the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies, these big fantasy epics featuring people who could do magic, audiences were also obsessing over the lives of a group ordinary people pottering about in a cramped container house. “The Big Brother house was the blueprint for what would come afterwards,” he says. “People’s lives were becoming everyday performance.” But it’s more than that, he says, “because you’re being watched, you have to succeed. You have to deliver. And what you deliver is being authentic.” Big Brother paved the way for where we are today.
He proposed a show to Staatstheater Nürnberg to mark 20th anniversary since the first series of Big Brother. Season One, Twenty Years of Big Brother placed a recreation of the Big Brother house on stage and populated it with actors. This wasn’t nostalgia trip theatre. Dialogue from the original series becomes increasingly surreal and distorted until Trump appears on the screens, drawing a direct line between the show and our current predicament. (Here’s a Nachtkritik review of the show). The opening of Season One coincided with the time of the first Covid lockdown, so they ended up livestreaming it, “which was ironic, because suddenly everyone was in the same situation.”
Big Brother centred the kind of everyday behaviour that would usually remain unseen, Nikitin explains. “In many ways it prepared us for Trump,” whose strange kind of fame, lest we forget, was amplified by his stint on a reality show. The word ‘obscene’, he points out, derives from the idea of actions that occur “off-scene” or “off-stage”, the things that are not supposed to be seen. This is how Trump operates, there is no “off-stage” with him; “he farts everything out.”
During the making of the show Nikitin became increasingly interested in the Big Brother house itself, as an anthropological object, something that belongs in a museum. In 2023, he presented The Last Reality Show, in which a slightly smaller recreation of the original Big Brother house, empty of its inhabitants, was placed in the Tinguely Museum in Basel, where it was framed as a historical artifact. (German speakers can hear Nikitin discussing it here).
Recently Nikitin has become interested in live cinema as a form. Having been approached by Swiss national television to come up with a 24-hour format, he suggested a show featuring a group of young people roaming around the city followed by a camera for an entire day. “They would just basically talk philosophical stuff about the world they live in.” Because he wanted to focus on young people, he reached out to Sebastian Nübling who has a long-standing relationship with Junges Theater Basel making insanely cool-sounding shows with young people, the latest of which, Krach, opened last week. (You can read a review here).
While the television project didn’t go ahead, Nikitin and Nübling took the concept to Theater Basel, where it evolved into Demons, a three-hour live cinema piece in which a group of young people move around the twilit city, occasionally hopping on public transport, as a camera man follows them around. The results are watched as it happens on a screen by the theatre audience. In 2024, they repeated the format in Berlin with members of the ensemble at the Maxim Gorki Theatre running round the streets of the city in creepy clown makeup.
Nikitin reprised the Demons model in his most recent production for the Staatstheater Nürnberg, Mixtape, of the Indivisible Community of Republics, in which seven twenty- somethings wandered round the city reflecting on their lives – though, as ever with Nikitin, it was more complicated than that: the words they speak were all composed by him. Everything was scripted.
Which brings us back to It’s the Real Thing, Nikitin’s festival which returns to Basel this week after a hiatus and is headlined by Carolina Bianchi’s CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY – Chapter I: The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella, a show which is completely in Nikitin’s wheelhouse. Bianchi’s show invites us to watch as she takes a drug on stage and slowly loses consciousness. It’s a show in which we both witness something ‘real’ - things are done to Bianchi’s body - and a tightly scripted and dramaturgically rigorous piece of theatre.
The programme also features Nübling’s collaboration with performer Kenda Hmeidan, In a Time of War, a show that started life in the basement of a Syrian restaurant, and Manuel Gerst’s Metamorphosis in which a VW Beetle gets the shit smashed out of it (I really want to see this). In keeping with previous festivals, while some of the work programmed is new, other pieces have been touring for some years. “You don’t always have to show the latest shit. I have always presented older works. I find it interesting to think about how a work can travel through time.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Death of a Salesman - Rufus Norris, former artistic director of the National Theatre in London, is directing Arthur Miller’s classic in Türkiye. Halit Ergenç, a major Turkish TV star, takes on the role of Willy Loman and Es Devlin is on design duties. It opens at the Zorlu Performing Arts Centre in Istanbul on 26 March.
John Proctor is the Villain - More Miller, sort of. London’s Royal Court stages the UK debut of Kimberley Belflower’s high school reworking of The Crucible. Danya Taymor’s Broadway production was a huge hit and now UK audiences get to see it for themselves. It opens on 26 March, though the whole run is pretty much sold out.
Automatenbüfett -Written on 1932, Austrian dramatist Anna Gmeyner’s forgotten play has been revived multiple times in recent years. British theatre critic Theo Bosanquet, Gmeyner’s great grandson has written about the experience of seeing her work be rediscovered in this way. Here director Jan Bosse helms the Berlin production, which opens at the Deutsches Theater on 26 March.
Slovenian Drama Week - This annual festival showcases the best new performances based on a Slovene play or text from the past theatrical season. The 56th edition includes work by Oliver Frljić, Tjaša Črnigoj, Katarina Morano, Tomi Janežič and actor Anja Novak. It runs from 27 March to 11 April.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to get in touch about anything newsletter-related, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com