Attempt on Dying
by and with Boris Nikitin
Production management: Annett Hardegen
Supported by: Fachausschuss Tanz & Theater der Kantone Basel-Stadt und Basel-Landschaft.
A radical and at the same time tender text.
Thus the very private becomes social and this theater performance political. The performer penetrates so deeply, self-critically, analytically, but also simply and lovingly into his intimate, individual life that he opens the view to questions that we usually avoid.
One year after the death of his father, author and director Boris Nikitin begins to write the story of his ALS disease. The disease had made short work: it took almost a year from diagnosis to death. Very early on, the father opened the idea of considering assisted suicide, which is a legal way of dying in Switzerland. It’s a statement that changes everything.
In "Attempt on Dying" Nikitin combines the story of this outing with the story of his own coming-out as a gay man 20 years ago and develops a radical and at the same time intimate theatrical evening about what it means to take the step into the public eye, making oneself attackable and vulnerable. Nikitin's play thereby fundamentally reinterprets vulnerability from something that we normally prefer to hide from each other to an ability that arises in the act of its exposure.