| Year and length: | 2025, 100' (world premiere) |
|---|---|
| Text and direction: | Anthony Nikolchev |
| Inspired by: | The Double by Fëdor Dostoevskij |
| With additional texts from: | WD, Radovan Karadzic (aka Dragan David Dabic), and court records of the 2019 Christ church massacre |
| Co-creation: | Lukasz Przytarski |
| Production: | The Useless Room |
| With: | Anthony Nikolchev, Lukasz Przytarski, Chris Polick and the collaboration from WD |
| Co-direction: | Gemma Galiana |
| Set design: | John Isaac Watters |
| Sound design: | John Zalewski |
| Lighting design: | Teresa Nagel |
| Video: | Keith Skretch |
| Costume design: | Luna Izpisua de Kissel and Claudia Dockery with the collaboration from Hunter Abal-Sadeq, Kody Nelson and MaryKate Glenn |
| Producers: | Jules Hyun, Ornella Salloum |
| Developed with the help of: | Teatro Romea Murcia, Dance at the Odyssey, with Stacey Dawson Stearns through a Responsive Residency at CultureHub LA and the CalArts Reef Residency |
Theatre
Anthony Nikolchev / The Useless Room - The (Un)Double
Description
Socratic dialogue, psychiatric intake exam, dance/movement, and literary adaptation—The (Un)Double is a performance of devised movement inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella The Double. Taking the audience through the lens of several real-life icons of doubleness, it dissects the space between the self, the ideal, and the unreliable if not destructive role of narrative. From Dostoevsky’s incisive characterization of the human desire to be seen as someone we are not, a complicated journey emerges by which one maintains the self.
How dangerous is the desire to become an image of oneself, and where does that image come from? Focusing in on extreme cases of doubleness today, the performance asks how does The Double pathology manifest in contemporary society, and is there a point at which it can be identified and rerouted?