Adam Dragun: ALEX

Adam Dragun devoted more than two years of his life to working on the performance ALEX. It began inconspicuously: in August 2023, he received a message from someone he had never corresponded with before. It was an acquaintance, an employee of a prestigious Slovak theater institution, who found himself in a deep crisis—he had lost faith in the meaning of his work and his life. He asked Adam to help him create a solo performance that would give him that meaning back.

For Dragun, it was an opportunity he had been waiting for since he was thirteen – a chance to give birth not only to a performance, but also to his own career as a great theater director. From that moment on, a process began in which the boundaries between art and amateur psychoanalysis began to blur dangerously.

The actors must bare their souls, delving into their childhood dreams and deepest fears. Dragun films, archives, and obsessively analyzes the entire process so that nothing escapes him.

The result is a production created from recordings, reconstructions, screen recordings, and live action. ALEX is a work on the borderline between documentary and performance; it is both a record of the creative process and a radical reflection on the meaning of theater today. Its backdrop consists of DIY offices, children's rooms, and a theater stage that must defend itself against the demands of fascists. 

"Now I finally understand, Kostya, that what matters in our work is not fame, but the strength to persevere."
 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Artistic performance has always been closely linked to exploring and experimenting with ways of working, collaborating, and creating art."
 Bojana Kunst / Gabriele Klein

„The moment I am at the end of one project … it’s an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.“ Slavoj Žižek