This June, The Un(Double), the latest work by School of Theater faculty Anthony Nikolchev, is set to make its world premiere at the 53rd International Theatre Festival of La Biennale di Venezia (Venice Biennale). Nikolchev’s piece is among the selection of internationally renowned experimental theater under the 2025 banner Theater is Body – Body is Poetry, curated by actor Willem Dafoe, who was appointed the artistic director of La Biennale’s theater department.
The Un(Double) was inspired by Dostoevsky’s 1846 work The Double, interweaving additional texts by Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb politician who was convicted of genocide, and judicial acts from the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. The work was produced through The Useless Room, an LA-based performance company of which Nikolchev is co-artistic director, and partially developed through the CalArts Reef Residency.
Nikolchev is a critically acclaimed performer, movement performance educator, writer, and director of major branded live events. His solo performance Look, What I Don’t Understand was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “tour de force” and earned him the award for best actor at New York City’s United SOLO Festival. He won the award a second time for The Echoes Off The Walls Underground Are Louder Than Your Footsteps Above Me, which toured the US, Europe, and Asia.
The work also features the talents of CalArtians Gema Galiana (Dance MFA 26), who is credited as co-director, Rory James Leech (Theater MFA 23) as a producer, and School of Theater faculty Keith Skretch as video designer.
More about the piece from La Biennale:
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?
The performance will be staged twice during the festival:
June 10, 9:30 pm CET
Tese dei Soppalchi
InfoJune 11, 7:30 pm CET
Tese dei Soppalchi
Info
Find the full 2025 Venice Biennale Teatro program at La Biennale di Venezia’s website.
