Damn Juan is not just another one-man show – it is, first and foremost, a project born from a sincere and unrelenting desire to create and express artistically under impossible conditions. These are not only impossible in the sense of production conditions – which are nowadays notoriously hostile to any kind of independent artistic work – but also in sense of cultural and linguistic conditions, shaping both the author and the ‘protagonist’, Juan.

How does one create in an environment whose language one does not speak – especially in a medium fundamentally shaped by that language? What does interculturality truly mean, and how can it be approached in practice? How do we engage with problems and challenges, how do we ask uncomfortable questions – and how do we formulate possible, perhaps even more uncomfortable, answers?

From a relatively simple idea, a progressively complex performance began to emerge – a story of a foreigner and, at the same time, a fellow citizen: a Slovenian Colombian, or a Colombian Slovenian. In simply attempting to live, function, and create within the Slovenian context, this figure opens up a specific political dimension. This dimension, echoing the feminist slogan from the 1960s – the personal is political – thoroughly permeates every layer of the performance. Yet, despite its importance, the narrative and discourse of Damn Juan do not remain trapped within it.

Autofiction, functioning here as a kind of meta-form, both offers and demands (should one dare to take that path) ever-deepening reflection and increasingly complex insights that compel us to confront the contradictions that life inevitably presents. And what better medium than art to address and embody such contradictions?

On the level of identity, we are not only confronted with questions of nationality, ethnicity, culture, language, class, profession, and artistic identity, but also with more fundamental existential questions: how does one live and act within a particular context? To what extent are we shaped and constrained by that context or by the web of circumstances around us? Why are things the way they are – and could they be different, perhaps even changed? If they could, why aren’t they? Can I have any impact on this – and if so, how, and to what extent? What happens to desire, to dreams? Does any of it carry meaning – and if so, where might that meaning be found?

In terms of form, Damn Juan is an eclectic mix of elements from different genres and performative approaches – including documentary theatre, monodramedy, performance art, stand-up, cabaret, musical theatre, epic theatre, physical theatre, and intermedia art. What unites these performative forms is a conceptual core rooted in autofiction and the fundamental question of its performability – particularly through the lens of interrogating the universality, political nature, and subversiveness of personal testimony, as well as the tension between social reality and theatrical fiction, or rather the affirmation of the contradiction between ‘personal’ and ‘performative’ truth.

Among the many conceptual entry points, the intercultural perspective of the creator-as-subject and creator-as-character stands out – a figure suspended between “passionate Colombia” and “sleepy Slovenia”, who, in this in-between space, poses essential questions and deconstructs his artistic persona along with the many identities formed in that time and place, while also venturing into the unpredictable.

We are truly delighted that you have chosen to embark on this journey with us!

Mišo Mićić, dramaturg and director