Marko Mandić and Samo Kutin in a concert performance of MandićCirkus.
No set design, no costumes, no lighting effects.
In Cirkus, Mandić unreservedly settles accounts with the actor and the performer, with the artist and the egomaniac, with the exhibitionist and the voyeur, with the divine and the banal, with the pathology of ambition and the misery of success … In doing so, he is as ruthless toward himself as he is toward the spectator – both establish and enable a Faustian theatrical consensus which, in its essence, does not differ in the slightest from the ideological apparatus of the state. On the contrary: both the state and the theatre – whether they criticize or affirm – are media for the production of ideological fiction. Or, as Pascal Rambert says in Closing of Love: “... no, the world is not bad – it’s the fiction in which we enclose it that makes it repulsive.” (MandićCirkus, role no. 64)
In the Cirkus of egomaniacal subjectivization, Mandić appropriates everything he has ever uttered, performed, acted, shouted, declaimed, chanted, sweated through, internalized, or extracted on stage and in performances. “My dignity is a grimace … Followspot on me, fuck!” (Wajdi Mouawad, Scorched; MandićCirkus, role no. 89)
The only objective fact – the conceptual foundation of the project – is Mandić’s theatrical biography, comprising 91 acting creations from 1996 to 2021. MandićCirkus strictly follows the chronology of their creation.
