Born in 1979, Nikitin grew up in Basel in a family of Ukrainian, Slovak, French, and Jewish heritage. He is a director, author, and essayist awarded the Swiss Theatre Prize in 2020, and researches the intersection between performance and theatre, fiction and reality, illusion and document, amateurship and virtuosity. In Basel, he created and directed festival It’s The Real Thing – Basler Dokumentartage, dedicated to the most innovative theatre with a documentarist approach, shedding some light on the several ways we build and represent different realities: in politics, media, science, history, art.

Nikitin’s production is founded on his personal vision of ‘vulnerability’, which he reinterprets not as a flaw, but as an extraordinary ability. Vulnerability is the potential that makes political and poetic entities out of people, it is the ability to manifest, document, be visible and vulnerable to critique and attack, which is the ability to act on reality.

The two shows presented at the Biennale, Attempt on dying and Hamlet, are manifesto creations by the Swiss director, who will be on stage himself, translating his vision into reality. Hamlet stars Julia*n Meding, electronic musician and performer, as a modern-day Hamlet that shows himself, his body, his biography in a performance midway between punk-queer musical theatre and documentary.
Attempt on dying stars Nikitin and his life: bare monologue and a very bare set of a single chair. The actor, in jeans and T-shirt, almost stands bare before the audience and tells the story of his father, who died of ALS in 2016 and over the last few months of his life, thought about resorting to assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland. Boris Nikitin draws a parallel between the coming out of his father about his intentions, and his own coming out about his sexuality.