German premiere

It is night-time. It is raining. A solitary man, who looks more like a large lost boy, wanders through various sparsely furnished apartments. He plays but not happily, he dances but cannot command his limbs. He builds and creates but destroys and buries too. The play is embedded in the elegy and beauty of Hungarian and other folk songs.

Josef Nadj performs a monologue relating the existential confusion of two of his friends who committed suicide, a third who went mad and from his Yugoslavian past. Nadj’s movements comb through the subconscious of the human soul. This includes the understanding smile, that catastrophic humour between joy and existential despair.

»Journal d’un inconnu« (»Diary of an unknown«) is Josef Nadj’s first solo. It was inspired by own diary notes and poems by the Hungarian poet Ottó Tolnai, born in 1940, who – as Josef Nadj – comes from the region Vojvodina, too. Josef Nadj focuses on an unknown, who leads us as a marionette of his ghosts between humour and disaster, through a series of hypnotic images of pain and an irrepressible love of life.

»After 15 years at work, Josef Nadj is taking the risk of a dance solo … Almost in a trance (Nadj falls so deep into himself that you fear he may not come back), he draws like a storyteller on the tangled mass of his identity and offers to share with the audience his play on the edge of the abyss« (Rosita Boisseau, Le Monde, Paris, 24.12.2002).