The Project

Project Hero is created by Uroš Kaurin and Vito Weis, with permanent collaborators Katarina Stegnar (dramaturgy), Boris Bezić (video) and Lea Čehovin (music). They have been developing this idea since 2011. Up to the present, they have made three performances, recorded hours of material, hosted events and award ceremonies, and talked a lot about their work. A lot.

Hero is meant to be a life long project and does not make any pretensions to modesty. Ambition is its starting point and its constant foundation. Two heroes, who find themselves in extreme, bizarre and absurd situations, are always walking on the edge of a precipice or triumph. In an honestly ambitious way. Two guys who want to give the audience everything they can. The audience often does not even know that they want to see this performance. Or they know that they don’t. But are still glad to have seen it.

“We are interested in honesty. Our ambition is our honesty. We don’t buy excuses and don’t tolerate whining. We also don’t accept the concept of target groups and the idea that somebody without a university degree isn’t able to recognise good art. If we aren’t making art for everyone, we aren’t playing.
Our work and the process have taught us that it is necessary for us to acknowledge our limitations and work with them. We see project Hero as an opportunity to overcome our limitations. All in all, we feel very affirmative towards our work (meaning: proud (meaning: some would say: conceited)), but this is exactly what stops us from being content, what does not allow us to stop. We are interested in what we have yet to learn.

This is more a process of dialogue and an exercise in mutual understanding than a process of creation. The main goal of our project is to try and work together for as long as we are inspired to do so, to do theatre, stay true to ourselves and also to be honest towards the audience. Contemporary ethical, political and artistic questions are always nagging at our backs and we are confronting them through our work. With huge delusions of grandeur and total belief in theatre.

Most of the time, we only get to understand our work after we have already presented it. We don’t go in and know everything. If our goal is to understand what we are doing and to be understood, we need the other to do it. This doesn’t always work, but: no pain, no gain. We are afraid of failure, but welcome it anyway. It is unavoidable. We can never be self-sufficient. It is simply impossible not to include others if we want to communicate at all. And with this mindset, it doesn’t matter what someone else thinks or feels about your work. Or if someone is present to see it. Only feedback enables us to understand our work. It makes our work alive. We need an audience. A live one. We need to share time and space with them.”

We want to have a good time. We want the audience to have a good time too. With us.
We want to be funny, but also smart.
We want to be aware of what we are doing.
We want to be able to make mistakes.
We want our mistakes to work for us.
We want to make theatre. Great theatre.
We want to play our shows as much as possible and as long as we are able to.
In the end, we just love to be on stage.
And yes, we will probably end up naked at one point.

You are welcome to join us! (metaphorically, as in: follow our work, come see our shows. We are quite a handful to handle … even just the two of us.)

The Producers: Moment

Our key mission is the production and development of independent theatre. We strive to make as many people as possible familiar with contemporary performance practices, to make them get to know them and to deal with them critically. Projects are created through research, testing, learning and (self)criticism in search of possibilities and abilities of expression. Our main activities are regular production and post-production of performances, organization and implementation of trainings, workshops, education and contents of culture-art education, as well as organization of the biennial international Prestopi/Crossings Festival. We connect art with society and society with art. In Maribor, we run the Intimni oder, which has been growing in the common spaces of GT22 since 2014.