Season 41: The Society of Individualism — Be (s) someone?

The originality of personality is what the individual must not lack, otherwise he has lost his existence. In addition, individuality can be bought well enough, and it is not even expensive. However, the uniqueness and uniqueness of the modern SELF is largely made up of media and marketing. The obsession with individuality has only intensified in recent years on social networks, supported by the rapidly increasing technological quality of mobile phones, which are largely built on the narcissism of their users. Social networks are becoming an initiator, which arouses in its users a constant desire to create a unique image of their individuality against the multitude of cyberfriends. At the same time, even the cynical environment of free competition of supreme capitalism and neoliberalism, which preaches a seeming equality of conditions, contributes to these tendencies towards uniqueness, so that one does not “fit in socially”. We are constantly being instilled with a universal responsibility for ourselves and what our life looks like or will look like. Everything is reduced to the correctness of personal decisions and the demonstration of one's own abilities. The SELF becomes a product that must assert itself before the competition. But is man really so independent of the outside world, of the society in which he moves? Is it in today's ideologically fragmented, hyper-informed, but also hyper-confused age, where — as Slavoj Žižek wrote “Dwindling Reality” — it is really possible to rationally and freely manage the project of one's life? Is the desire for uniqueness really something natural or is it just a very clever marketing that is meant to arouse new and new desires in us that cannot be satisfied? What about people who haven't become individualities? Do they have the right to participate in the creation of this individualistic society? Does solidarity have room in an age of individualism? Can there be a state and democracy? Can we form a community? Is it possible to divide into good and evil in this unreadable age? Against what principles to define them? Is it possible to be together? Is cyberspace an extension of public space or just the water table of the postmodern Narcissus? Based on these questions, we decided to devote the entire new season to the topic of individualism and society. As the basic communication code of this season is a portrait that reflects this theme. Each of the four upcoming productions on the main stage of HaDivadlo will be a de facto portrait of the central character and “her” company.

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