Every man needs a certain portion of narcissism. But when is the time it becomes dangerous and harmful? When people become for each other mere objects of "self-monitoring"?

In their latest production called Mono, the Debris Company, which has been acting on the Slovak theatre scene since the second half of the 1990s developing many successful theatre and dance productions, creates a world of five people who desperately try to form and define their own identity. Yet they still hit the walls of their own Self, which is more and more indefinable and ungraspable.

Though they don´t know it, they lock themselves in their private prisons with no doors, windows or bars. Who am I and who are the others - is the fundamental question which interests them. Or - who am I in the eyes of the others? The other person for them is only an image in the mirror, which serves only to confirm their own existence. The Self is being more and more crumbled for in the society focused on loans, productivity and a perfect body it misses some inner steady point, and it becomes, stated together with Gilles Lipovetsky, "something indefinable".

Two men and two women produce intensely the shapes of their own self, but it is difficult to find out what they are authentic in. It is maybe this over-production of the images of themselves. They need to manipulate, seduce, conquer, but as they take shelter in their private rooms, they cease to exist. The fifth of them is isolated completely - he is locked in his totally introvert world as a hikikomori.

The worlds of loneliness have a common point of intersection - the space prepared to serve to constantly new combinations. A new combination, new structure - it is also a new possibility to confirm one´s Self which is, paradoxically, unstable and unsteady. The narcissism is often defined by the symptoms as boredom, emptiness, inability to make relationships, insensitiveness, selfishness and recklessness. A self-staging in the public space. And that requires a huge portion of self-control and false discipline, so there is no energy and time left for anything else.

At the end there is only exhaustion. Perhaps it is caused by the fact that they long for closeness and intimacy, but they still do not know the way to it.

" He would take the imprisonment. To end up like a prisoner - that would be a life objective. But it was a barred cage. The roar of the world was flowing through the bars uncaringly, bossily and familiarly, in fact the prisoner was free, he could take part in everything, he misses nothing outside, he could even leave the cage for there was a meter distance between the bars, he wasn´t even imprisoned. "

Franz Kafka - Aphorisms

Choreography : Peter Jaško, Stanislava Vlčeková
Director, conception, music : Jozef Vlk
Dramaturgy : Martina Vannayová
Stage design : Tom Ciller, Martin Piterka
Costumes : Eva Rácová
Light design : Jozef Vlk
Musicians : Jozef Lupták, Peter Krajniak, Peter Šesták, Jozef Vlk
Cast : Martina Lacová, Emil Píš, Martin Piterka, Daniel Raček,
Stanislava Vlčeková

Duration: cca 60 min.