Sebastijan Horvat is one of Slovenia's leading theatre directors. He graduated in Theatre Directing from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana (AGRFT), where he later completed a master's degree with the thesis The Space Between Word and Body. Since 2005, he has been a lecturer in Theatre Theory at AGRFT. In 1997, together with scenographer Petra Veber and actress Nataša Matjašec Rošker, he co-founded E.P.I. Centre, an independent production platform dedicated to developing innovative and research-based theatre projects in collaboration with major Slovenian cultural institutions. Since the early 1990s, Horvat has directed productions in virtually all major Slovenian theatres and has received numerous awards, including the University Prešeren Award, the Grand Prize of the Slovenian Drama Week Festival, several Borštnik Awards, and the Montblanc Young Directors Project Award at the Salzburg Festival for his production Alamut (2005).
Hydra is the epilogue of the Cement trilogy which the above-mentioned authors realised in a year, and presented them to the public in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana. The three theatrical performances were inspired by Müller's Cement, and they represent three diverse approaches to similar topics, such as: the relation between intimate and social relationships, love and revolution, the unfinished process of emancipation, the politics of memory. The HYDRA play also covers the same topics and it derives from the eponymous fragment from the Cement. And although this fragment could not be found in textual form in the trilogy of theatrical performances, it is of great importance not only for each of the three performances, but also for the cycle as a whole. In this fragment, which could be defined too quickly as post-dramatic nowadays, we can recognize an echo of the problems that German writer and director Heiner Müller was certainly facing during the historic deadlock the world was at before the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the one hand, it reveals the almost complete continuity of the Nazi era social elite – the rise of neon, financial sector, and carpet bombings as a prediction of the times we live in today – and on the other, the myth of a socialist hero of the working class and revolution.