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).
Brecht's didactic play about the spread of communism in China was banned for many years and staged only seven times in Germany. One of Slovenia's most acclaimed theatre directors of his generation, Sebastijan Horvat, took the risk of revisiting this "forbidden text" and, by combining bodies in motion with elements of visual art, created a striking new interpretation.
Four agitators stand before a Party tribunal and must account for the death of a young comrade during a mission to spread the communist cause in China. In order to justify their decision, they reconstruct a series of crucial situations and examine the consequences of the young comrade's actions. Although passionately devoted to the revolutionary ideal, his behaviour repeatedly undermines the cause and eventually becomes a threat to the movement itself.