The Istrian National Theatre – City Theatre of Pula and the artistic collective MONTAЖ$TROJ are in the final stage of rehearsals for SOLARIS TWO, an original project by Borut Šeparović. The premiere will take place on Friday, 30 January 2026, at 8 p.m. in the Ciscutti Hall at INK Pula, with a repeat performance on Saturday, 31 January, at 8 p.m. The production will then be presented at Zagreb Youth Theatre on 24 and 25 February.
“What if a theatre performance decided to meet its film source face to face — and, in the process, acquired yet another, digital double?”
Taking Stanisław Lem’s novel and Andrej Tarkovski’s cult film from 1972 as its starting points, SOLARIS TWO relocates Solaris into the age of generative artificial intelligence and the infinite cloud of data. The stage becomes a laboratory of perception: before the audience, live performance, archival film and their computer-generated variant unfold simultaneously — creating a space in which we question what we are still able to recognise as true today, when visual evidence can be falsified as easily as everyday content on social networks.
At the centre is psychologist Kris Kelvin (Matija Čigir), confronted with “guests” — apparitions created from fragments of memory and the unconscious. Hari (Rea Bušić), the double of his deceased partner, is at once tangibly present and radically unreal: the body and movement belong to the actress, while deepfake technology occasionally “borrows” her face from the film archive. At one moment, three Haris meet on stage — the Hari from the film, the theatrical Hari and the computer-generated Hari — and it is precisely in this thin fissure between media that SOLARIS TWO comes into being.
Alongside Kelvin and Hari, Snaut (Nikola Nedić) and Sartorius (Sven Medvešek) appear on stage, while the performance also includes video/AI-hybrid appearances: Dr. Gibarian (Frano Mašković) and pilot Henri Berton (Vedran Živolić) appear exclusively via video recording. As an additional “guest” — a non-human performer / “visitor” — the robotic dog Unitree Go2 AIR also appears in the production, a figure of robotics that brings literal, embodied technology into Solaris’s logic of “otherness”.
The dramaturgy is by Filip Rutić, based on motifs from the novel Solaris and the screenplay of Tarkovski’s film by Tarkovski and Fridrih Gorenštajn. The visual and technological identity of the performance is shaped by Konrad Mulvaj, responsible for video, multimedia and AI programming: he treats archival film material as an active layer of the performance, synchronises projections and real-time image transformations live, and at the same time coordinates the movement of the robotic dog from the console. The set design is by Filip Triplat, based on motifs from the film set design by Mihail Romadin, and the costumes are by Desanka Janković, based on the original designs by Nelli Fomina. Lighting design for the live performance is by Anton Modrušan, and Roberta Milevoj is the associate for stage movement. The soundscape of the performance emerges in dialogue with the music from Andrej Tarkovski’s film — Johann Sebastian Bach / Eduard Artemjev — as well as through MONTAЖ$TROJ’s original interventions and AI processing.
SOLARIS TWO asks: where does the human end and the machine begin — and can love composed of memories and algorithms be any less real?