Bustric’s Theatre – How to unmask the secrets of reality

How to create illusions and surprises by exploiting the magician’s rules and knowledge? Bustric and his fantastic theater explain.

He doesn’t like to be called a “magician” because he considers magic to be an alchemy brought about by encounters between people. In his shows, he draws the audience into a collective game where everyone is able to discover the myriad masks of reality. Sergio Bini, aka “Bustric”—named after the dormouse he adopted as a child and with whom he learned to build fantastic worlds—is certainly one of today’s most interesting comedians.

Bustric considers himself a showman who has sought a profession in life by “learning, doing, meeting,” inventing it in his encounter with a reality that he interrogates with irony both in life and on stage.

His training began at the art institute, where he learned “everything he shouldn’t have done,” then DAMS and the great masters: Jerzi Grotowski, Zygmunt Molik, Étienne Decroux, John Strasberg, Eugenio Barba. He learned to use various techniques and rework them on stage with a narrative rhythm that fills his stories with surprises, funny and seemingly incomprehensible things.

To tell his stories, Bustric uses magical effects, thus breaking the audience’s attention, creating new mental spaces from which the most profound thoughts blossom. His acts often incorporate “life philosophy pills,” such as reflections on injustice or the importance of listening to children’s intuitions.

Using some fundamental principles of illusionism, Bustric treats his audience like children, revealing the perverse game of life. His shows are the constant reiteration of a single, great lesson: everything we see of reality is pure illusion. Nothing that surrounds us truly tells us what reality actually is.

Miraculously, Bustric’s shows give audiences “new eyes” through which they can look at life differently.

Following the thread of his original approach to theater as a craftsman of perception, we can rediscover the ideas of Leibniz and Kant, those of the German idealists and Schopenhauer: space and time are mere forms of perception, and the things perceived (representations) are not things themselves, nor do they even resemble them. And so Bustric plays with space; he performs in large theaters and small suburban theaters.

And when the moment of amazement arrives, the audience—lost in an unreal reality—realizes that there is still something that exists independently of us. Desperate yet comforting, sad yet full of passion and love.

This is Bustric’s theatre.