19. Eurokaz

In its nineteenth edition Eurokaz will focus on innovations in theatre conservatism.

Eurokaz will use similar methods and assumptions as in its previous years' research on new circus: that innovations are possible also within those genres dominated by a certain invulnerability of their viewpoints. In the case of innovative, avant-garde theatre, parallel to the processes of the destruction of familiar viewpoints, the thinking structures and artistic expressions that support and classify those viewpoints are also being destroyed. However in the case of theatre conservatism, the immovability of such assumptions, are, to say the least, intriguing. So if in the social sense we are allowed to use the term conservative revolution, we'll try to research if something like that is possible in the field of theatre.

Theatre conservatism relies on the invulnerability of a mythological matrix: non-tragic, and therefore, an endemic reductionism. On the horizontal plane, moral coverage (when needed, also a horizontal homogenization), and the family and teleological hierarchy on the verticals planes.

Eurokaz 05 opens itself to performances which rely on the role of their immediate social surroundings, be it in a thematic or in a constructive sense. This surrounding could also be described by the wider term of neighbourhood; in a daily life which denies utopian horizons, replaces criticism with delay, translating social stimuli in a way that precedes merely working with unprivileged communities.

Eurokaz 05 offers a different kind of social and performative energy; one which opens the limits of an insensitive theatrical professionalism and reduces our social essence to impressive scenes concerning the exchange of human material that can, again, after a long neurotic series, astonish as a psychotic catalyst of artistic creation and its innovation.

The international guests who in this context collect a street energy (Bruno Beltrao, Abou Lagraa), disperse a transparent eavesdropping on community (Arne Sierens, Emma Dante, Fratelli Mancuso), or reedit mythologems (DJ Spooky, Béla Pintér), will be joined at the rear by two Croatian examples of "using" neighbourhood: Zahtila's Labin Art Express and Čokrić's Šušur Bol from the island of Brač.

The other two international performances, Goat Island's When will the September Roses Bloom. and the solo dance, Once, by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker are also determined by social components. A psychotic catalyst within a therapeutic practice of theatre has been formulated over many years by Goat Island while Anne Teresa, with her fantastic combination of nostalgia and engagement, surely establishes a new performative courage on a global scale.

And in the end, when talking about courage, we can also mention the performance by a young Zagreb company Combined Operations which stays in line with the above mentioned breakthroughs towards an increased responsibility of theatre forms, helping in this way the Eurokaz programme to acquire a wide-ranging coherence of its choice.

Gordana Vnuk