The Zagreb Festival of New Theatre, EUROKAZ, was first held in 1987. It was established out of a need to fill the information gap in Zagreb where, after the International Festival of Student Theatres (IFSK), in the 1960s and the subsequent Young People’s Theater Days (1974 – 77), there was no major contact with the international theater scene, and foreign guest tours were infrequent, and of doubtful quality.

Aside from sporadic attempts by a few alternative groups in the mid-1970s (Pozdravi, Kugla glumiste, Coccolemocco), the life of the Zagreb stage has been characterized the last twenty years by a marked conservatism and parochialism that has choked from the start any ambitious moves toward a different sort of theater.

EUROKAZ wanted to change this, in Zagreb and beyond. The Festival wanted to offer more then mere information, and do something.
The first EUROKAZ ’87 tried to affirm a new kind of theater that was in confrontation with the leading theater world (realism, psychology, global metaphor, the illustrative), opening theatre toward other media, high technology, visual arts, spectacular geometry, gestus... showing that Zagreb was ready to absorb the experiences of its day and age.

EUROKAZ ’87 brought together some of the most well known representatives of visual, dance and music theatre in Europe: La fura dels baus, Studio Hinderik, Rosas, G.B. Corsetti, Krypton, Centrum swiatla, Harald Weiss, Gioco Vita/TAM, Teatro delle Briciole. The Yugoslav selection that year tried to join a new generation of authors who would pave the way for Yugoslav theater in its inclusion in world theater (Red Pilot, Taufer, Knez, Brezovec, Pandur, Bakal, Kugla, Sviben, Pipan).

Gazing into the future in search of its self, EUROKAZ then moved toward a daring selection with all elements of risk: by 1988, it abandoned the notion of “hits” and “famous names” and started bringing over relatively less known artists from the United States, most of them in Europe for the first time. The radicalization of “hi-tech” procedures, their logical extremes are visible in works by groups from San Francisco, in their individual performances but also in the joint organization on the level of the entire city.

Five groups from San Francisco: Survival Research Laboratory (film and video), Soon 3, Nightletter Theatre, Joe Goode Performance Group, Nancy Karp+Dancers, with a performance artist Rachel Rosenthal from Los Angeles, the Liz Lerman group from Washington, and the video program of the New York space The Kitchen and an exhibition of photographs by Paula Court, “10 Years in Downtown” have provided a conceptually in-depth insight into the current events of the American theater scene.

Of the European performances on the program that year were Jan Fabre from Belgium and the French group Ilotopie which introduced the theme of new ambientalization of urban spaces.

The Yugoslav selection has broached the ever present issue of the breakthrough of the new aesthetics into institutional theater (the ballast and advantage of the institution) through a new generation of directors who by the force of their concepts are changing the givens of establishment theater production. Haris Pašovic at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, Vito Taufer at the Theatre “Mladinsko”, Branko Brezovec at the National Theatre from Bitola.
Last year (1989) EUROKAZ returned, in one of its segments, to the source of change: tradition, the actor, the text.

After re-thinking these segments that have undergone all phases of radical negation to utter obliteration, we have tried to show, first and foremost (though not to solve) their contextual contradictions.
A part of the program called “the new dramaturgy” has pointed to methodological procedures of juxtaposing various texts, theater genres, historical styles, in order to instigate amid the apparent bedlam of linguistic and stylistic cubism a new harmony that perplexes the audience (which must learn to see).

Performances by John Jesurun, Need Company, Ivan Stanev and Branko Brezovec, by destroying discursive planes, explore ways of dislocating a story in such a way that it radiates, paradoxically, from the basic dimension of meaning (how can one reach the moral of a story without telling the story?).
Taking partial part in the procedures of “the new dramaturgy”, a group of performances or rather groups, stand apart with their specific attitude toward art itself, distancing themselves from customary theater praxis.

These are relatively hermetic artistic communities (we might call them “manifesto theater”) whose members accept their carefully elaborated credo with a certain dose of fanatism and intolerance, and which one must necessarily know in order to fully understand the meaning of the performance which is only part, and not always the most important part, of their activity: Raffaello Sanzio, Derevo, Red pilot, Etant Donnes.

The Popmehanika music group connects varied images and sounds using similar dramaturgical principles, while the Royal de Luxe had continued the line of performances of a new ambience.
The Soviet version of Genet’s “The Maids” (Theatre Satirikon) directed by Roman Viktjuk with his highly aestheticized touch has suggested a comparison with Tomaž Pandur and the Slovensko mladinsko gledališce’s “Šeherezada”.

From a topographical point of view, this year we have presented one segment of Soviet theater in its atypical form (Derevo, Popmehanika, Roman Viktjuk), in a kind of aesthetic profiling that one dose not often meet in that country, closest to the praxis of Novum around which EUROKAZ has invested the greatest effort.

The accompanying program includes a video production of the Mickery Theater from Amsterdam, a workshop for new critics, a round table on the theme of “New Organizational Models of Theater and the Possibility of Using them in Yugoslavia”, the creation of a Yugoslav theater network, and, like every year, many discussions within the framework of the Festival.
An OFF-EUROKAZ has been founded which, aside from performances by Zagreb free groups, and in the form of a Review of Theatrical Amateurs of Croatia wishes to stress the exceptional creative potential of what many consider a peripheral realm that hovers between theater and social influences.

This year, EUROKAZ closes the circle: it returns to the first Festival with two groups who then enjoyed the greatest success (La Fura dels Baus), and the greatest controversy (Rosas).
Has the context changed over the last three years?
What do these groups mean today and what reactions will they arouse this time around?
Has EUROKAZ changed something in the reception of new theater in Yugoslavia?

This year’s selection includes also the English group Station House Opera which is taking us back, with the “metaphysics of building”to the delightful question of the beginnings and meaning of the dramatic experience.
“Faust” by Tomaž Pandur with a revival of director’s glamour deliberates on the eternity of Faustism, freeing it of its ideological superstructure in order to re-conquer the aesthetic domain.
With the IETM congress and the fine Yugoslav selection this year, we are inversing the usual Festival situation: during the past three years we brought “the world” to our audiences, and now we are bringing ourselves to the “world”.

Yugoslav theater with its creative potential can participate on equal footing in all major theater events the world over, holding even a prominent position.
The first part of the program (during the Congress) gathers together exceptional artistic personalities: Bulgarian director Ivan Stanev and a new generation of already acclaimed Yugoslav directors: Branko Brezovec, Haris Pašovic, Vito Taufer, Dragan Živadinov (Red pilot). The significance of this gathering can be compared to the role played in European theater (in the 1970s) by generations of German, Polish and Romanian directors.
Having matured under the specific conditions of socialist system cultural strategy that cripples relevant forms of non-institutional theater association, channeling young people into theaters that are under state patronage, this generation has wound its way through the Scylla and Charybdis of the conservative mechanism and succeeded in using the momentary ineptitude of the ideology in government as well as the stunted state of market logic in order to stage amazingly radical performances even in national theater or opera.

Although each of these directors including Stanev has developed an utterly personal style of undermining conventional theatrical form, we can speak of certain points they have in common.
What we have here is almost the articulation of a new theater language that dramaturgically contextualizes the historical legacy, juxtaposing different theater conventions. This is not in the form of an eclectic historicism such as visual arts and architecture that create an aesthetic enjoyment as an awareness of the falsely freed “burden” of the past (historical references and quotes are not democratic signifiers), but taking into account the historical continuum and problems that conflicting artistic forms pose; on a Musil-like oblivion, so to speak, of extremes.

The system of non-imitative communication in which the onlooker participates as an equal with his code, functions on the principle of floating connections (for example, Bob Wilson communicates with popular music by Leo Martin in “Calling the Birds” or Verdi with the Bosnian singer in “Traviata”).
The “material” for realizing this will seem familiar (the conscious, often aggressive use of familiar, sometimes rather worn-out models), however the original articulation of sophisticated overmaturity (these people, namely, are versed in everything) is not as concerned with its material as with the way in which the various elements are arranged in a whole, and how this whole should be treated.

The meaning of a performance can be read only from its total structure.
The serene chaos that rules these performances is an expression of a heightened organization and a different harmony that seems to speak to us in Hegelian terms on the panlogism of the cosmic and aesthetic order.
This new language lends novel substance to the emptied form of European theater and speaks in the name of the future of theater, beckoning people toward new passages.
Such performances are writing out a new temperature chart for the people and art of our day and age.

In order to show something of the variety of the Yugoslav theater scene, we have included the Roman Theatre “Pralipe”in our informative program; this group, despite daily cultural repression, has existed for over twenty years now as an essential fact of Yugoslav theater. Also there is one of the youngest theater groups from Ljubljana: Gledališce “Helios”.
Five young choreographers are also taking part as an investment in the future of Yugoslav dance scene, and there will be remarkable performance of the Albanian Drama Theatre from Skopje which with its modernity defies its own manipulated space of social reality in which the only theatrical option is either vociferous politicized language, or the silence of a theater of escapist oblivion.
Next year EUROKAZ will be embarking on a new thematic series, but always bearing in mind its grand ambitions: a search for those impulses that contribute to creating a new theater language, that instead of fulfilling, alter the history of theater.
EUROKAZ is held every year in the latter part of June. This year, because of the IETM Congress, its dates have been shifted to the month of March.

Gordana Vnuk