EUROKAZ 2004
It is as it is, back at the beginning: we must again confirm Eurokaz's direction, its place and significance. This year we look back on some companies that have been important to us, as well as being some of the leading theatre companies in Europe today. We can say that the vertiginous continuation of their strong ideas has been a journey that started at our festival. Eurokaz was among the first to recognize them in the past and consistently promoted them beyond an often disinterested or frowning mediocrity.

The companies La Fura dels Baus and Societas Raffaello Sanzio are exemplary of this artistic phenomenon which shook European theatre and reached to its highest levels without reducing an uncompromising radicalism, all the while maturely operating impressively diverse stage mechanisms, technology and production standards.

With its cycle Tragedia Endogonidia produced as eleven episodes across ten European cities, Soc. Raffaello Sanzio dismantles one of the basic issues of contemporary culture: a crisis of tragic consciousness that employs an impressively grand stylistic and organisational format.

La Fura dels Baus' artistic nucleus, after specializing in different celebratory events like the 1992 Olympics opening or other similar events, entertains today by producing operas at prestigious festivals such as in Salzburg, yet without falling behind on the continuation of their radical discourse of inquiry. XXX is a show of decisive political and social demands. It can be recoded and read as an excuse for interactive pseudo-porno-graphic play in which the audience, by its own choice, follows by convenience the challenges of de Sade and La Fura dels Baus.

An interactive relationship with the audience is the core of the piece by German choreographer Felix Ruckert. The audience, blindfolded, passes through three levels of seduction and gives way to direct manipulation by company members, becoming performers who decide on their own degree of inner pleasure.

Also, in the show by the Slovenian company Via Negativa, the audience will be interactively engaged: the group determines each of the performers' schedule and quality of food consumption which, in the best tradition of Greenaway and Bunuel, creates a brilliant scenic comment on the nutritionist schizophrenia of modern society. The other two works by Via Negativa speak with a freshness unusual for Slovenian theatre which appeared after many years of crises as an epigone relation to a Western European new theatre mainstream (especially dance).

The show by Chicago-based company Lucky Pierre sets up a negative interactivity: the audience is held in expectation all the time and the show relies on their consumerist impatience. It's a show about spending time; on an iconoclastic border of noble dilettantism and the impulses formulated by fellow Chicago performance group Goat Island; the show gives witness to an active North American performance scene that, not without a certain irony, tries to free itself from its most recent theoretical suffocations.

The French Compagnie 111 continues our theme of new circus that was enthusiastically accepted last year. As in the Australian shows we saw then, the word circus for 111 can be used conditionally; although performers demonstrate a perfect command of acrobat and circus skills, the show on its own is structured as a condensed reverie that lets itself free from being determined by genre.

Kim Itoh, often compared to another Eurokaz’s acquaintance from the past - Saburo Teshigawara, is a true star of contemporary Japanese performance: a leading figure of Japanese post-butoh generation who finds surprising production effects in a schizo-active relation towards traditional definitions.

And finally, it was about time a polite encounter took place between Eurokaz and Zagreb's Academy of Drama Arts. In the last few years, shy steps towards reconsidering the future of Croatian theatre have been made at the Academy, and Eurokaz cares mostly about that future. Discussions, lectures, encounters will possibly reveal an over-emphasised neurosis and an epidemic of iconoclastic solutions in the works by Academy students, but also a desire of professors for a looser application of traditional didactic tasks.

Gordana Vnuk