A View from Within 

Fifteen years of one theatre festival.

An appropriate time to view results, unfold directions and start towards an evaluation!

What were the motivations that created Eurokaz, what did it want, what did it achieve, what worked, what was its relationship to Croatian theatre and what orders did it overturn? These are some of the questions that I will try to address as the founder and author of the programming concept behind Eurokaz.

One view from within: fragments of memories, self-approval, self-reproach, a waterfall of images, some worn-out quotations and the pleasure of diagnoses.

An intimate theatrologue willing to contemplate the topic of new theatre.

From the very beginning I was rebuked for being exclusive, totalitarian and a proponent of new theatre as the only kind of theatre that both represents the present and acquires the rights to the future. I replied: ideas that open passages are fragile; resistance against them is historically accountable. First, we must persist, accepting the odium of imposing a context onto something that would prosper much better on its own, and then we must believe that the first big bangs of genius will coalesce into a navigable sequence of talented achievements, enduring at the edge of their own death. To put it simply: feel the strength of weak ideas (Valéry).

Had I been easily reconciled and ready for compromise - I am reminded of this by peering to the foggy eyes of the cynicism of cultural bureaucracy on a daily basis - Eurokaz would have expired after only two or three years, or would have, in the best of cases, lived out the destiny of the Young Peoples' Theatre Days, a manifestation which has been flattered: here, a valuable, but velvet initiative which Croatian theatre had no will to support. Today, when Eurokaz has become an undeniable cultural fact - obtaining a little office of its own last year, accepting the financial crib of benign balance and serenity (if it received more it would become over-dominant, if it received less the arrogance of its smarts would become too excessive) - my totalitarianism may have a softer mane and I may look upon the shearing and shrieking of the dutiful guardians of theatrical order and peace with a smile.

But, why has Eurokaz always provoked vehement reactions, why was it always a case of confrontation and not of a civil coexistence with the Croatian theatre establishment?

We can not say that a region is involved in the happenings of contemporary theatre unless it has relevant theatrical production of its own and if it visibly exhibits, as a topos of theatrical modernity, only one international festival that has, as any festival, presentation as its starting point, such a strategically limited field of operations. The suspicion of Croatian theatrical circles towards the Eurokaz aesthetic, the lack of willingness to open up the profession to the experience of new theatre that has since the early eighties entered, with a blast, even the biggest institutions in Europe and acquired the status of mainstream, has been the cause of our celebrated delay in comparison to the impressive artistic events in other countries.

Ignored, pushed to the margins, into the alternative as a safe option, Eurokaz has, from a solitary position, fought from its very beginnings that its programme would be observed in the context of relevant theatre.

It is paradoxical that Eurokaz has influenced Slovenian theatre to a much greater extent then Croatian. On a European level, Slovenia has become theatrically more interesting precisely because it has responded to Eurokaz's challenges. However, Croatian theatre has not utilized the fact that in Zagreb, those who are interested in the contemporary scene can see all of the leading international names, a multitude of aesthetics and possible directions of Novum. It has not used this opportunity to spur on the intellectual forces that could work towards the integration of Croatian theatre into the world currents - very much like Serbian theatre that has remained untouched by decades of BITEF's best years (although perhaps we can't deny that the sweep of German theatre of the seventies has left a far too large trace there).

With one or two exceptions of eternal outsiders (Brezovec, Jelčić) whose stubborn efforts were marginalized by the same methods that ignored their successes abroad, as it has ignored Eurokaz, Croatian theatre is still playing with a well-marked pack of cards, hiding its smirk like Argentinean players of truco, trying to display its feeble importance to those in power. With the latest adoration of a theological-drama based upon the life of a saint, Croatian theatre has hit the bottom of Jerzy Lec and awaits a metaphysical answer from the underworlds.

Looking back, we can see that confrontation with the existing order was Eurokaz's destiny from the very beginning. In its first year in 1987, Eurokaz presented a programme that was so unlike anything previously seen on Croatian stages that resistance was predictable, if not understandable. I will briefly try to analyze the incitements from which Eurokaz sprung, and the theatrical context which determined it.

Eurokaz was created as support and platform for a small section of theatre history of the twentieth century that had, in the now distant eighties, stirred up Europe and initiated a number of bold impulses that arrived from the fields of technology and science, visual arts, new media, dance and movement - rejecting logo centric order at the same time.

Different attempts at liberating theatre from the ideology of text, political and utopian thought, that is, from the teleological blows of any kind, from all prerogatives that have marked student theatre of the sixties and settled into institutions during the seventies, were by the end of the eighties collected under the somewhat unfortunate and dull name of new theatre and have, in time, risen into stylistic differences.

What should this new theatre be like?

New theatre is, in a certain sense, a reflex of the philosophy of postmodernism, the quickest delayed response that the scene, as an inert medium trapped by its mimetic function, can produce in relation to the history of ideas.

But maybe it is indeed only the modernist game of hide-and-seek that still believes in the evolution of Barthes’s responsible forms, the humanistic drive towards understanding the hidden structures of the world, which theatre reduces, in a relaxed manner, to a whisper of scenic signs.

At the time of the Young Peoples' Theatre Days and the Dubrovnik Young Peoples' Theatre Days we didn't have significant contact with the international theatre scene. Foreign touring performances were rare and of questionable quality. In the broader perspective, BITEF was stuck in the aesthetics of the seventies and a strong research drive couldn't be found there. The theatre situation in Croatia was in a state of excessive predictability, in other words - catastrophic: the nineteenth century as an intellectual horizon, realism, psychology, illustration. The Academy of Dramatic Arts had problems dealing with Grotowski, and Wilson had to wait another two decades until last year's placement of Brezovec as assistant professor.

While at the same time, in Slovenia, the NSK movement produced an essential theatrical dynamism, in Croatia, there hardly existed a theatrically responsible independent scene.

The first Eurokaz engaged in conversation with both the situation we were thrown into after a decade long information gap (since the last year of the Young Peoples' Theatre Days in Zagreb), and the politics of the systematic destruction of intelligent artistic potential. As for the international programme, the first Eurokaz was primarily a warehouse of information: it distributed different directions of research and innovation that were thriving in Europe at the time. Zagreb saw performances from the future stars of new theatre. Names that went onto cut through the European theatrical landscape over the next twenty years showed some of their first, important productions here.

So, in line with these somewhat unconsciously modernistic ambitions to find impetuses to change the history of theatre (and not just fill in), to find artists who belong to art, and not just to art history (as Borges would say), the first editions of Eurokaz recognized the beginnings of the Flemish wave phenomenon whose representatives would go on to make a significant mark on contemporary theatre by the end of the century.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Fabre, and Jan Lauwers performed in Zagreb with their first uncertain successes, setting formal parameters which became recognizable in the works of numerous covetous epigones. Production mechanisms of meaning, structure, real-time on stage, epidemic of geometry, formalism and disinfection, only a few years after the initial bewildered critical reviews of the first Eurokaz, all these elements came to dominate the European theatre market as the fastest selling commodities, but which also lead to a wide-spread uniformity of the European theatre and dance landscape in the mid-nineties.

Those first editions of Eurokazpointed to the relevant contexts of innovative theatre, such as non-figurative fluxes of energy (La fura dels baus), urban ambientality (Ilotopie, Royal de luxe), non-economical dramaturgy (Jesurun, Stanev, Brezovec, Lauwers), theatre of manifesto (Soc. Raffaello Sanzio, NSK, Etant Donnes, Derevo), or the  iconoclastic theatre that will be elaborated on in the later years. There were also Hinderik, J. B. Corsetti, and Station House Opera, who have drawn extreme poetic consequences from the very means of realization, as Artaud would say, playing with construction materials (bricks, glass) or constructing a world of amazing props and developing the particular poetics of a theatre of objects, so distant from the usual theatrical categories of meaning.

Artists who showed that theatre was capable of the timely recognition of the experiences of its age were received by our stagnant culture as a shock. Suddenly, something was happening: a festival that had no connection with the theatrical establishment, and through the strength of its organizational, aesthetic and technological means, appeared more serious and so different from the soft parameters of the IFSK (International Festival of Student Theatre) and the Young People's Theatre Days, that it instantly ruptured the practice of Croatian theatre as a Dorian Gray kind of freak. *

After the first Eurokaz, which took its informative function as its central point, programmes of subsequent years were interested in the identification and contextualization of contemporary theatre phenomena; leaning towards parallelism, connecting works of different artistic levels and subtexts, and trying to give it all an open theoretical and critical dignity. **

One of the characteristics of new theatre is a pluralism of aesthetics, many of which still come from modernist positions, relying on the totalitarian, the manifest character of ideas, and often working contrary to the postmodern indifference produced by a pluralist mass, where existing differences are of equal value (Boris Groys). Although today we no longer speak so much of the New as of the Other, theatre astounds us with the fact that within it, the historical eschatological force has still not reached its end. From the appearance of Robert Wilson in Europe in the seventies, till today, there is no lack of delighted blasphemy by artists who, playing va banque, hit our perceptual habits and revolutionize the language of theatre with a number of informal procedures. Eurokaz has learned to enjoy recognizing such impulses, so the uncompromised and authentic selections (and not the fearful repetition of other festivals' programmes and yielding to market relationships of cultural capital) were the main characteristic of its programme concept. ***

Already in 1988, Eurokaz intensified its programme concept with examples of radical representatives of technological theatre from the West Coast of the United States. The selection included names of artists relatively unfamiliar in Europe (Joe Goode, Nightletter Theater, Liz Lerman, Soon 3, Nancy Karp, Rachel Rosenthal), who realized the ultimate consequences of one premise of new theatre. Their hi-tech radicalism removes the actor from the stage and replaces him with machines and robots, while the text becomes completely obsolete due to an impact of images and emphasized visualization. It was one of the most controversial, but at the same time most valuable, editions of Eurokaz; the meaning of which can be interpreted only today. We can find the determining characteristics of that theatre language - fiercely attacked here as too simplified and carefree American - a decade later in European directors and choreographers who advocate not only the cold language of technology, but the simple models which express distrust of the whole higher sphere (R. Musil).

After the American season, 1989 had an exceptionally abundant programme that dealt with new dramaturgy, theatre of manifesto, contemporary opera and Russian theatre.

The third Eurokaz provoked the ontological nest of the theatre denied in the Festival's beginnings: the text & the actor. What we see are different dramatic texts intercrossing and co-existing, a play of bizarre combinations which multiplies the meanings of the sentences' references. Incompatible theatre genres, historical styles, directing and acting methods, all fuse in one production. New dramaturgy expanded its definition a few years later in the concept of post-mainstream that shows the ways in which individual culturological models collaborate in the construction of a new theatre language.

Russian theatre was well presented that year, and in its less typical form. Artists' collectives Popmehanika (Russian version of Neue Slowenische Kunst) and Derevo, the director Viktjuk (and Klimenko in 1991), all presented one of the most interesting periods of Russian theatre that was having a hard time getting back on its feet. Western cultural management had still not rushed in and one was free to speak about whatever one wanted, albeit obediently. The fall of the Berlin wall offered the stability of cultural industry and the market, so Russian artists put their future up for sale. Today that large country's theatre survives on artificially created trendy names, showing off its Slavic mysticism when needed. This is to say, it is too immersed in all forms of adaptability.

At the end of the eighties, postmodern eclectic theatre gave the impression of optimism. It seemed that there were no obstacles and that theatre could match the speed of film, compete with the mass entertainment industry and its production of images, successfully appropriate high technology, and put the dull Laokoonian limits of the theatre medium into a secondary position. Theatre groups sprang up like mushrooms after rain, as did many new festivals of ever newer new theatre.

It was the time of the most productive work by the production-distribution network IETM (Informal European Theatre Meeting), which was, and still is today, one of the most powerful organizations of its kind in Europe. IETM was envisioned as providing logistical support for new theatre in the early eighties, coinciding with the appearance of artists and groups who were produced outside of the institutions and required specific production conditions. Eurokaz was the host of one of the key plenary meetings of IETM in 1990, the first that was held in one of the so-called East European countries since the organization's foundation ten years earlier. In Zagreb, Western Europe confronted for the first time an organized presentation of, until then, the unknown theatrical and cultural strategies of a socialist country on the verge of breakdown.

That year's programme of Eurokaz (due to the IETM Plenary, the festival's date was moved from June to March) brought together representatives of the new generation of Yugoslavian (as they were stilled called then) directors and their productions, which would go on to have a cult reputation.

The productions of Dragan Živadinov, Branko Brezovec, Vito Taufer, Haris Pašović (joined by Eurokaz's co-production of Bulgarian Ivan Stanev), testified to the exceptional creative potential of a group of artists educated in the institutions of a rigid theatre system, but who, thanks to a free flow of information and cultural mobility (that allowed interesting aesthetic, cultural, and multilingual leaps) produced strong concepts and erudition of the highest order which was comparable to any relevant European project from the same artistic generation.

These directors did not belong to the so-called independent scene that the new theatre productions of Europe were familiar with; instead they directed astoundingly radical productions in big repertory and national theatres, some of whom had programming policies that were open towards research and innovation. That was an infrastructure which West European directors with an inclination toward experimentation could only dream about. However, that wasn't the only thing that confused our western colleagues who arrived here with very reserved expectations and strong stereotypes, certain that they would be bored with poor, old fashioned East European theatre, smelling of the reiteration of Kantor and Grotowski. What created most misunderstandings was the very determined theatrical discourse and directorial sway, both quite unknown in the West, and rather peculiar to their taste, infused as it was by Flemish orderliness. These directors jumped with superiority and grand gestures through different, sometimes incompatible dramatic levels within one performance, referring to the ritual solemnity of Yugoslavian cultural and social memory. This created a contaminated style that stood out against the formalism and hygiene of theatrical languages that burdened the West European market. Traditional forms communicated on an equal level with contemporary directing methods, the theatre of the image with ritual, Bosnian Sevdah with Robert Wilson, emptied, recycled historical styles with technological schizophrenia.

Theatrical Europe responded in the same confused way to these scenes of authenticity as the European politics responded to the changes in Eastern Europe - it filed away these authentic theatrical energies as fast as it could (while buying some along the way), and then, a few years later, it awarded those who stooped to overripe dramaturgical models and imitations of mostly dance languages which had helped Brussels and Amsterdam to win over new markets.

In this way the new Slovenian theatre, first recognized and forcefully presented in the Eurokaz programme, became a theatrical fact in Europe, but only through its second generation of directors and choreographers whose break-through happened thanks to the aforementioned premises: blend into Europe in the safest possible way, a Europe where everyone dances to the same score.

Today, IETM is far too large, a spoilt institution that hides its ideological intentions by appearing to give benign lectures  that, surprise, surprise, undermine the big psychotic theatre systems like the ones in Russia, so they can be replaced by scenes of the pathology of normality, a chronically low-level schizophrenia.

If there is anything left from the meeting in Zagreb, then it is definitely Zagreb's contribution to the surge of multiculturalism in the following years. The programme in Zagreb offered the concept of vertical multiculturalism that was to help in the clarification of the multicultural fog which had been hovering over West Europe since the time of Brook.

In opposition to horizontal multiculturalism, and by that I mean cultural and social activity focused on minorities or the decorative use of traditional forms of mostly non-European cultures (Brook, Barba, Mnouchkine), a musaka that, with a little Indian make-up, magnificent Japanese costumes, or screams of a few black actors, tries to convince us that it is engaged with the rest of the world, while in fact its manner of piling up sensations is intrinsically Western. Contrary to this, to name it properly, colonial approach, artists of vertical multiculturalism, working at the intersections of different cultures and penetrating through the simultaneity of different cultural identities by using a kind of schizo-analytical approach, build a unique, innovative artistic form. That kind of actor manages to keep together a multitude of different archaic combinations and procedures within his mental habitus. At the same time his physis emanates the gesture of modern theatre responsible for giving vertiginous dimensions to the inner ritual element and the ritual sense of time. The same can be said about the aforementioned directing procedures.

From its beginnings, Eurokaz was aware of its pioneering intention to promote such a different and (at least in Europe) unwelcome cultural and theatrical concept. From 1991, a year that coincided with the beginning of the war in former Yugoslavia, it has tried to approach similar ideas, artists and institutions from other continents.

The Eurokaz programme of the wartime and post-war period abandoned Europe as the unquestionable arbiter of contemporary theatre and opened up towards other cultures where it found impressive traces of Novum.

More or less stubbornly, Eurokaz developed the concept of post-mainstream, transferring the focus of theatre from West European centers of economic and cultural power to marginal European countries and in a wider context to non-European cultures.

Theatres from Latin America, Asia, and Africa appeared in this context at Eurokaz; the mature authenticity of their performances testified that the new theatre mainstream was slowly loosing its breath. Post-mainstream productions of the festival programme dealt with the reinterpretation of tradition, atypical dramaturgical procedures of sequencing which was impossible within the concept of postmodern theatre. The relation to the body is not neurotic and narcissistically auto-referential as it is in European theatre and dance, but touches on the collective emotional experience or addresses metaphysical questions. These productions dare to use the elements of spectacle that abolish the typically European concept of individuality and the European notion of experimentation which receded into an intimate and perfectly controlled sphere. The groups Athanor Danza from Columbia, Integro Grupo de Arte from Peru, Diquis Tiquis from Costa Rica, Gekidan Kaitaisha and Op. Eklekt from Japan, Daksha Sheth from India were the high-points of Eurokaz and Zagreb's audience accepted them with great pleasure. These were their early works - what later happened to some of these companies is another example of unfortunate attempts to adapt their performances to the taste of the Western market. To this we should add a section of Asian traditional forms - Nô, Katahkali and Kodo - which had never been seen before in Croatia and which astounded with their classical modernity.

Unlike the productions of the European new theatre mainstream, especially dance productions that are silent in the same globally understandable language and do not create perceptual problems, the reception of post-mainstream artists requires a diligent approach, a measured reception, sometimes even an ethnological concentration on certain scenic references. But this is far too much for the European management that apprehensively expends its time, although the always growing uniformity of theatrical landscape forces it to roam the post-mainstream margins - thus turning them into equal participants of artistic exchange.

But, let's get back to the Eurokaz programme. Dealing with post-mainstream did not mean giving up European or American initiatives. During the war years we discovered interesting art initiatives in Denmark and presented them in a thematic selection in 1994 (Hotel pro forma, Teatret Canatabile 2, von Heiduck). On several occasions we presented the new generation of French directors, some of who became regular guests of Eurokaz (Pesenti, Nordey, Tanguy), and in the last few years we have presented the young Italian scene (Fanny & Alexander, Clandestino, Motus).

The Croatian selection has wandered to all corners and searched in all directions - we have approached Croatian theatre (to use erotic terminology to grasp something devoid of all eroticism) from above, from underneath, from the front and behind, openly or reserved, roughly and gently, all in the search of a minimum of uncalculating Croatian stage prosedé. Sometimes there is a feeling of something stirring, a few inspired theatrical decisions, an appearance of a boldly announced Croatian selection, but already two years later, the erection recedes to a maximum of one or two juicer carrots.

In this sense the Croatian selection of Eurokaz tried to investigate into all possible directions: independent companies, innovation in national and repertory theatres, marginal areas of performance art, Croatian theatre dissidents, amateur theatre (SKAH), the newest alternative theatre (FAKI). Some carrots Eurokaz has followed from one production to the next (Brezovec, Jelčić, Bartol, and partially Montažstroj).

The celebration of the tenth anniversary of Eurokaz in 1996 was the culmination of one programming era.

Eurokaz arranged, with pleasure and respect, the presence of Robert Wilson and Jan Fabre at the celebrations. The work of these two artists was pivotal to the epoch of new theatre and its reliance on the image. But that year’s selection also included the groups Goat Island and Gekidan Kaitaisha who work in opposition to visual concepts and who, with their interesting iconoclastic concepts, pronounced the programme for the following years.

But, before the iconoclastic series, after a few relatively peaceful years, almost disturbed by its own lack of disturbance, in 1997 Eurokaz caused a scandal of impressive size, and it seemed as if the festival would cease to exist.

The eleventh Eurokaz presented a theatrical version of body art, bringing to Zagreb lunatics, pornstars, faggots, sadomasochistic freaks, just to list a few names our press used. Cult artists who determine the significance of most of today's performance art books scandalized and enraged our public (disturbed by the fact that it was disturbed as Bosco would say) with their radical use of the body as artistic material.

Ron Athey, Annie Sprinkle, Orlan, Franko B, Lawrence Steger, and Stelarc (a year prior), all testify to the phenomenon of a tortured and wounded body that persists in an age of technological magic and virtual reality as one of the last sanctuaries the individual can inscribe with his power.

The gestures the body uses to defend its artistic status are immediate and non-mediated: all that happens happens in front of us in a beyond-ritual irritation of no recurrence, a kind of direct ontology.

The body loses its (in theatre usual) symbolic function and becomes a simple, although unpleasant, iconic sign.

Using Barrault’s tactics of rhythm of interchange, the following year Eurokaz decides to present the programme wrapped in the beautiful costumes of classic Asian theatre, thus upsetting the prepared maneuver in form of a pre-selection censors' committee that finds itself speechless in front of No, Kodo and Kathakali, causing it to - after refreshing its knowledge from oriental theatre textbooks - give up its planned malignance, leaving Eurokaz to continue on its iconoclastic trail.

Thematic sections of iconoclasm that deal with the ideology of the image and are particularly dear to the festival were announced as early as 1989 with the performances of the group Soc. Raffaello Sanzio.****

They performed their first productions in Zagreb, among them their cult project Santa Sofia that can be archived as the manifesto of iconoclasm where they explicate the artistic paradox: can theatre, a mimetic art par excellence, liberate itself from its representative function, if it is inseparable from the phenomenological aspects of the world it wishes to surpass. It is not about creating an emptied space where a new beginning can be conceived, but about the existing image that holds the seed of destruction. It is about a fracture within its own medium and tradition through which pours the beginning of a new language. That new language does not recall the image, but a constant linguistic reference; it is, as Lacan would say, a translation without an original. Raffaello Sanzio returns thus to Artaud's lyrism of classical texts (Hamlet, Julius Caesar) or to mythological themes (Gilgamesh, Genesis) which they reveal in unexpected, astounding versions.

Examples of iconoclasm, still not readable as stylistic characteristics at the time (it will happen a decade later with the second generation of iconoclasts), were visible in the work of groups like Forced Entertainment, BAK-truppen, directors like Stanev, Brezovec, Pesenti, Tanguy, artists who today have some fifteen years of experience to back them up.

Unlike mainstream artists who believe that by rejecting text and relying on the image, theatre will free itself from ideology (many come from the field of visual arts), iconoclasts believe that the image too can be ideological. They will attempt to research the space that precedes the image, that schizo-analytical space of the production of production that precedes codes (because image is also a code) and which is explicated by the anti-Oedipus theory of Deleuze and Guattari about fluxes of desire. *****

For example, Goat Island explains that they do not start out working with a predetermined objective, but begin a process and believe in the extent of it. What we spectators see is a sequence of non-utilizable images that are built up in front of our senses, but simultaneously dissolve before we can grasp their meaning. That procedure stimulates the imagination and requires the effort of the audience that must inscribe inappropriate meanings on its own.

The procedures of BAK truppen are even more extreme: with abundantly playful performances they produce liveliness, but it doesn’t come from a text; the text, if there must be some, is casually read or written in chalk or projected.

Similar procedures are used in the treatment of text and dramatic characters in the productions of Pesenti (Helter Skelter, Conversation Pieces: People are great), Brezovec (King Hamlet, SoSo), Tanguy (The Goat’s Song), Stanev (Woyzeck). Starting out from a proposition that states the inconstancy of the dramatic character as a positive entity, iconoclastic theatre questions the phenomenological aspects of the character. This is not about the  familiar and already pretty exhausted deconstructive methodologies which we know from the practices of modern theatre, but an attempt to use the system of differences and relations to discard the existence of elements per se; a character exists only in relation to other elements, other characters that are also not simply present or absent. Paradoxically, that type of theatre has an optimistic view of the individual as a being of unlimited possibilities. There is no ideological, limiting axis that can collect all the contradictory aspects of a person because the center is empty (as testifies Peer Gynt in his soliloquy while peeling an onion). We are inhabited by many beings, different levels of spirituality that lead a parallel existence in a kind of schizo-analytical world whose complexity today may be expressed only by theatre.

Dealing with the problem of iconoclasm, we are actually dealing with the basic problem of the medium of theatre, one the aesthetic of mainstream readily neglects. Serving itself freely from other artistic fields, the so-called cross over theatre chooses the quickest, extremely seductive solution by dealing with anything but theatre itself. To cause implosive disturbances within the tradition of the medium itself is difficult and this is exactly why the phenomenon of iconoclastic theatre - the one Eurokaz recognized, named and promoted - is one of our least humble contributions to theatre history of the late twentieth century.

Eurokaz has shown in the last few years that this theatre language has left a trace and influenced many young artists. We can call groups like PME, Showcase beat le mot, L&O, Gob Squad, and Fanny & Alexander the second generation of iconoclasts who bring the disregard for the usual categories of good theatre and professional acting to an extreme. Acting is absent from most of their productions. Performers are simply present on stage, their set-ups are structured incompetently and as if by dilettantes (I talk about these performers as noble dilettantes). The performances can be described as: spending time, directing the void, intensity that doesn't say anything (Heidegger), passive theatricalization.

They also play with exhausted styles and eradicated signs, and it all speaks against the laws of the theatre market; in the performances of the group L&O we are stuck to the glue of the optimism of the soul produced in the theatre of the sixties, but always with a warning that the temperature difference is not on our side. What we witness is a cold deconstruction of past thrills.

Showcase beat le mot enjoys conceiving actions that border on the pointless: organizing a congress about Nothing with climate zones into which the audience is invited to enter so as to join the performers in the wellness of a sauna or to relax in an artificial landscape of palm trees.

The bridge becomes wider then the river, to paraphrase Shakespeare.

Productions of the Canadian group PME seem at first glance to be intellectual tricks about the problems of criticism and translation, but this is a false direction, a trap. The diagnostics of their productions want to say how difficult it is today, after Heidegger's experience of the language, to talk and to say nothing  (even when we speak nonsense there will be someone who will understand what we say), to deal with the difficulty of setting up a functional whole by destroying at the same time all associations.

Iconoclastic heroism of the first phase has been reformulated into a density of style that points to the changed, disillusioned understanding of the position of theatre, a new structure of feeling (R. Williams). It addresses the audience that recognizes those artists as a part of their immediate life experience. A new stylistic phenomenon is being created, one which all serious theatre theory must catch up with.

And here we come to the fifteenth Eurokaz, one that approaches its programme in a relaxed manner, as if it has forgotten all the dark winds that tore at it, believing it has in its perseverance, as Fortinbras would say, earned some (civic) rights.

The audience has accepted the celebration, we have proudly endured, so, from now on, watch these creative tremors on the construction site of language - with mercy.

* That suspicion from Croatian theatre circles has followed Eurokaz almost till today. It is interesting that most of Zagreb's directors and actors do not come to see the productions presented at Eurokaz, and there was a time when students of the Academy of Dramatic Arts were warned to keep as far away as possible from the unhealthy influence.

** This latter was slightly more difficult. Although Eurokaz has invested itself into symposiums, round tables, and discussions, many years will pass until the appearance of relevant texts about the festival’s productions and a new fraction of critics who were, I dare to say, educated at Eurokaz. Croatian theory and criticism simply did not know how to write about what they saw at Eurokaz in the beginning, and found it difficult to describe the presented; it lacked the contemporary concepts and referential apparatus to responsibly grasp the arrival of new theatre. Still, the reception of Eurokaz in theoretical and critical circles (there was never a problem with the audience’s reception) is a sad story that requires a text and complete analysis on its own, and is not the topic of this editorial.

*** Although discoveries are an important part of Eurokaz’s orientation, there is a continuous determination to give support to lasting names of world theatre, names that are starting points of directions and trends, and so simultaneously the creators and the outcasts of those trends. Eurokaz presented strong artistic personalities that marked the century, names like H. J. Syberberg, Achim Freyer, Jan Fabre, Robert Wilson, Gerald Thomas, and others; there would have been even more had there been a financial will for those especially demanding productions.

**** Soc. Raffaello Sanzio today the star of world festivals everywhere, from Canada to Australia, but at the time of their first productions, in the mid-eighties, they were labeled with slurs like amateurs or dilettantes by the same people who co-produce their productions today.

***** Iconoclasm and its theoretical base were discussed on several occasions at Eurokaz round tables, also a book titled Disturbing (the) Image was published on the occasion of a festival of iconoclastic theatre I curated and organized at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, 1998.