Eurokaz as a production company: production and investments as a way out of crisis

After twenty-seven years of deliberately shattering the image of theatre as an art that cannot and does not want to see its inner reflection, Eurokaz ceases to be a festival, but refuses to cease being a project fact of Croatian theatre life. Its transformation into a production company, an autonomous unit with access to public resources, gives it an opportunity to produce what it has only presented so far. Several successful coproductions and participation in EU projects during the festival years are a guarantee of solid foundations for this new phase of Eurokaz.

Each step forward is inevitably a change of one's position. We are told that stagnation is the worst thing during crisis, so the recipes for faster recovery are found in production and investment. Since Eurokaz is always looking for the next crisis in art, the logical step today is to take responsibility for not only presentation, but also production, knowing that the latter has a greater power to change the collective cultural and artistic matrix. With the help of local resources and international contacts, this step will cause Eurokaz's poetics to once again question itself, as well as the environment saturated with festivals in which it exists and diagonally operates. Instead of questions regarding aesthetic and taste that follow after the act of watching, Eurokaz's new phase will raise questions with the very principles of (co)production models of its further existence – without giving up, of course, its aesthetic and rhetoric.

The past contained in the future of the transformation of a festival idea and the possible paths of its development and the widening of scope will be discussed at a special, simultaneously "commemorative" and forecasting session of Eurokaz Saloon.

Igor Ružić, Eurokaz Saloon moderator