SHOWCASE OF THE BEST CROATIAN PERFORMANCES
“CROATIAN SHOWCASE” 2007

ZAGREB, OCTOBER 17 – 21

SCHEDULE
(changes may happen)

Each morning the participants can come to the office of Croatian Centre of ITI in Basaričekova 24 (UPPER TOWN) from 10 am to 13 pm to the press festival club.

THE MEANING OF LIFE BY MR LOJTRICA
One of the most successful last season's small plays tells a story of a modest, honest and diligent clerk who is diagnosed with a rare fatal disease. From that moment on, Mr. Lojtrica gradually loses everything: his job, his wife, the only friend and finally the last expression of his identity – his briefcase. The play is actually a kind of contemporary (anti) morality with a strong touch of Monty Python's humour expressing the tragic reality of Croatian transition breaking on the powerless and passive individual by flirting with trash poetics. Saša Anočić is one of the rare full-blooded author personalities of Croatian theatre who often casts his performances with the same actors thus shaping the text together through numerous improvisations. His sensibility is characterised by the concern for a «small man» who does not know his way around the cruel world, stressed humanity and warmness towards an individual, interest for dark states of the psyche and intertwining of tragic and grotesque.

CONCERT FOR DAWDLER AND LOITERER (dance)
Tamburitza, samica (loner), danguba is a solo instrument with three or four strings. It was played by shepherds for their own fun, wasting time in solitude. It often accompanies dancing or singing. In this music and dance performance one person is playing tamburitza and another one is dancing his own improvised dance.

OUT OF SERVICE (dance)
Out of service is a performance that deals with questions of Availability, on a personal and interpersonal levels, in and out of the theatrical context. The five performers have their own angle of the subject. Through out diverse performative actions they try to communicate to the public their confusion, hesitation and interpretation: How can I make myself available? What is the state of availability? What am I willing to offer? How far am I willing to go? The performance  tries to host and mediate those parallel lines of investigation and to find a way to be of service to the public. However, sadly enough, good intentions are not always a guarantee for success and out of the wish to be in service, “out of service“ slowly but surely goes out of service…

OTHER SIDE
The author team, director Bobo Jelčić and dramaturg Nataša Rajković, started their research theatre work in the mid nineties and to date they have affirmed themselves as one of the most significant representatives of realism/documentarism in Croatian theatre. In their latest production, Other Side, the textual structure is once again an open form that is put together during rehearsals through actor improvisations. The performance focuses on the everyday loneliness of four “ordinary people” who try to tell their stories and bring the accounts of their intimate breakdowns closer to us. This is one of the most praised performances in Croatian theatre from last season!

HOW DO YOU SAY THAT I DON’T EXIST?
Another one among the last season's extremely successful «small» plays came to be as a work in progress of the Master workshop of the Academy of Dramatic Art and Exit theatre. It deals with very local topics that in a way permeate into the social reality of any East European country in transition. The so-called small man is in the foreground. He is an unimportant person without a coin in his pocket that most often pretty unsuccessfully tries to secure his own material existence, while facing different absurd forms of social reality. The performance is comic, dramatic and sad at the same time. Pirandello-style dramaturgy of the story mixing life and scenic reality as well as dazzling transformations of two young actors travelling through a number of their interior and imagined identities make this play especially theatrically interesting.

MISS RICE, MUSIC WAS HERE LONG TIME BEFORE GEOPOLITICS
Another one among the last season's extremely successful «small» plays came to be as a work in progress of the Master workshop of the Academy of Dramatic Art and Exit theatre. It deals with very local topics that in a way permeate into the social reality of any East European country in transition. The so-called small man is in the foreground. He is an unimportant person without a coin in his pocket that most often pretty unsuccessfully tries to secure his own material existence, while facing different absurd forms of social reality. The performance is comic, dramatic and sad at the same time. Pirandello-style dramaturgy of the story mixing life and scenic reality as well as dazzling transformations of two young actors travelling through a number of their interior and imagined identities make this play especially theatrically interesting.

THE SEAGULL
High quality repertory play that belongs to modern classics with its deliberations. Russian director Vasiliy Senin has balanced harmoniously all the segments of the play thus creating the powerful image of the seemingly idyllic rural atmosphere that reflects a full-blooded Chekhov, funny and moving at the same time. The cast excels with a number of exceptional creations and it managed to open up convincingly subtle relationships between people and intimate destinies reminding us of the ingenious Chekhov's knowledge of the human psyche.