The Dubrovnik Summer Festival and the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts are starting an art-research project based on wedding plays written by Dubrovnik Renaissance playwrights. The project will result in premiere plays featuring new wedding texts at the 69th Dubrovnik Summer Festival.

During this year's second semester, students of the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts' acting, dramaturgy, direction, production and dance departments, and young directors, will attend lectures by professionals in the fields of theatre, art history, Croatian studies, anthropology and ethnology, and study historical and theatrical writings on the Renaissance theatre in Dubrovnik. The focus will be placed on the characteristics of wedding plays and customs in the Renaissance Dubrovnik, and on the venues, context, and circumstances in which wedding plays by Marin Držić, Nikola Nalješković and other Renaissance playwrights were written and performed. Other subjects of study will include the history of performing Renaissance wedding plays, focussing on productions created at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival.

Georgij Paro and Ivica Kunčević will give lectures on the Dubrovnik site-specific theatre, while Nataša Rajković will lecture on Dubrovnik's new site-specific quality elaborating on the plays The Walking, Talking and Imagining Workshop and Allons enfants. Ivica Boban will lecture on the mask and play using the example of Play Držić, and on satyr play in Marin Držić's Hekuba. Krešimir Dolenčić will give a lecture entitled The Actor in Marin Držić Plays, Matko Sršen lecture is called Theatre director's Interpretation and Actor's Interpretation, while Tomislav Bogdan (Zagreb Faculty of Arts' Croatian Studies Department) will elaborate on Marin Držić in the Renaissance context. Ana Marinković (Art History Department) will give a lecture entitled Boundaries: Public and Private Spaces of Dubrovnik. Slavica Stojan (Croatian Academy of Science and Art's Institute of Historic Sciences) will lecture on weddings in everyday life of Dubrovnik, and Nikolina Farčić will give a lecture on wedding customs in the present-day Dubrovnik.

During the project's second phase, the students will study privacy ideas in modern-day Dubrovnik, the traces of complex anthropological- theatrological wedding customs which nowadays exist in the City's micro-community, and whether they can become themes of some new wedding customs plays.  The study will involve residents of Dubrovnik and archival materials.

The project will be concluded by performances based on new wedding texts, which were inspired by the Renaissance wedding comedies and Dubrovnik's recent wedding customs, entitled Countdown – at a Wedding with Držić and Nalješković at the 69th Dubrovnik Summer Festival (1, 2, 3 August, at Fort Minčeta).