Lecturer: Petra Jelača
in Croatian
A walk through the history of the most important theatre productions of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival that provides insight into the characteristics of Dubrovnik’s site-specific theatre, which has marked, as one of its formative elements, the history of Croatia’s most renowned and longest-running summer festival. The purpose of the lecture is to reminisce and to educate, since in the last thirty years, this site-specific quality on which the myth of the Festival was built, becoming embedded in Dubrovnik’s collective memory, has been gradually disappearing.
At the same time, the term ‘site-specific’ is often used in public discourse without proper understanding, bringing forth comparisons of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival with major European festivals such as Salzburg, Avignon or Edinburgh.
Lecturer Petar Jelača, a theatre expert and critic, who has been following the Dubrovnik Summer Festival’s theatre programme for two decades, will take the audience on a walk through the history of the Festival’s most important site-specific productions, and elaborate on the distinct features of Dubrovnik’s site-specific theatre that distinguished it from other European cities, and caused so much excitement among the critics and audiences.
The possibilities of contemporary interpretations and adaptations of this phenomenon will also be discussed, and the audience members, both those who remember the productions discussed here, and those who may be hearing about them for the first time, are invited to contribute with their comments.
