the new season of the legendary Teatar &TD in Zagreb

In an environment of mostly boring theater repertoires, can one man resuscitate a once legendary and avant-garde theater house? Marin Blažević shows us a stage cannot exist without a bookshop and a laboratory for young authors, a theater without a vision of aesthetic and social responsibility, a city's cultural milieu without reawakened audiences.

Home to a grandiose and traditionalist national house and seven city theaters all dedicated to genres of their own ranging from satire to puppet theater, Zagreb also hosts one theatrical institution that is back in focus this season – Teatar &TD.

Established in the mid 1960's as a part of the Student Center of Zagreb's University under the artistic direction od dramaturg Vjeran Zuppa, its original repertoire of new theater was under great influence of Anglo-Saxon and American literature as well as of existentialism. Teatar &TD was born in the atmosphere of the breakthrough of avant-garde art on the then stale socialist cultural scene and as a necessary reaction to academism. It was a time of discovery of new local and foreign playwrites and a time when theater (and politics!) took to the streets.

Since the 1970's, with rare exceptions, Teatar &TD lingered in limbo of easily forgotten repertoires. Its program reflecting in many ways its immediate environment – the Student Center was built on the grounds and Zagreb's former fairgrounds and in the last couple of decades several of the pavillions have rotten away, burned down and been replaced by parking lots.

After the last several years of a repertoire collectively curated as a part of the Student Center's “Culture of Change” program, Teatar &TD entered this season with a new artistic director: Marin Blažević, theatrologist, expert on new theater and lecturer at Zagreb's Academy of Drama Arts, and a new and clearly defined program delineating an open production and research machine set to generate an aesthetic of its own in collaboration with invited artists and authors.

The new program holds three separate modules: an educational modul of practical and theoretical workshops; a laboratory and research modul that offers new authors a chance to develop their work and present it to an audience; a theatre's production and co-production modul. Blažević has envisioned seasons to come at Teatar &TD partially in line with the theoretical, political and ethical programmatic visions of Croatian theater legend Branko Gavella, a director whose theoretical writing in the late 1920's spoke of “aesthetic and social responsibility”, but also “the joy of creation”.

To stress theory's necessity within the performing arts today, Blažević went a step further and opened Zagreb's first theater bookshop in the lobby, allowing every spectator a chance to supplement the inexpensive ticket not just with the obligatory during at the theatre's bar, but perhaps also with a book or journal that might further boost one's future expectations.

With a repertoire of contemporary theater, with a constant program of presenting young authors and by hosting Zagreb's innovative but homeless contemporary dance scene, Teatar &TD seems to be once again the local hot spot of performing arts, as the “et cetera” (“ITD”) in its name holds the legacy and promise of the fringe, the rough, the still to come.

Ivana Ivkovic, April 2008