ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

Ganz New Festival presents young, emerging authors and focuses on exploring contemporary tendencies and unconventional approaches in performing arts. By means of theatre and dance performances, installations, multidisciplinary workshops, research residencies, talks with renowned artists and experts, the goal of Ganz New Festival is to connect local and international artists and organizations, establish dialogues, transmission and exchange of knowledge and experiences between different generations of artists, art fields and skills. In times of the so-called perpetual crisis, staying in touch with contemporary tendencies and developments in live art becomes important for the mere reason of encountering different, more creative visions of reality, or ways of its perception.

Genesis, a dance performance by Slovenian choreographer and dancer Mala Kline, will be presented in the restored French pavilion. In Genesis, Mala talks about the creation of world through our dreaming, a return to the place of dreaming so familiar to children, but easily forgotten by adults. Young Croatian dance artist Pavle Heidler is premiering with The Cosmic Dust Practice, forth in the series of his performing arts practices in which he explores the invisible forms and constructs that determine our actions. Canadian choreographer Ame Henderson and Croatian artist Matija Ferlin will premiere their new piece Out of Season, a practice of becoming that produces the possibility for many readings, connections and discoveries – both for the authors as for those that witness them. Spanish artist David Espinosa will present My Great Work (An Ambitious Project), a theatre performance in which he uses scarcity as a creative drive, gathering 300 actors, a military orchestra, a rock band, animals, a car and a helicopter on stage. In her work-in-progress What Is Third, another Span­ish artist Maria Jerez is trying to solve the enigma of an encounter between two people. In Gallery SC you can enjoy the installation Les Thermes devised by French artists Annaloro, Defoort, Four­net, Goerger and Vial, where you can dive into a pool full of soft, black balls and let the stoic philosophy gradually pervade you.

After 7 years, internationally renowned Croatian artist Ivana Müller returns to Zagreb art scene. Theatre performance Positions formally functions almost like a game of poker which constantly generates questions about the mechanisms of exchange and property. We Are Still Watching is a performance in which the author tried to set up a performative context in which everybody is in the same situation. Every­body reads the script for the first time in their life and nobody knows how all of it will end. From neighbouring Serbia we invited an establish writer, director and critic Zlatko Paković with his performance Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People as a Brecht’s Teaching-Play about the destiny of Doctor Stockmann and his family in the form of Brechtian dialectic theatre. The director, together with actors and a musician, cre­ates a theatrical organism which reflects the aesthetics and the ethics of resistance.

On September 26, within Nuit Blanche, a ‘sleepless’ night of contemporary art and the closing event of Rendes-vous, festi­val of France in Croatia, Ganz New Fes­tival presents two installations. Artist Jan Vormann will fill in the broken and damaged walls of Zagreb with plas­tic construction bricks. With his proj­ect Dispatchwork, Jan is not trying to defy deterioration, but aims to emphasize transi­toriness as a chance for the construction and reconstruction of our environments. Art­ists Bojan Gagić, Miodrag Gladović and the participants of their workshop will use the techniques of luminoacous­tics to intervene into the space of the famous Zagreb passage Oktogon.

Ganz Edu consists of four different pro­grams whose goal is to offer educational programs, projects and actions based on interdisciplinary, concrete and prac­tical work. These kinds of programs are difficult to find in institutional edu­cational programs, but are crucial for improvement, advancement, acquir­ing experience, applying knowledge to practice and future professional careers of students and young authors. This year, Ganz hosts the fifth apap lab, ded­icated to the evaluation of multifarious activities of the European project apap – Performing Europe and to sharing, learn­ing and imagining new models of future collaboration.

In the musical part of the program Ganz presents The Projection Band, an experimental band which will be improvising live to Hidden Lanscapes, a video work made by Ivan Mršić.

Free entrance, for you.