The mission of the World Theatre Festival is unchanged: to present the contemporary creation offering to the professional audience and the interested cultural public some of the key works of the artistic theatre. During only three years of its existence, the World Theatre Festival has acquired the benevolence of the public and its reputation is confirmed by superlatives. The artistic theatre in the strictest sense is our intention; routine and conventionality have no place here. For the first time we open the festival by performance of the rock-group Let 3, one of the most non-ortodox artistic phenomena in Croatia. The World Theatre Festival invites to the Zagreb stage for the third time the masters and the ones who will become so. Also the third festival appearance has been formed in cooperation with invited artists in order to determine together with them also the new territory of art. Through Robert Lepage, Pyotr Fomenko, Luc Bondy, Joseph Nadj, to state some of the most loyal attendants and their top creations, the Zagreb audience got acquainted with special practices, issues and vitalities which necessarily inspire the milieu. The programme of this year is built around groups of actors led by Eugenio Barba, Krystian Lupa, Pippo Delbono, Alvis Hermanis and Haris Pašović. Along with them, Dragan Živadinov, a Slovenian artist, significantly connected with the Zagreb avant-garde scene, imposed himself by his performance. Their works singled out in the context of the World Theatre Festival will be highlighted by talks by which the audience will enter more directly the world of artists. A director of Italian origin, Eugenio Barba is a founder of Odin Teatreto and I.S.T.A., an international school for theatrical anthropology.

After cooperation with Jerzy Grotowski, and during his study stay in India, he discovered Kathakali and since then, eastern traditions have taken crucial place in his explorations and development of original acting techniques. Krystian Lupa has finished the Plastic Art Academy and then the Theatrical Academy in Krakow. Being a set designer and adaptator of prosaic texts, Lupa is an author who has succeeded to realise from literary texts theatrical master-pieces like « The Karamazov Brothers » according to Dostoyevski or « A sketch of a man without properties » according to Musil. The critic describes his performances as genial author and acting theatre, as discreet music in which a bread-crumb falls with a sound of crystal. In metaphorical duology Lupa connects two in appearance incompatible authors, Tschechov and Yasmine Reza, extending the time of the performance up to the extreme in a special kind of soft and nostalgical sensuality. Pippo Delbono is an original, non-typical author in Italian theatre. With his feet deeply rooted in the soil and his head in the clouds, Delbono finds the initial impulse in his works in real events. His group is composed by artists, musicians, the homeless, former psychiatric patients. Theatre is not only a profession for them, but a form of survival and Delbono stimulates them to express by their bodies all the silences out of which a human being is composed. Alvis Hermanis, a Latvian producer and director, studied at the famous Lithuanian Theatrical Academy. He started his career as an actor and after his study stay in Paris, his directing and set designing interpretations were proclaimed an event of European theatre. Since 1997 he has been managing the New Theatre in Riga, focussing on contemporary repertoire. Haris Pašović is a favourite of the Zagreb audience, which, although having seen only two of his cult performances, keeps memory of the director of the magic. After a couple of seasons of delay, Pašović has returned to the thatre, more powerful than ever. The author of the »Mutiny in the National Theatre« sharply and ironically comments the contemporary society of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its cultural institutions, and through them he paints the twilight of the consumer civilisation which in the post-war ambiance of Sarajevo assumes the look of a radical reality show.