It doesn't take a lot of air to blow four candles on the cake of culture, which likes to see itself as traditional. Four years mean still the same generation of spectators and hence their great expectations as well as new challenges on our part when choosing what to present. Esthetic legitimacy of ZTF is made of the works of directors such as Robert Lepage, Pjotr Fomenko, Jozef Nadj, Luc Bondy, Eugenio Barba, Thomas Ostermeier, Antonio Latella, Andrej Žoldak, Rezo Gabriaze, Krystian Lupa, Eimuntas Nekrošius, François-Michel Pesenti, Rimas Tuminas, Pippo Delbono... and Peter Brook, Lev Dodin, Oskaras Koršunovas, Jan Fabre, Danio Manfredini. Since its beginnings, Zagreb Theatre Festival has met recognition of professionals and the Zagreb audience. Polemics and conflicts have only underlined its status and the need for it. Esthetical (and political) dilemmas, the struggle for the affirmation of public awareness and artistic consciousness and occasional didactic inclinations mobilize us around the idea of a festival that celebrates contemporary creation, uniqueness of the pleasure that we take in a theatre act and a sense of belonging to a wider European cultural community.

The great author who marks this festival is Peter Brook. His play „ Sizwie Banzi is dead“ is not nostalgic, but its simplicity and humanity prescribe the Festival ethics and esthetics. Jan Fabre, just like Brook, presents his performance in which he connects his artistic genius with Warhol, Forsythe and the Croatian dancer of great international acclaim, Ivana Jozić. Lev Dodin is a great name in a series of masters that have been for the first time presented in Croatia at ZTF. His original choir signature is unique in world theatre and the play „Moscow choir“, co-authored with Igor Konyayev, is a satirical and melancholic view of the communist ‘50s. Oskaras Koršunovas is this year's winner of the European Award for New Theatre Reality. After Nekrošius and Tuminas, this encounter continues the story of the Lithuanian theater wonder. Finally, subversive and, in artistic sense, persistent and personal adaptation of Genet’s novel „Our Lady of the Flowers“ is directed by Dani Manfredini, an author close to the self-effacing line of Italian theatre already presented at ZTF by the works of Latella and Pippo Delbono.

These directors and their companies continue our common adventure towards a single theatre which erases the expected and breaks the mirror of certainty and uniformity on the way to a theatre of different social and esthetic experience.

Dubravka Vrgoč and Ivica Buljan