It was with excitement and anticipation that I boarded the bus for Zagreb and
Faki - a
theatre festival I knew little about. My expectations from the
programming were for a fairly radical time, and my appetite was whet by,
among other juicy provocative phrases, the festival press release's
proud exclaimation:
"The international Festival of Alternative Theatre Expression was
first organized in 1998, in reaction to the elitism, but also
commercialization of the institutionalized cultural scene, defined by
political and artistic one-sidedness to the point of obstructing the
independent avant-garde, subversive and experimental practice of theatre
and performing artists.
Admission to the entire festival is free of charge. On principle."
Cool.
Photo: Merima Salkić
Part theatre festival, part rave,
Faki
seems to run on a kind of anaemic energy usually reserved for those at
the extremes of life, which indeed some were. Amongst the
Mad Max 2 style junkyard fortress of
the
Autonomous Cultural Centre Attack!, a former medical factory,
one can party hard, sleep hard, art hard - everything turned up to 11,
and a kind of sublime, with a beautiful community
surrounding it, bouncing from conversation to conversation about the work in a kind of never-ending rigorous dialogue.
