These are Future Epics performances by Heartefact Fund (Serbia), Dubrovnik Summer Festival (Croatia) and Vitlycke – Centre for Performing Arts (Sweden) that premiered at Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2020 in August 2020:

Embrace – dance performance by Meleat Fredriksson, Adam Seid Tahir and Lydia Östberg Diakité

Performance & Concept: Lydia Östberg Diakité, Adam Seid Tahir, Meleat Fredriksson
Scenography & Costume: Aida Rønvik
Sound Editing and Production: Holger Hartvig
Coproduced by Vitlycke – Centre for Performing Arts

EMBRACE’ is a performance working with the intimacy of getting your being woven into a spectacular mess of softness and care. And we said, we are all that and a little more, and a little more, and a little more more and a little more. Meleat, Adam and Lydia will bring the audience on a journey where they are embracing all of that which a society in a scandinavian landscape have been pushing them to let go off. Come lay with us. Take a nap on our chests. Hear the sound of generations of hard work and hard love. Hear the contradictions of belonging, hear the shade. Hear the scream from our inner peace. Hear cries and screams of joy.

Meleat Fredriksson is a dancer and choreographer, educated from The Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen. Since graduating in 2015 she has been part of danseatelier: a studio-collective consisting of 11 dance artists working with creating continuity within the freelance world and explore art making, sharing and hosting – using multiple hierarchies. Meleat’s work often springs out of and features improvisation, rhythm and attitude. She is currently tuning into and questioning how her blackness is connected to her artwork. On the mission to duck imposed white values, standards and affirmation she wonders what happens when she places her whole (intersectional) self at the core of the research? Meleat’s work has been shown in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Hong Kong at festivals such as My Wild Flag 2019, Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival 2018, TheCarrierBag Festival 2016, Hong Kong International Choreography Festival 2016.

Adam Seid Tahir is first and foremost a dancer and performer. He has studied at the Royal Swedish Ballet School and has worked in the dance company Ballet Junior de Geneve in Switzerland. He has also studied computer technology, history of ideas, aesthetics and more at Konstfack, Uppsala University and University of Gothenburg. Adam has performed in works by choreographers Sharon Eyal, Hofesh Shechter, among others. In his own artistic work, Adam is very interested in technology and film. Adam is also one of the founders of the collective Body Intelligence. Besides performing and creating artistic work Adam also works as a Web developer.

Lydia Östberg Diakité is an Afro Swedish dancer, choreographer, curator and union organizer based in Copenhagen. This past years since graduating from “The Danish National School of Performing Arts” in 2017 they have been working with many variations of practicing, making dance, performing, activism, community building and creating together with/shout out to i.a Bambam Frost, Sonya Lindfors, Tamara Alegre, Cassie Augusta Jørgensen, Célia Lutangu, Stina Nyberg, Justin F Kennedy, Emilie Gregersen, My Wild Flag, POSSE – dancing and reading group, and the The Union – Culture workers union for black and people of color.

“Grižula” – pastoral comedy by Marin Držić (1508 – 1567). Directors: Saša Božić and Petra Hrašćanec
Dubrovnik Summer Festival in co-production with the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb

Marin Držić (called ‘Otter’) was a Croatian poet, dramatist, political author and actor (Dubrovnik, 1508 – Venice, 1567). Inspired by Renaissance theatrical experience, he introduced the restlessness of Mannerism in everything he wrote. Under the disguise of seemingly bright comedies, Držić is in fact the author of very restless works, and therefore considered as one of the most significant authors of Croatian Mannerism.
He belonged to a generation of authors who did not have the optimism of their predecessors, a generation of tired people who realised that not a single one of the proclaimed ideals of the Renaissance was reached. This emotion marks his opus and endows it with particular gravity. His talent remained unrecognised in his own town, which is why he did not feel comfortable at home. He was a kind of an outcast, a man who wished to transpose his international experience to his native environment. His innovativeness remained unrecognised during his lifetime and he was gradually discovered by future generations.
Držić’s modern stage voice was recognised only after the first adaptations in 1938. In the following decades, all his dramas were staged, his works were translated to many languages and he was also staged abroad. Reworked at first, today Držić’s plays are performed with a high degree of authenticity. Their best performances took place on Dubrovnik’s open-air stages.

Grižula
The contemporary relevance of Grižula does not lie in the allegoric glorification of marriage, but in the story about love that is not to be sought beyond what is known and available to us. This new reading of the eternal human search for love by theatre director and dramaturge Saša Božić and choreographer Petra Hrašćanec is a study of the local mentality intertwined with motifs from Dubrovnik folk songs and dances.

Saša Božić is a Croatian theatre director and dramaturge present in the field of European contemporary dance. His works rarely fit neatly into the category of choreography or directing. Petra Hrašćanec is active in the field of performing arts as a dancer, choreographer and pedagogue. Her primary field of interest and education is contemporary dance, whereas her works are characterised by exploration of the body as the reality of performance through different media. The works of Petra Hrašćanec and Saša Božić have been presented at the renowned European dance festivals and theatres, including the Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis in Paris, Impulstanz in Vienna, UOVO Festival in Milan, La Jette Dance Centre in Brussels, Les Subsistances in Lyon, Theatre de la Bastille in Paris and others.

The specificity of the project is the participation of the final year students of Acting from the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Art alongside renowned Croatian theatre actors. They will go through the process of attending workshops and auditions and, through their work with actors and directors, learn the language of Držić’s works and be introduced to the general context of older Dubrovnik literature.

„Intimacy“ – director Andrej Nosov and playwright Biljana Srbljanović
Produced by the Hartefact Foundation (Serbia)

In a particularly intimate atmosphere, a “quarantine” seat between the audience and the two actors was held last night, and all of stories were common. Through stage re-examination of distance, discipline of (self) isolation, privacy and fears, the audience became part of the intimacy of the main actors, and the theater became the most important place for the exchange of thoughts and feelings.

The piece premiered in Dubrovnik Summer Festival 2020. The performance brings more than symbolic associations to the unique stage it premiered at, namely Dubrovnik’s Lazareti – the only fully preserved quarantine building under the protection of UNESCO in the European part of the Mediterranean.

“Although we had different plans in the beginning, the corona virus forced us to give them up, but also to make one important decision, and that is to get into the production of this piece. We realized that by giving up” Intimacy “and not finding a way to make it happen, we would give up the theater,” says Andrej Nosov, the author of the play.
The stage costume and design for the play was done by Selena Orb, and Draško Adžić was in charge of the composition. The assistant playwright is Ognjen Aksentijević, while Selena Pleskonjić and Aleksandra Lozanović are responsible for the executive production.

Future Epics project: https://futurepics.org/
Dubrovnik Summer Festival: http://www.dubrovnik-festival.hr/en