Queer Zagreb Festival has, since its beginnings in 2003, become a major international event, having been organized in New York, Sao Paolo and other cities around the world, but every year it comes back to Zagreb, where it all started.
This year, the festival’s founder and producer Zvonimir Dobrović envisioned the festival to consist of two curated segments. The first segment is fully dedicated to international performances and it will be held in May, hosting performances by well established artists from USA, India, Philippines, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Serbia and Croatia. The second segment is about the local and regional artists, and it will take place in November.
Jeremy Goldstein will open the festivities on May 15th with his community theatre project dealing with freedom of speech and personal empowerment. He will also include up to ten local participants from Croatia who will together with him develop their own material for the stage. A well known Slovenian company Via Negativa will present their recent production Hundred Toasts developed and performed by Polish performer Anita Wach. American performance artist Kris Grey will also participate in the festival with his durational performance Precarity, which talks about the perpetual, delicate balance trans people maintain between identity and diagnosis. Kris will also perform in Rijeka at a festival Smoqua.
One of the more intriguing events of the festival will be a program dedicated to children, in which the local drag queens group House of Flamingo will organize readings of fairy tales and children’s stories – while in drag, of course. Finally, the festival will host several dance pieces by Sujata Goal from India / US, Maayan Danoch and Özlem Alkis from Germany, Josh Serafin from Philippines and an artistic collective of Rahel Barra, Ida Daniel, Ana Dubljević, Frida Laux i Zrinka Užbinec from Germany, Serbia and Croatia. These works touch upon issues of intimacy, gay identities, feminist pornography and relationship between tradition and contemporaneity.
All of the performances of this festival will be held in Zagrebački plesni centar, (Zagreb Dance Centre), Ilica 10, admission to them is free and you can find the detailed schedule of the performances and more details about the festival at: https://thisisadominoproject.org
