Practicing Life – Second Time – Marin Blažević (HR) in collaboration with Franka Perković (HR) and Goran Ferčec (HR)

When at the beginning of 2019 the Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc Rijeka announced the staging of the novel Leica Format by Daša Drndić, in an adaptation by Goran Ferčec and directed by Franka Perković, and in that remembering the legendary Practicing Life by Nedjeljko Fabrio, Darko Gašparović and Georgij Paro, many upset witnesses of those past days and the famous performance, resented that they had even dared to mention Practicing Life and Leica Format in the same sentence. Even more so – they allowed themselves to announce the entire Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc Rijeka season with the slogan Practising Diversity!?

However, after the premiere of Leica Format, many spectators, even the critics, dared to connect the two performances, even giving this second one the title of the “new Practising Life.” Does it mean that the audience and the theatre have begun to become emancipated from the performance and the time, in other words, the performance about Rijeka time, which has been haunting them for three decades as an unattainable social, cultural, marketing and political event? Yes, it did haunt even to the extent that all that the (Rijeka) theatre could and had to be in the following decades was been measured in comparison with Practising Life, and did it eventually degrade the legendary performance itself from memory and inspiration into a rhetorical “souvenir” and turn it into a kind of Rijeka theatrical “curse”? Does it mean that the time has come for Practising Life – Second Time: anew, that is, again and in some new way? When would be best to ask this question, if not in the year that Rijeka is a European Capital of Culture?