The Fifth Ensemble, whose members are young people with intellectual difficulties and people with disabilities, through education mature in an artistic ensemble capable of quality and exciting performing arts.

The Fifth Ensemble emerged from the need to bring together, via the collaboration of institutions, young, different, capable people who would, going through education from the field of performing arts, grow into an artistic ensemble and in the long-term produce quality and exciting performance art. Participating in the project are young people with

intellectual difficulties and people with disabilities, students of the Centre for Care and Education Rijeka and young people with Downs syndrome, members of the Rijeka 21 Association.

The project began in February 2018 and continues into 2020 with workshops and the preparations of a production in the tradition of postdramatic theatre, which is realised in October 2020 in the Croatian National Theatre Ivan pl. Zajc Rijeka. Novi List journalist, Branko Mijić, wrote the following about the first show by the Fifth Ensemble which was held in June 2019: “The Fifth Ensemble is the best thing that could happen to us at this time, in a society in which misunderstanding and rejection of the other and otherness has crossed all civilizational borders. The show Potomci, divovi, bogovi (Descendants, Giants, Gods) in conjunction with the Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture project is more important than all the buildings, walls and structures which we will erect at this occasion.