Premiere IT=ITBased on the text by Inger Christensen
U predstavi su korišteni fragmenti poeme „To” Inger Christensen
About the Organizers & The Concept
THE FIFTH ENSEMBLE
The Fifth Ensemble operates in Rijeka as a performance collective that brings together performers and authors, including people with disabilities, through collaborative work and performance practice. The Fifth Ensemble grew out of the context of the “Theatre to the People” program in 2015, when we sought to answer the question: “Whose national theatre is it, and who constitutes ‘the people’?” This resulted in a shift toward understanding theatre as a common good and a space of struggle for access, presence, and visibility.
In the 2025/2026 season, the Fifth Ensemble consists of the members listed above. It is an open field of practice where performance is constantly reinvented through encounter and shared attention—a collective coming-into-being supported by movement and the continuous expansion of possibilities.
IT = IT (TO = TO)
The performance “IT=IT” is a play about, a play about, about eight days of creation, inspired by the text “It” by Danish writer Inger Christensen.
In “IT=IT”, we are invited to enter the existing Croatian na-, nat-, national system. However, rather than the invitation itself, we are more interested in the possibility of temporarily suspending the system—allowing it to let nothing happen, or letting time organize itself around waiting and indecision, rather than, rather than, rather than productivity.
The measure of our work lies not in the output, not in the output, but in the ways attention is shared, how responsibility circulates, and how rhythms collide. Our performance is out of tune, uncoordinated, and sometimes even, sometimes even unusable in a conventional sense.
We do not use rehearsals to make something emerge, to make something emerge, but rather to unbind what, what usually constricts us: order, purpose, and the expectation of an outcome. In this kind of rehearsal, the space expands, the space expands and contracts depending on the bodies that inhabit it, that inhabit it; as much as the space is useful to us, we are just as useful to the space.
Nothing moves toward a deadline, a date, or a premiere. We prepare well-tailored suits and silk dresses, but our performance does not know, does not know of any such day.
In the Fifth Ensemble, a performer cannot be, cannot be replaced because their presence is not a function. That is why we refuse, why we refuse to work according to assigned roles; we work according to fluctuating capacities. And if you are looking for our, looking for our contribution in this performance, look for the invisible shifts. Do not look for something to measure or quantify—there is none, there is none, and there will be none.
It is clear as day to us that both the city and the theatre scene must be read, must be read differently, diff-erently, and it is unbearable to wait for roles and a bit of text to be assigned to us, to be assigned to us.
Here we are, here we are, we are gathered, and now we are inventing.
Acknowledgments: We thank the following for their support: the Drugo More Association, the Multimedia Institute Zagreb, Molekula, the K2K Dance Center, IKEA, the donors of the scenography materials, and all collaborators and authors who donated their work to this project.
