PRACTICING LIFE – SECOND TIME

Nedjeljko Fabrio – Lucija Klarić, Maja Ležaić, Nikolina Rafaj, Marin Blažević

Croatian Drama in co-operation with Italian Drama of CNT Ivan pl. Zajc

In periodic dialogue with the production by Fabrio, Gašparović and Paro

It has been three decades already that the legendary play on the complex identity (identities rather), namely, Practicing Life by Nedjeljko Fabrio, Darko Gašparović and Georgij Paro, has been haunting the Rijeka CNT as an unattainable social, cultural and political, naturally, also a marketing event! Haunting, yes, even to such a measure that all that the Rijeka Theatre and theatre in general could and should be is in Rijeka always measured in relation to Practicing Life. What eventually came to be is that the very legendary performance from memory and inspiration has been degraded into a rhetoric ”souvenir” and turned into a kind of the Rijeka theatre ”curse”. Each comparison has become impossible, each criticism almost a blasphemy, and each different view and path – suspicious.

Therefore, when is it, if not precisely now, in the (already) turning point of the Rijeka cultural history, year of Rijeka as the European Capital of Culture, for us to come to grips with the “legends and myths” and invite new generations of theatre artists and to spectators to their right to present and see the new, their own interpretation of Practising Life, through it also get insight into the history of our Town, the Theatre, in fact.

The new production of Practising Life is not a renewal or reconstruction of the former one, though thoughts were given to it at some time past, but neither has it been created as if it did not have a predecessor. The new Practising Life gets into a periodic dramaturgical dialogue that is sentimental, at the same time also critical with the Fabrio, Gašparović and Paro production, while additionally proposing a new approach to the novel and its famous first staging from the beginning of the nineties out of the responsibility for and perspective of today. Practising Life – Second Time is thus a production that provides a second, in stage terms also different reading of Fabrio’s novel. It is a hommage to, as well as dramaturgical, director’s and acting reconsideration of the former Practising Life, but also of the Rijeka history of our Theatre, of the Town, that is.

Marin Blažević, Lucija Klarić, Maja Ležaić and Nikolina Rafaj