Premiere of “The Knot”, directed by Žiga Divjak
16 Jun 2026Here Comes Zoom+Igralke Festival 2026
After successfully joining forces as festivals last year, our Igralke Festival is once again teaming up with the Zoom Festival of performing arts, organised by the Rijeka-based association Drugo more since 2010. Sharing knowledge, resources and organisational tasks is our survival strategy, helping us sustain ourselves and continue bringing current performances to Rijeka that surprise us and open our eyes to all that theatre can still be. From the more intimate auteur works by younger generations of artists from the region that make up the Igralke Festival, to the acclaimed international and often hybrid works characteristic of the Zoom Festival’s legacy.
This year’s programme, taking place from 24 September to 2 October 2026, features no fewer than nine performances and one talk, united under the theme “Unconquered Bodies.” Around every corner or line of text, a trap constantly awaits us—tempting us to perceive our bodies as something uniquely ours, intimate or "natural," while ignoring the extent to which societal rules and assumptions shape them, influencing our behavior, acceptance, or safety. The performances you are about to watch expose these constructs and shed light on various aspects of certain bodies and sexualities—those that are normative and those that elude norms, those that are privileged and those that are oppressed, those that are free and those that are endangered. The selected works embrace bodies in resistance and emancipation from often violent political and patriarchal frameworks, creating a space where, at least in the theater, they remain unconquered.
The festival opens with Bone(r) in the throat by Serbian contemporary dancer and artist Miloš Janjić, in which five young men with different sexual identities and performance practices share their experiences and perspectives on masculinity and its consequences for contemporary society, pulling the patriarchal bone from our throats in a moving theatrical gesture of alternative, tender masculinity. The charismatic Slovenian duo Uroš Kaurin and Vito Weis, in their sequel Hero 4.0 – Business as usual, heroically take on the fact that (performance) time passes and runs out, turning it into the subject of a playful game. And if we conclude that the time we spent together was “worth it”, they will know they have done good business. From Macedonia comes actress Angela Stojanovska, who, in her intimate and witty solo Shame, bids farewell to shame surrounding her body, food and life in her country. Friends, artists and educators working across dance, music and theatre — Milena Minja Bogavac, Frosina Dimovska, Ista Stepanov and Dunja Crnjanski from Serbia — bring us The Place of a Good Female Worker, a performance somewhere between a lecture, a public discussion and a concert. They share their experiences of precarious work in the arts and educational work in schools, while questioning and fighting for the role of culture and education in contemporary (Serbian) society. The auteur project Ja, David by Pula-based director Gabrijel Lazić and Nastja Uršula Virk offers an innovative and powerful stage approach to the documentary story of the elusive body of David Heimer. It will make us question how far we are willing to go as a society to preserve clear boundaries between male and female — while making us irreversibly question this binary division itself. Slovenian artist and actor Rok Kravanja will take us on his journeys along the peaks of the Slovenian Transversal, where he encounters his father, the power of nature, national and gender imperatives, and the discovery and acceptance of his own identity. Slovenian authors and performers Barbara Kukovec and Minca Lorenci, together with Croatian dramaturg Jasna Žmak, bring us a lively and lucid performance about the female body in need. They play with the tension between holding back and letting go, control and surrender, and through a series of everyday situations repeatedly discover that there are countless reasons why we are Pissed. Croatian dramaturg, writer and director Vedrana Klepica, in her auteur project The Incredibly Unknown Case of Slavko G. from Kutina, offers a poetic, dreamlike and evocative attempt to reconstruct the memory of a forgotten theatre actor, Slavko Goldschmidt, who, during the Second World War, performed with a prisoners’ theatre group in the Jasenovac concentration camp.
To close the festival, we will screen a recording of the four-hour documentary performance The Pelicot Trial by one of the most prominent contemporary directors and documentary theatre makers, Milo Rau, and dramaturg Servane Dècle. This international production, stripped down on stage to the presentation of actual court files and trial transcripts from a case that shook the world several years ago, exposes gender-based and domestic violence, relentlessly holding up a mirror to rape culture. The performance was banned from being staged at last year’s Ne:Bitef festival, but Serbian actors, cultural workers and artists performed it anyway, allowing it to live on as a recording that was streamed across the region for a limited period of time. We will screen the censored version of this recording, in accordance with the wishes of Giséle Pelicot’s daughter, and will conclude the festival with A Conversation on Censorship, Institutions and Spaces of Resistance, led by theatre director and author Oliver Frljić and director Ana Miljanić from Belgrade’s Centre for Cultural Decontamination.
Join the festival audience, where, body next to body, we will see and acknowledge one another, hear each other breathe, laugh, and perhaps sigh at the same time. In a world where we are increasingly disconnected, politically fragmented, and capitalistically individualized—having long lost the possibility of any shared imagination of the future, progress, or salvation—the moments in which our bodies sit quietly and look in the same direction, at least in the theater, are already something to us. They are already a lot.
Admission to all programmes is free // no reservations // free tickets can be collected at the performance venue one hour before the start, while places last.
Yes, free. So you can all come. For more information about the programme, visit the FESTIVAL section of our website or follow this link.
See you!
Yours,
Igralke