DRUGAJANJE 2017

For the sixteenth consecutive year, Festival Drugajanje will make an effort to address Maribor and the youth of Maribor. The original idea remains: to bring to Maribor engaged contemporary performing art which will speak to the youth. In the past decade and a half, the festival retained, but also upgraded, its original mission. Over the past years, we have been trying to address young people as viewers and as creators and to make them brim with enthusiasm for the stage. The festival has also developed in terms of production – this year, no less than 3 out of 4 performances will be (co-)produced by the festival, and most of them are international.

This year’s Drugajanje is addressing young people (and everyone else) with superbly elaborate performative processes that grab hold of a viewer and don’t let him surrender to the comfort of his seat in the dark. It was already Brecht who resisted the interpretation of art as a mirror to society. He thought of art as a hammer with which one shapes the world – whereas this year’s performances use art more as a means to see the world from a different perspective, to try to find the basis for solutions, for other interpretation, but at the same time, to mischievously stick our tongues at it!

Since 2012, Festival Drugajanje has been part of the network Festivals in Transition, a cooperation between thirteen festivals that, within the framework of their Urban Heat project, strive to artistically explore and examine relationships between the arts, the city and its invisible communities.

more about drugajanje

Since 2001 Bunker is organizing Drugajanje festival in Maribor. It started on the initiative of the headmaster of a high school II. gimnazija Maribor Ivan Lorenčič and it grew into a permanent and fruitful partnership between Bunker and the school and also built a very successful bridge between Ljubljana, the capitol of Slovenia and Maribor, the second largest city in Slovenia.

Drugajanje is a concentrated short contemporary arts festival organized in collaboration with secondary school in Maribor at their theatre and at other venues in Maribor. The focus is on performing arts, especially contemporary theatre and dance. The festival was founded with the purpose of bringing the young generation and the whole city some fresh and vibrant performance art. At the same time it enables Slovene performances to spread out from Ljubljana, where most of the national contemporary scene is being produced.

Contrary to the belief that special performances for the youth should be produced for the youth, Drugajanje has always had a strong artistic contemporary profile and the program through the years always consisted of state-of-the-art contemporary theater and dance.

In the last years the festival has developed from a Slovene focused to internationally focused festival in terms of geographical distribution and has also had a shift in the format: from merely presenting finished works of art to youth and other inhabitants of Maribor we have started developing more process oriented festivals that strongly takes into consideration the festival’s home: Maribor.