From the CCA President:

Dear CPP participants,

On behalf of the Creative Cultural Alliance, it is a great pleasure to welcome you to the Contemporary Performance Practices program starting within a few weeks!

I am proud to have with us the most acknowledged leaders in the field who will share with your various perspectives in order to offer as much knowledge and understanding possible to you, our students.

In addition to the information available on the website www.ccalliance.eu/cpp, we compiled some practical tips in order to facilitate your arrival and sojourn in the city of Rijeka.

Enjoy every moment of your time in our city, make these two weeks the best for you and for those you come in contact with, give everything you have during the practice and the mentoring sessions. I trust that by the end of the program, you will be leaving with more knowledge, ideas, friends and professional connections equipping you for a successful future.

I am looking forward to meeting you all in Rijeka!

From the Artistic Director:

Dear CPP participants,

First of all – congratulations on being part of the very first cohort of CCA’s Contemporary Performance Practices (CPP) – I look forward to meeting all of you in Rijeka!

The idea for CPP was born during CCA’s Inaugural Retreat in July 2017 on the island of Osor. Daniela Urem assembled an incredible group or makers, thinkers, entrepreneurs and educators, dreaming up a series of collaborative projects, partnerships and life-long-learning initiatives with the goal of rethinking the future of creative fields in Europe, and beyond. When she invited me to conceive a theater program for CCA, I started fervently thinking about what a performance training for the 21st century might look like. 

This was an interesting juncture at which to begin weaving together strands that ultimately became CPP. Later this summer, my New York based performance group, WaxFactory, will celebrate its 20th anniversary. Momentous occasions — such as this one — always prompt us to take stock of what we have been doing so far, re-examine our own practices, and imagine what the next 20 years might look like. As I continue to make work and teach, I have been thinking a great deal about this: as we gain solid footing within the landscape of the 21st-century time-based art, it is evident that traditional definitions of genres and disciplines are being transcended in favor of multiple, fluid, hybrid art forms. Along with the resurgence of site-specific, devised, immersive and virtual-reality projects, the role of the performer is rapidly evolving, away from being simply an interpreter of scripts / scores to becoming a co-creator of work – one whose contributions are integral to the vision and identity of the new creations. Consequently, the CPP program aims to acknowledge and expand the performing arts canon, tracking current trends and discovering new ones, for the benefit of contemporary performers and performance-makers, such as yourselves.

For the program’s inaugural edition, I decided to invite two of the world’s most forward-thinking companies working in the realm of contemporary performance: Jan Fabre’s Troubleyn (Belgium) and Anne Bogart’s SITI Company (USA.) While Bogart’s and Fabre’s philosophies approach performance-based work from different angles, both companies are deeply committed to developing truthful, compelling, rigorous visions for the stage, honoring the performer’s intuition and intelligence to advance their development as co-creators rather than merely interpreters of work. I chose these two companies for our program’s inaugural edition, as I find their visions to complement each other in a way that will afford participating artists a well-rounded preparation, inspiring them to generate their own unique creations in the future. 

As the CPP’s start date fast approaches, it feels almost uncanny that what began as a seed of an idea on a remote Croatian island is about to become reality. I am excited to share this vision with all of you in a few short weeks.