PUF history
The International Theater Festival PUF was founded by an alternative quartet and managers of the four most deserving independent domestic theaters – Branko Sušac, an employee of SAKUD Pula and manager of the Theater Dr. INAT (Pula), Davor Mojaš from Lero (Dubrovnik), Nebojša Borojević from Daska (Sisak) and Romano Bogdan from Pinklec (Čakovec). The festival – whose first edition was opened on July 1, 1995 – sprung from positions of rebellion against both amateurism
and professionalism because, as diagnosed by Branko Sušac back in 2000, “nobody wants us in those spaces anymore: the amateurs don’t want us because we have achieved some status; professionals don’t want us because it’s a nasty guild organization that cares about the diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Art, regardless of our many years of work”. At the same time, the PUF festival itself – the abbreviation of which corresponds to Harms’ Dada song Pif, paf, puf – influenced the creation of the Prague festival 4+4 in motion (1996), led by Pavel Štorek, as well as the domestic festival Seven Days of Creation in Pazin (founded in 2004). At the first PUF, as far as the founding alternative quartet is concerned, the Lero theater performed The State of the Moon, Daska staged the mystifying Waiting for Bread, Pinklec Macbeth, and Dr. INAT the choreo-performance Anno Domini ’95 which was held in the Vinkuran quarry and whose content can be included in the poetics of the seismograph of consciousness of the post-war “discourse of reconstruction” and the possible apocalypse of peace. In the same year the performances The State of the Moon and Macbeth were also performed at Eurokaz. At that first festival (post/war) edition in 1995, only one foreign theater group performed, while the second edition established the standard of six foreign plays. In addition, the festival was enriched by accompanying contents such as exhibitions, concerts, workshops and round tables, so that over the next 20 years PUF will host more than 170 plays and more than a hundred other programs such as performances, exhibitions and concerts.
Suzana Marjanić







