The Dubrovnik Summer Festival new executives have announced the Preliminary Programme of the Festival's 64th season, which traditionally takes place from 10 July to 25 August, within the Festival of St Blaise and the City of Dubrovnik Day. Krešimir Dolenčić, Festival Director, and Mladen Tarbuk, Music Programme Director, have presented the Programme at the Festival palace on 2 February. The press conference has been attended by Andrea Zlatar Violić, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, Nikola Dobroslavić, Prefect of the Dubrovnik-Neretva County, and Andro Vlahušić, Mayor of Dubrovnik, who expressed their support of the Festival. The extensive 64th Dubrovnik Summer Festival's theatre programme includes three premieres, three repeat performances, one remake play and two guest performances. The premiere theatre programme will open with the authorial project by Bobo Jelčić and Nataša Rajković entitled Allons enfants, based on the plays Uncle Maroje (the first venue being Gundulić Square), Allons enfants (taking place at the City Hall), Hekuba (in an apartment in Kantafig) and in various venues around the City including squares, streets, houses and apartments, which hide stories that must be told. The project Father Courage by Boris Bakal and Bacači sjenki is based on Brecht's text and his politic and theatrical intentions. Taking place in the City's streets and squares, this interdisciplinary play deals with courage, responsibility and survival at any cost. Plato's monodrama The Trial of Socrates will be staged by the Slovenian theatre director Tomi Janežič, exploring conformism, the people's courage to think for themselves, questions of authority and young people, democracy, home, exile, the death penalty and death itself, i.e., the distance which Europe has covered from the time of Ancient Greece and the so called Ancient Greek ideals the western world claims to have derived from. Much to the audience's delight, the legendary Ivo Vojnović play Equinox – premiered by the Festival Drama Ensemble in 2004, at the 55th Dubrovnik Summer Festival, on the Island of Lokrum and directed by Joško Juvančić – returns to the festival after five years. The repeat performances include three hit plays: Stulli's Kate Kapuralica directed by Dario Harjaček; Danton's Death by Georg Büchner, directed by Oliver Frljić; and Euripides' classical play Medea directed by Tomaž Pandur. The guest performances include the last year's best Croatian play Unterstadt by I. Š. Kuči, directed by Zlatko Sviben. Produced by the Croatian National Theatre of Osijek, the play has been awarded the best play prize, the best direction prize and the audience's play of the year prize of the Teatar.hr portal. The Nightingale - directed by Lee Delong and performed by the Triko Cirkus Teatar - is the first full-length clown play for grown-ups in Croatia, promising the audience plenty of laughter. This year's programme also includes the Triko Cirkus Teatar with a large number of street theatre performances. This work-in-progress project will be performed in three seven-day cycles, and the performers include five clowns – circus artists and two musicians. The topics and structure of the plays will be changed on a daily basis, from the «walk on stilts» performances to the Street Circus Cabaret spectacle. Saša Božić and Petra Hrašćanec will stage a modern dance project entitled The Beatles - the co-production by the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, Collectife Lodgea 22 of Lyon and the Lazareti Art Workshop – which is the last part of the trilogy that also includes Love will tear us apart and Boys don’t cry. The Slovene National Theatre of Maribor will feature the widely acclaimed performance of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, choreographed by Valentina Turcu. The music programme is based on the 1813-1913-2013 time span. The two centuries saw major changes in European music, which was trying to evolve from an occasional art form into absolute art. Both born in 1813, Verdi and Wagner played essential roles in this transformation, and so did the two pieces first performed around 1913: Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe. In the words of Mladen Tarbuk, Music Programme Director: «I would like to contrast that music – which determined the forthcoming centuries – with the music composed this year, so that all of us could try and understand what music means to us nowadays, and whether we actually need it as music, or perhaps primarily as music and psychological background for the modern multimedia time». The Scenes from Verdi operas and Wagner music dramas will be performed by the Symphony Orchestra of the Zagreb University's Academy of Music and a number of soloists conducted by Ira Levin, while the programme 1913 – The Rite of Music will be performed by the Hungarian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra and the Kodály Philharmonic Choir of Debrecen under the baton of Mladen Tarbuk. The audience will have the opportunity to listen to the London Sinfonietta – prestigious orchestra specialised in performing contemporary classical music – and several concerts of the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra. The recitals include performances by the pianists BogányiGergely and Elena Bashkirova, the violinist Lana Trotovšek and the cellist Enrico Dindo. The mezzo-soprano Dubravka Mušović Šeparović accompanied by Đorđe Stanetti on the piano will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Croatian opera diva Milka Trnina. Other performers include the Cantus Ensemble & guests conducted by Berislav Šipuš, Igor Lešnik and the biNg bang percussion ensemble, the Elogio Guitar Trio - a member of which is the Festival audience's favourite Petrit Çeku - and the guitar duo Peter Finger & Damir Halilić Hal. The Dialogos Ensemble & Katarina Livljanić will perform the musical monodrama Judita, based on the Croatian Medieval agonies, while the bass-baritone Krešimir Stražanac, the pianist Cornelis Witthoeft and the reciter Urša Raukar will perform Brahms' The Beautiful Magelona and first perform the works by Croatian composers. The Festival's jazz programme will feature the American ensemble Robert Glasper Experiment - which successfully combines various African American music styles creating a unique modern sound and rhythm of the modern New York – and the R&B singer and Grammy nominee in the Best Female Vocal Performance category Lalah Hathaway. Other performers include Rufus Wainwright - one of the finest Canadian-American composer-singers of the young generation and the winner of numerous awards, characterized by his original style combining elements of classical and baroque music with the subtle pop sound and intimate verses – and the jazz trio Matija Dedić, piano, Scott Colley double bass and Antonio Sanchez, drums performing the programme entitled New York en direct. Celebrating Croatia's joining the European Union, the Music Without Frontiers Foundation, London, the Agevent Agency, Dubrovnik, and the Dubrovnik Summer Festival will present Mozart's opera Così fan tutte in the Art School Park. The opera will be directed by Sally Burgess and performed by the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Gilmour. Other festival events include a project by the Croatian Writers' Association, the Dubrovnik Summer Festival and Mani Gotovac entitled Writers Gathering, which will take place once a week in the course of the Festival. During these nocturnal meetings Croatian writers and poets will present themselves and their works to Dubrovnik's audiences. The authors will read fragments from their published and critically acclaimed works written in accordance with the City, the venue and the Festival, and thus create exquisite and original events. The Dubrovnik Summer Festival's Film Programme in collaboration with the Kinematografi Dubrovnik will take place from 11 July to 24 August, at the summer cinemas Jadran and Slavica. The programme will feature a selection of finest films from the Pula Film Festival by its Artistic Director Zlatko Vidačković, and present renowned film artists, while the programme entitled Filmokaz will feature films based on dramatic works. Exhibitions at the Sponza Palace are still a part of the Festival programme, and the first one will feature the Dubrovnik painter Duško Šibl. According to Krešimir Dolenčić, “Creating a festival programme - at the time of changes which are not only political and economic, and not dealing with this visible material world but also penetrating deeply into human consciousness, subconsciousness and opening the door of a different perception of the world, reality and ourselves – is equally exciting and risky. We would like to make the City reflect itself again in the mirror of art, and emerge from its invisibility covered with the layers of everything we managed to throw on it in the course of past decades. I would like to express my gratitude for the enthusiasm that welcomed us everywhere: from the guests and residents of Dubrovnik, the participants and collaborators, to those who will visit Dubrovnik for the first time. We wish everyone to create his own image of the Festival on the basis of the plays, concerts, writers gatherings, films, dancers and everything we dreamed of during the recent months, and that – like in a hologram – each day spent in Dubrovnik shows at the same time its wholeness and completeness. We are looking forward to the knowledge, practice and adventures we are about to experience with you, and to the preparations for the season 2014 we will immediately begin with”. The Dubrovnik Summer Festival is traditionally supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, the City of Dubrovnik, the Dubrovnik-Neretva County, and by numerous sponsors headed by the General Sponsor VIPnet which has been supporting the Festival for more than a decade.