COURAGE

connecting collections

The Estonian Literary Museum is a national, state-funded research institution, which collects and preserves the cultural heritage of Estonia, conducting research mainly in the fields of folklore, cultural history, literature, art and culture. The Estonian Literary Museum consists of four departments: the Archival Library and its Bibliography Department, the Estonian Cultural History Archives, the Estonian Folklore Archives, and the Department of Folklore.

The Estonian Theatre and Music Museum is a state museum under the Ministry of Culture. The history of the museum goes back to the year 1924, when a movement emerged to collect the legacy of the composer and organist Peeter Süda. Since 1934, the museum has been located in Tallinn, at 12 Müürivahe Street, in the Assauwe Tower, built in the 14th century. In 1941, the original music museum merged with the Theatre Museum, which was established in 1937.

Today, the museum has departments of music and theatre, libraries about music and theatre, a collection of sheet music, a collection of art, and a photograph collection. The Särev Theatre-Room, dedicated to the stage director and actor Andres Särev, also operates as a branch of the museum. The department of music includes more than 500 personal funds of Estonian musicians and composers. These funds contain altogether more than 12,000 original manuscripts of compositions.

Eurokaz – The International Festival of New Theatre, today the artistic organization Eurokaz, was created as a part of the cultural program of the Universiade in Zagreb in 1987, and was thematically conceived as a festival of innovative and research theatre. According to Vnuk, Eurokaz originated from a desire to show new tendencies in the performing arts in Zagreb, to present artists who were radically changing the theatrical landscape of Europe in the 1980s. Eurokaz participated on equal grounds as its Western counterparts in the creation of the platform for this new generation “which has, by liberating the theatre from the ideological burden of logocentric systems, opened the theatre to new media, high technology, visual arts, movement, dance” (Vnuk, interview, January 26, 2018). Vnuk thinks that theatre in Croatia and Yugoslavia in the 1980s was at the level of the 19^th century and that Eurokaz demonstrated how theatre could ˝correspond to its time, and it was exactly at Eurokaz that for the first time in the theatre context the term postmodernism was used. That what we had already had in architecture and in literature, was applied for the first time to theatre which is known as a “slow” medium always delayed after other arts. The very first festival editions recognized these tendencies in the performing arts making Eurokaz a point of reference in the global context." (Vnuk, interview, January 26, 2018).

As quoted on Eurokaz's web page: "Eurokaz was, therefore, primarily thinking about its space of freedom and independence, for it has always eluded politics and has never become, like BITEF (Belgrade International Theatre Festival), a state-sponsored festival. It examined all theatrical phenomena through a direct selection process; it never gave way to collecting performances on the bases of global echoes and pressures. It endeavoured to be a creative organism which attitude should be respected. It wanted to help Croatian theatre by means of competition for talent, committment and risk.”