VERA FORTIS

Founded in 2025 by internationally recognized director Tea Algaic, as a response to her own experiences with war, migration and political violence during the Bosnian War, VERA FORTIS is a multidisciplinary collective that works across classical, modern and adapted texts to interrogate themes of power, class, gender, history, and individual responsibility. With a fiercely international lens, VERA FORTIS creates bold, often multilingual performances with collaborators from all over the world, in order to center the bodies, rhythms, architecture, silence, and histories of artists shaped by the paradoxes of exile and survival. 

Using a formally rigorous praxis, Alagic draws on years of physical theatre training with luminaries including Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Simon McBurney, Robert Lepage, and Richard Foreman, as well as classical training in order to break open text. For Alagic, visual, spatial, and sonic thinking begin at the first rehearsal. A political refugee herself, Tea’s work often centers on women grappling with the ways political conflicts have marginalized, erased and instrumentalized their bodies, languages and communities. Regarded by critics as “vivid” and “vital”, it is work that emphasises the ways international exchange is not a luxury, but a political necessity, particularly in a world increasingly defined by borders, nationalism, and exclusion.

Upcoming projects of the company include Zero Hour, a new autobiographical piece written and directed by Tea Alagic, exploring her and her mother’s relationship to memory, guilt, and survival during the Bosnian War and a two-week residency workshop of Mother Courage at the Mercury Store in November 2026.