A year of protest and resistance in Serbia
On the current situation in Serbia and the impact increasing government repression is having on the country's cultural scene.
Hello from Belgrade, where it has been a typically eventful week. This past weekend marked the anniversary of the tragedy in Novi Sad that sparked this current wave of protests and while the remembrance event was peaceful, things took a volatile turn later in the evening.
My piece on national theatres is in this week’s The Stage. It was a fascinating piece to research, speaking to a range of artistic directors, including Michael Sheen, who launched a new Welsh National Theatre earlier this year, about the role a national institution plays in the cultural landscape of its country.
There will be no newsletter next week, as I’ll be on my way to Dresden for Fast Forward, the European festival for young stage directors, but I’ll be back in your in-boxes next Wednesday.
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At 11.52am this past Saturday, much of Serbia fell silent. It was a day of mourning and remembrance, a year to the minute since the collapse of the canopy at the recently renovated train station in Novi Sad which killed 14 people instantly. Two more people later died of their injuries, bringing the death toll to 16. In Novi Sad, over 100,000 people gathered outside the station to stand together in silence for 16 minutes. Some of them had arrived on foot, marching all the way from Novi Pazar in the south of the country. In other cities in Serbia people stopped what they were doing. In Belgrade we stood in the November sun outside a high school, the city eerily still.
November marks a year since the start of the biggest protest movement in Serbian history. On 22 November last year, students from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts were holding a vigil when they were attacked by people who it transpired had government connections. They occupied their faculty in protest, kickstarting a wave of student-driven protests that are still ongoing. Their initial demands were straightforward and clear: they wanted accountability and transparency. They wanted someone to be held responsible for what happened in Novi Sad. A year on and they are still waiting.
It has been a turbulent year, to say the least. Those initial student occupations evolved into a country-wide protest movement. Serbia is no stranger to protest, but this movement differed in the way it was organised. The students had no leader. They made every decision via plenum. They were not affiliated with any political party. Initially they did not call for elections, they only asked that the institutions – the courts, the press – function as they should. They were also nimble, social media savvy and capable of evolving their approach. They didn’t just occupy their faculty buildings, they started travelling across the country, walking and cycling from town to town. In a country with very limited free media, this helped spread their message across Serbia. Wherever these young people went, they were met with offers of food and shelter, embraces, tears, music and fireworks. (This documentary, Wake Up Serbia! Pumpaj: The Student Uprising, by journalist Raül Gallego Abellán, is well worth watching if you want to get a better sense of what the last year has been like).
The protests grew in scale and ambition. In March of this year an estimated 325,000 people – though many put the number far higher - converged on Belgrade, more people than ousted Milosevic from power in 2000. In April a group of students cycled all the way to Strasbourg to bring the protests to international attention. They followed this by running an almost 2,000 km relay to Brussels.
I’m describing what happened here, but it’s equally important to understand how this felt, this sight of young and old, students, farmers, bikers, actors, pensioners, war veterans – groups who do not have much in common, and do not agree on many things - standing together and recognising their shared struggle, was incredibly psychologically galvanising. The sense of solidarity palpable. This has been one of the key achievements of the protests, says theatre director and assistant professor at the Faculty of Drama Arts in Belgrade, Tara Manić. “The unity between students and professors, the bonds formed across departments and faculties, the friendships and alliances that grew out of this shared struggle. Before the protests, most of us were focused on our individual, everyday teaching and artistic work, not fully aware of the collective potential we hold when we stand together – nor that we belong to a broader community facing the same systemic pressures.”
“Teaching is, after all, a two-way relationship,” says Manić, “and in these past months, we have learned a great deal from the students themselves, who said no to many things we had grown numb to and accepted as normal, losing the strength to challenge them. Their courage reminded us of what it means to resist, to remain vigilant, and to reclaim agency in both education and society.”
After briefly trying to fob the students off with an unworkable loan scheme to help them buy a home, President Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has done everything it can to discredit and undermine them, accusing them of being in the pay of foreign interests and out to “destroy” Serbia. During Vučić’s regular, rambling interviews with government-supporting media outlets – I say interviews, but he tends to interrupt and talk over even the most softball of interlocutors - he talks about coups and colour revolutions. Recently he called the protestors “Satanic,” which is at least a new addition to his repertoire. Never once has the possibility of a public enquiry into the train station collapse been seriously discussed.
Instead, the ruling party has staged counter rallies in which the participants were bussed in while others were pressured into attending. Earlier this year, a camp sprung up in the park opposite the National Assembly populated by a pro-government group who styled themselves as “students who want to study,” even though most of its suspiciously middle-aged inhabitants were vague about what exactly they were studying. The public dubbed them Ćaci (a kind of pun that is difficult to translate) and their encampment became known as Ćaciland.
The surreal nature of this encampment, which now blocks one of the city’s main roads, disrupting the traffic, is hard to convey. It is ringed by police tasked with ‘protecting’ it. More than one commentator has compared it to a kind of durational performance, though the idea that these are students has long since been abandoned. As this article by Srdjan Cvijić in the Guardian points out, many of these tactics, including the pro-government encampment, echo tactics used as part Ukraine’s anti-Maidan movement.
Formal teaching was paused during the occupation of the universities, and professors had their salaries withheld. Professors at the Faculty of Drama Arts, for example, were without salaries from February until the end of August.
Despite isolated incidents of violence, including the still disputed use of an illegal sonic weapon on demonstrators during the 15 March protest, things were largely peaceful. Since the summer, however, things have taken a more repressive turn. Protestors have been arrested in greater numbers. Protestors have been beaten. Independent journalists have been threatened and attacked, while the nationalist tabloids show no compunction about sharing people’s personal details.
The impact on the cultural scene has been significant. Already underfunded, it has borne the brunt of a government keen to stamp out any whisper of dissent. Cultural organisations that have been deemed to show support for the students have been defunded. The future of many of the country’s festivals is in jeopardy. Cultural production has fallen to an unprecedented low. An SNS party member was appointed director of the Šabac Theater. A former paramilitary leader was appointed president of the board of the National Theatre of Belgrade, which has been closed since the start of October, ostensibly for fire safety reasons, though most people believe it’s the result of the actors’ vocal support for the students – many of them donned red gloves during curtain calls, the bloodied hand a symbol of government corruption. The theatre management is now trying to bring in new regulations forbidding artists from expressing political opinions in public spaces.
“The independent scene is barely surviving, while the institutional one is slowly being strangled by political control and financial pressure,” says Manić. “The cultural scene has been completely, utterly, unmistakably demolished,” says young director Andreja Kargačin. “Everything that happens now, happens in spite of the government.”
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, Kargačin believes. Things were already heading in this direction; the last year has just acted as an accelerant. Budgets were already “criminally low,” she says. “The scene was [already] de-professionalised and marginalised, and any progressive tendencies have been overshadowed by polite genres.” Soon she says, the only art that will be tolerated is 18th century ballet or folk dance.
The future of the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), the most significant theatre festival in the region, is now uncertain – something I have previously written about for The Stage and briefly discussed on BBC Front Row last week. The festival’s budget had already been significantly cut and, in October, its proposed programme, which included Milo Rau’s The Pelicot Trial, was rejected by the board, a decision that had little to do with artistic merit and everything to do with the fact that Rau had given a speech critical of a major lithium mining project in the Jadar valley at his opening address at least year’s festival. Pressure was put on the festival organisers at the time to distance themselves from his remarks and in March this year Nikita Milivojević’s mandate as artistic director was not extended after only two years in the role. Following the board’s rejection of their selection, which also included work by young Serbian directors, the festival’s current artistic team, director Miloš Lolić and dramaturg and critic Borisav Matić, resigned from their roles (dramaturg Ana Vujanović had already withdrawn). Ironically, their proposed programme also included Romeo Castellucci’s Bros, a piece about police brutality, to which the board did not raise any objections, presumably because Castellucci was not on their shit-list.
While there has been a constant erosion of freedom of expression under the SNS, says Borisav Matić, “recent events have marked a dramatic shift toward direct censorship and authoritarian interference in arts and culture. The board’s decision to reject the entire program of BITEF, because they deemed Milo Rau and his political views “undesirable”, is emblematic of this shift.”
“After 59 years of BITEF’s existence,” he continues, “the board squashed freedom of expression at a festival known for its progressive and socially provocative character. But we, who worked on this year’s BITEF, as well as other critically-minded colleagues in Serbia, will not be so easily silenced. We are already finding new ways to express our dissent and critically examine our repressive reality, like water finds its ways around obstacles on its road. The Board’s decision means just that our path will be a little more difficult and that we will have to rely on non-institutional ways of working.”
Kargačin, who I think it’s fair to say is not a fan of polite genres, was among the young artists due to present work at BITEF. Her piece, which goes by the working title Dora or Who is going to stitch the vests?, explores how “our personal and political lives are inseparable.” It was an honour to be selected for BITEF, she says. “It was sort of a dream, because I grew up with the neo-avant-garde.” At the same time, she wouldn’t want her work to be presented as part of the festival if it means tolerating censorship. Rau’s work was picked out, she says, “because he did what our government hates the most: the man was just speaking his mind. I don’t want to work in circumstances where that is a reason for punishment.” However, she adds, “if your art doesn’t suffer the consequences under a dictatorship, there is something wrong with your art.”
The leaderless model the students have adopted has many benefits, but it has also resulted in missteps and questionable choices. Nationalist slogans and symbols have been present at some protests. This was particularly evident at the protest on 28th June, which took place on Vidovdan, a historically significant Serbian national holiday. This felt tonally different to previous protests. Right-wing speakers were given a prominent place on the bill and nationalist chanting could be heard. It’s easy to see why some commentators, particularly those in neighbouring countries, feel uneasy about the protesters, their goals and their methods. Many of the students and their supporters also felt uncomfortable about the presence of nationalist and right wing elements at the protests. Could they have done more to address this rhetoric? Not only could they have, but they should have, says Manić. “The entire iconography of the Vidovdan protest feels alien and deeply unsettling to me. If that ideological framework is seen as the only possible counterpoint to the current regime, then that’s profoundly disturbing.”
“It was perhaps inevitable that a movement as diverse and decentralized as this one would sometimes flirt with populist ideas – but we must not follow that path. If the outcome of this struggle becomes a reinforcement of nationalist sentiment, then I honestly don’t know what we’ve been fighting for. This is precisely the moment for our society to recognize that nationalist narratives are, in fact, the very narratives of those we claim to oppose.”
While this does not excuse it, it’s hard to understate how pervasive this rhetoric is in Serbia. It’s graffitied on the walls and it flows from politicians’ mouths on a daily basis. As Manić says, “these ideas have dominated the mainstream discourse for nearly forty years. The alternative must be something entirely different: we must stop defining ourselves only through resistance and begin articulating what we are actually fighting for.”
There’s no consensus on what should come next. While some see elections as the only possible way forward, others feel justifiably suspicious of the democratic process and feel change needs to happen on a societal level, a dilemma explored in this Guardian article. There are similar splits of opinion in the cultural scene. Ana Vujanović withdrew from her role on the BITEF artistic team, stating that many of her colleagues in the sector “believe that holding the festival under these conditions would mean supporting an illusion of normalcy.” If there’s one thing most people can agree on it’s that this is not normal – and this isn’t over. If anything, the anniversary has reignited things. As I said at the start, over 100,000 people converged in Novi Sad this weekend despite the entire train network being suspended over the weekend due to an incredibly convenient bomb scare.
As of Sunday, Dijana Hrka, the mother of Stefan Hrka, one of the young men who died in the canopy collapse, has been on hunger strike, calling for justice for her son. She’s been sleeping in the open air near the National Assembly. The area in front of the building is essentially off limits to residents of Belgrade now, so she has positioned herself near the barricades. The Ćaci responded to this woman’s distress by playing nationalist songs at high volume - for hours. Tonight there are further protests planned, with pro-government supporters arriving for a rally while the number of people coming to support Dijana Hrka continues to grow. It’s a situation that feels engineered to stoke tension.
While the last year has contained moments of elation and exhilaration, they have also taken a psychological and emotional toll. It has been a lot. “The months I spent on the streets with my students allowed me to learn from their courage, integrity and persistence,” says Manić. “But these were also months of exhaustion and anxiety, of teaching under impossible time frames, and of living in constant uncertainty – in emotionally draining, financially unstable conditions, under the everyday threat of state and police violence and brutality endured by the students of the Faculty of Drama Arts, students from other faculties, as well as numerous other citizens and peaceful protesters
“The past year has been the most intense year of my life,” says Matić. “I’ve experienced so many emotions in rapid succession – hope, enthusiasm, fear, anxiety, empathy, despair, love, anger, gratefulness, disappointment. It’s important to note this because every political change has been driven by positive emotions, in particular hope, but it has also required sacrifice. And we’ve sacrificed so much in the last year, our safety, security, well-being and professional lives. But there’s no going back, precisely because of these sacrifices. The people’s need for change is unstoppable and they will endure all hardships the government creates.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Kunsty – The Southbank Centre in London presents a four-day take-over of the queer and weird, featuring emerging artists from the UK’s cabaret, dance and live art scenes with work from artists including Bullyache, Sung Im Her and Harry Clayton-Wright with Mr Blackpool’s Seaside Spectacular. There will be parties, DJ sets and flamenco. It runs from 5-8 November.
The Magic Formula of Zurich – Rimini Protokoll but, you know, for kids. Schauspielhaus Zürich’s annual family show sees Rimini Protokoll’s Stefan Kaegi create a ‘political fantasy’ in which young people from the ages of 9 to 13 are invited onto the main stage to explore the contemporary fantasies embedded in our political systems and to use musical instruments and miniature models to create their own live documentary. It opens on 8 November.
Festival TNB – Founded in 2017 at Théâtre National de Bretagne, the annual festival features a mix of dance, live art and experimental performance, with a programme that includes Christophe Honoré’s take on Madame Bovary and Mackenzy Bergile’s solo show Autothérapie. It runs from November 12-22
Thanks for reading!