Hello from Belgrade, where I have been reading the reviews of Tiago Rodrigues’ Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists with interest. UK audiences seem to have had a more lukewarm response to production than their European counterparts. I interviewed the director about the show, which has been causing walkouts and outbursts since its 2020 premiere, for The Stage. I also wrote a piece about this past weekend’s ne:BITEF, during which a large part of the Serbian theatre community - plus a few big international names - took a stand against the government’s ongoing crackdown on the cultural sector. More of which below…
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For six hours on Sunday 20 September the whole of Belgrade became a stage. Or, more accurately, 60 ‘micro-stages.’ In cultural spaces and bars, in private apartments and out on the streets, Serbia’s theatre community held a variety of performances, talks and screenings. Audiences were given a map and were invited to curate their own mini-festival, moving from space to space, shaping their own route through the city.
This was all in aid of the fact the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) turns 60 this year. But while people were in a suitably celebratory mood, this event was not part of the official festival programme. That was taking place elsewhere.
This was ne:BITEF, an unofficial guerrilla action which saw a large part of Serbia’s theatre community – plus several notable international guests – coming together. Former BITEF artistic director Ivan Medenica was in conversation with German director Thomas Ostermeier. Another former director of the festival, Nikita Milivojević, was hanging out with Milo Rau. Playwright-performers Maja Pelević and Olga Dimitrijević sat under the unnecessarily massive statue of Stefan Nemanja in downtown Belgrade and engaged in an act of antiperformance. Teater Mimart’s Nela Antonović staged a six-hour outdoor durational performance in homage to Frank Castorf that involved raw meat and fake snakes (it got so hot the glue in their shoes started to melt). Nikola Knežević, a regular collaborator of Florentina Holzinger, was walking round the city dressed as a police officer in a homage to Romeo Castellucci’s Bros. Pussy Riot was in town doing something. (I am still not sure what Pussy Riot was doing). I hosted a screening of Alexander Zeldin’s LOVE (though fittingly, the lengthy presentation on Zeldin’s work I had prepared ended up being distilled into a series of micro-presentations). As more than one person commented on the day, the biggest issue was one of chronic FOMO.
What prompted this action? Last year, as regular readers may recall, the festival’s then artistic team - Miloš Lolić and Borisav Matić – put forward their proposed programme to the festival’s board, a programme which included Milo Rau’s The Pelicot Trial, but their proposal was rejected effectively disinviting Rau, a decision viewed by many as an act of censorship, reprisal for a speech Rau gave at the previous year’s edition of the festival.
As a result, for the first time since it was founded in 1967, there was no official BITEF last year, instead The Pelicot Trial was mounted by a group of actors, artists and activists as part of ne:BITEF (which basically just means ‘not BITEF’), a ‘guerrilla-style’ independent festival.
This year there was an official BITEF. The 59th edition. The festival’s new selector Spasoje Ž. Milovanović announced his programme of seven productions, only to see the artists withdraw one by one when they learned more about what was going on in the country. The German troupe Gob Squad were the first to go, followed by Teatro Prague from Portugal, the Slovenian National Theater from Nova Gorica, the Italian troupe Motus, the Lebanese director Ali Čarur, the Montenegrin National Theater and the Argentinian director Marina Otero, until the only production left in the original programme was Black Gold, a play by Macedonian author Dejan Dukovski directed by Oliver Frljić. This was a production of the Belgrade Drama Theatre, whose director has links with the ruling party, and though Frljić spoke out against the decision at the time, he was not given a say in the matter.
A new programme of work from Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, Turkey and Tunisia was swiftly assembled, which took place last week. Frljić, meanwhile, gave a lengthy interview in Serbian newspaper Danas expressing his displeasure and describing his performance against his wishes as violence. (I am no fan of this production, which uses a trans woman’s body as a metaphor for societal transition, but I appreciate what a difficult position he was in). In a final twist, however, a spectacularly well-timed cast illness ensured the performance did not go ahead during the festival.
“When we organized the first ne:BITEF last year in response to the censorship of our programme, we hoped we would not have to organize another guerrilla festival this year,” says Matić, who spent six hours cooking as part of his micro-stage, a homage to German director Johann Kresnik. “But in the meantime, the government’s crackdown on the cultural sector has become even more drastic: institutions and the independent scene have been defunded, several independent managing directors have been dismissed, and loyalists to the ruling party have been appointed in their place. BITEF is a representative case. The festival is now led by people with little relevant experience, who have shown no genuine interest in experimental art or international cultural exchange, and whose mandate appears to be to create the illusion of “business as usual” while quietly continuing to enact censorship.”
“BITEF is everything to me,” says Andreja Kargačin, director of Dora, or Who Will Stitch the Vests?, who got caught up in the fallout from last year’s cancellation. “BITEF without the spirit of BITEF is not BITEF. That is why Ne:BITEF is important, it is the most important thing, it shows that BITEF is the community and not the institution.”
“There was no option for the cultural scene to remain a passive observer of this process,” Matić continues. “The student movement and last year’s ne:BITEF proved that self-organization is not only an effective mode of resistance to government repression but can also create cultural spaces of freedom based on solidarity.”
Kargačin puts it rather more bluntly. “I resent anyone who supports the hostage BITEF and pretends everything is normal, all while using the pathetic excuse that art should be put above politics. They are doing precisely the opposite. They are alienating themselves from the worldwide artistic community and the history of the festival itself just to suck up to a few unremarkable individuals who happen to be in positions of power.”
Founded in 1967 by Mira Trailović, manager of Atelje 212 and by all accounts something of a force of nature, and dramaturg and writer Jovan Ćirilov, BITEF turned Belgrade into a space where audiences where able to witness some of the boldest stage experiments of the day. The list of participants contains nearly every significant figure of the era.
The British critic Michael Coveney, who edited the magazine Plays and Players in the mid-1970s and arguably knew the festival better than any of his UK peers, attended his first BITEF in 1975. “I felt immediately at home. The great figures and companies from east and west met in the melting pot of Tito’s cultural exchange zone: the Living Theatre of New York formed an historic alliance with Polish guru Jerzy Grotowski. Mira Trailović and Jovan Ćirilov were an unlikely duo, chalk and cheese, but the combination of Mira’s political nous and status and Jovan’s forensic intellectual curiosity worked brilliantly.”
Over the next 40 years, Coveney returned many times and had the opportunity to see “Yuri Lyubimov’s great dissident Na Taganka Theatre from Moscow, Shakespeare in Lithuanian and Serbian, a remarkable Three Sisters from Ukraine on presidential election night in 2000 when the crowd on the streets drowned out Milosevic’s bland pop party with a raucous, amplified broadcast of the Rolling Stones’ I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
“Theatre in Belgrade has always linked with life on the streets, and that juxtaposition of what’s new on the stage with the real world was a steady pulse in the work of Bitef, as much under Mira and Jovan, as it was under their bristling, passionate successor Ivan Medenica,” he writes.
The day ended in Belgrade’s Centre for Cultural Decontamination with a panel discussion that acknowledged the complex legacy of BITEF. Yes, it was everything that Coveney says it was, a space of connection and experimentation, a bridge between east and west, but all festivals are subject to compromise, be it artistic, financial, or political, and BITEF was no different. In celebrating its legacy, it was important to interrogate its complexity as an institution, the absences in its programming and the role it played in cultural life in the 1990s. While it was a point of pride that the festival survived this period, it is also necessary to question how it managed to do that.
The point was also made, by Milo Rau and others, that going backwards is an impossibility. Even if there is political change in Serbia – and that is a big if, given that Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić is eyeing up the role of Prime Minister – things won’t just snap back to where they were. Too much damage has been done.
In one of my favourite parts of the day, the young playwright Mina Milošević held a mock funeral for her play Lysistrata: Sex and Strike which had been programmed at the BITEF theatre, the year-round venue affiliated with the festival, only to be cancelled when the theatre’s previous director was replaced by actor Filip Gajić, who deemed the play “too feminist.” (You can read more about young Serbian playwrights are responding to the dearth of opportunities to get their work staged here).
When she was invited to create a micro-stage at Ne:BITEF, she says, “I knew I needed to find a way to speak out about what happened to Lysistrata.” She felt “silenced and gaslit” by the new director. The decision to bury her play was, says Milošević, at once a homage to Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd and “part of my grieving process. Somebody killed her stage life, and I needed to let my anger and pain out, so I decided to do it in a joyful way. I think it’s very important to celebrate the birth, the life, and also to grieve the death of our art.”
In many ways it feels like that’s what happened this weekend. That this iteration of ne: BITEF was not a placeholder but a stepping stone, a shift from something old to something new. The energy and cooperation it took to pull off ne:BITEF outside of an institutional framework is a source of inspiration for what can be achieved when people come together, but as celebratory as the mood was on Sunday, I think there was also an awareness of this being a transition. As the Slovenian director Sebastijan Horvat (director of two of my favourite BITEF performances) said via video on the night, that we are moving from a time when “our politicians did not care about art, to one when they care too much.” We need institutions robust enough to navigate that.
Awareness of that didn’t stop there being a feeling of pride and achievement on the night. The mood was one of celebration and reflection, of a community pulling together, albeit tempered by anxiety surrounding next month’s snap elections (more on this here).
“Ne:BITEF proved that the festival belongs to the cultural community, and that no city official or repressive measure can change that,” concludes Matić. “More than a hundred cultural workers from Serbia organized 60 micro-stages dedicated to international artists who have participated in BITEF over the 60 years of its history, while several dozen international colleagues took part in these parallel events. With 60 events taking place at 60 locations, the whole city of Belgrade – and its citizens – became BITEF. It was a stunning collective defence of a common good: a cultural festival that means so much to theatre makers and audiences alike.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Dublin Theatre Festival - Róise Goan’s second programme as artistic director is a blend of exciting new Irish work, from the likes of ANU and director Tom Creed, and international big hitters including Carolina Bianchi, Mario Banushi, Florentina Holzinger, TR Warsawa and Rebecca Chaillon. It takes place at venues around the city between 24 September — 11 October.
Doppelgänger/Doppelganger - Talking of Gob Squad, they are performing their latest show, a playful meditation on identity which premiered at the Wiener Festwochen in June, at HAU in Berlin from 24-26 September. Cake and balloons are promised.
Mercury - Director Michał Borczuch’s new show is inspired by the time Queen frontman Freddie Mercury spent in Munich between1979 to 1985 (it’s where he recorded his solo album). Billed as “an enquiry,” it opens at the Residenz Theater Munich on 28 September.
The urgency and joy of the anti-festival battling the storm clouds. Almost as if it's the year 2000 all over again, for all the wrong reasons. But perhaps with an outcome more positive and lasting. (We live in hope, or we don't do theatre.) A great read, Natasha. So grateful to catch up on all this!