Bitef Returns Under the Banner Dare to Know

A festival that for decades knew how to make us uneasy this autumn seems to invite us, through its very slogan, to step into that unease with our eyes open. Dare to Know is the banner under which the 59th Bitef will unfold from September 14 to 20, and within it one hears both an invitation and a quiet threat, because knowledge on the stage rarely leaves a spectator the same as the one who walked into the hall.

The programme was presented at the National Theatre, at a press conference held on June 23, by selector Spasoje Z. Milovanovic, a man who, by his own account, reviewed eighty-seven domestic and foreign works to single out a handful of titles for the main programme. Out of that sieve came productions from seven countries: Argentina, Lebanon, Slovenia, Montenegro, Portugal, Italy and Serbia. A geography that does not pretend to be neutral, since it gathers stages whose shared theme, each in its own way, is how one is even permitted to think aloud today.

That Bitef again chooses risk over comfort is suggested by one detail usually left unspoken. The Berlin collective Gob Squad, a British-German group known for performances on the border of performance art and media play, declined the invitation to take part. Because of this, six productions are confirmed for now, while a seventh is still expected and not yet finalised, so it is more accurate to say that the main programme holds six to seven titles than to draw a firm line.

How much does a slogan obligate a programme?

At festivals, slogans are often mere ornament, a phrase forgotten the moment the lights go out at the press conference. Dare to Know nonetheless carries something of that old Bitef charge, from the days when this festival brought to Belgrade names that had nowhere else to be seen in the region. The question now hanging in the air is whether the chosen productions will wear that title as an obligation or as a label.

A line-up of seven countries suggests the selection is not after a common aesthetic denominator but a common state of mind. The Argentine and Lebanese stages come from contexts in which the very possibility of public speech is a political fact, the Slovenian, Montenegrin and Serbian from a post-Yugoslav space where theatre still wrestles with its own history, and the Portuguese and Italian from a Western European tradition that long ago domesticated experiment into institution. If Milovanovic manages to set those voices in dialogue, rather than in a mere succession of guest appearances, the slogan will be earned.

What does the programme tell us about the city’s cultural policy?

The figure of twenty-seven million dinars from the city budget is not large for a festival of this rank, but neither is it symbolic. It places the theatre in that delicate zone where artistic freedom and institutional dependence are constantly measured against each other. Bitef has historically been a place where that tension was not hidden but staged, and part of its value always lay in welcoming the very thing that made it uneasy before its own financier.

The refusal by Gob Squad is a reminder that an invitation is not the same as an arrival, and that a festival’s programme is always written partly by what stayed away. It remains to be seen whether the seventh production will fill that gap with a title carrying the same measure of risk, or whether the selection will rest on six performances that must defend the promise of the slogan on their own. September is not far off, and Republic Square will once again, as so many times before, be the place where we measure how far we truly dared to know.

Is Bitef still, for you, a festival worth the risk, or has it long since become just another entry in the city’s cultural calendar?