Bitef loses a fourth show as artists keep pulling out
Lebanese choreographer Ali Sahrur has withdrawn “When I Saw the Sea” from the 59th Bitef. Four of the seven scheduled productions are now off the list, six weeks before the festival opens.
The slogan of the 59th Bitef is “Dare to know.” Ali Sahrur found out, and left.
The news landed on the afternoon of July 30. The Beirut-born choreographer and director took “When I Saw the Sea” off the programme of the Belgrade festival, explaining that when the invitation reached him he was not fully aware of the circumstances surrounding the festival or of the wider cultural context in Serbia. The picture, he said, came into focus over the past few days.
My decision stems above all from solidarity with everyone who defends the independence of artistic spaces
The sentence is carefully measured and names no institution, yet the address is obvious to anyone who has followed this festival over the past eighteen months. Sahrur is talking about the space, not about his own show, which moves the withdrawal out of the scheduling column and into cultural politics.
The fourth name on the same list
Sahrur is not the first to say no this season. Three productions had already left the 59th Bitef:
- “Audition” by the Portuguese company Teatro Praga
- “Anhovo” by the Nova Gorica National Theatre of Slovenia
- “Frankenstein Diptych (A Love Story + A History of Hate)” by the Italian group Motus
The edition was built around seven productions. Four of them are gone. The selector and chair of the festival board is Spasoje Z. Milovanovic, and at this point his job looks less like curating and more like damage control.
Alongside the withdrawals sits a list of invitations that were never taken up. The German collective Gob Squad turned its invitation down. Ljubljana City Theatre declined to bring “Osvajalec” by Sebastijan Horvat and Milan Ramsak Markovic. Director Oliver Frljic said he had not even known that his “Black Gold” was on the programme, a detail that says more about the state of the organisation than any statement about slogans could.
Why is a festival emptying out before it begins?
Because the previous one never happened. Last year Bitef was not held in its institutional form, breaking decades of continuity at one of Europe’s oldest festivals of contemporary performing arts. In its place, an alternative programme called ne:Bitef ran from December 15 to 18, 2025, under the slogan “Bitef is everywhere we gather.”
That line has since grown from a quip into a description of the situation. Once a festival moves out of its building and into a community, going back inside stops being an administrative matter and becomes a question of trust, and trust is not rebuilt with a schedule of performances. The foreign companies dropping out now are not walking away from Belgrade. They are refusing to lend their names to a restoration they do not recognise as theirs.
What is left for September
The 59th Bitef is set for September 14 to 20, 2026. If the list stays as it is, three of the seven productions remain, and that is the festival, however many side programmes get added later.
Inside the house itself the damage has a different scale. The director of the Bitef Theatre has cancelled four premieres for the 2026/27 season, meaning the repertoire that was supposed to outlive the festival week. A festival can be skipped and brought back. A season of work that never gets made does not return, because the people who were meant to make it have gone somewhere else by then.
Six weeks remain until September 14. Enough time to fill a programme back up, nowhere near enough to fix the reason it is emptying.
