Bitef Without Bitef: Seven Shows Down to Two
The fifth withdrawal came on August 2, leaving only two shows in the 59th Bitef's main program. Ivan Medenica wants the festival stopped; the selector says his job is to keep it alive.
The program of the 59th Bitef reached journalists by email on June 26, with no press conference and no chance to put a single question to the selector about the choices made. The document listed seven titles from Argentina, Spain, Montenegro, Italy, Lebanon, Portugal, Slovenia and Serbia, picked out of 87 productions the festival’s team had seen. Six weeks later, only two of those seven remain.
The fifth withdrawal was announced on August 2, when Argentine director Marina Otero said her production “Kill Me” would not be coming to Belgrade. Before her, the festival lost “When I Saw the Sea” by Lebanese author Ali Shahrour, “Audition” by the Portuguese collective Teatro Praga, “Anhovo” by Žiga Divjak, staged by the Slovenian National Theatre Nova Gorica, and “Frankenstein Diptych” by the Italian company Motus, which had been scheduled to perform on September 19. The British German collective Gob Squad turned down its invitation even before the program was announced.
The reason is the same in every case, and it has nothing to do with artistic merit. The companies cite solidarity with the artists, students, professors and activists in Serbia who are demanding justice and freedom of expression. Otero was explicit in her statement that the decision was neither easy nor cheap.
“Cancelling the production of Kill Me carries significant financial costs. Despite that, I am certain this is the right course of action.”
The cost she mentions is not a figure of speech. It is a line item in an independent production’s budget, and it shows how deliberate the decision was.
What’s left in the selection
Two titles remain in the program. “Object Medea,” directed by Diego de Brea, a co-production between the Montenegrin National Theatre in Podgorica and the Bar Cultural Centre, and “Black Gold” by Dejan Dukovski, directed by Oliver Frljic and produced by the Belgrade Drama Theatre. Frljic’s involvement is not currently in question, precisely because his production is a domestic one, though he too has said publicly that he does not want his play used as an alibi for censorship, a reference to last year’s rejection of Milos Lolic’s program by the festival’s board.
There is also a quiet change nobody has explained. The June announcement scheduled the festival for September 14 to 20, while later reports mention September 16 to 20 instead. On top of that, the selection does not include a single dance production, a striking absence for a festival that spent decades bringing contemporary movement to Belgrade, and not one that gets fixed with a footnote.
Why the selection is falling apart now
Because it has not just been falling apart since June. It has been falling apart longer than that. Last year, part of the theater scene organized a parallel guerrilla event called ne:Bitef, and Nikita Milivojevic, the previous artistic director, turned down an invitation to return to the post. In a letter to the board, he wrote that the festival’s budget had been cut by 10 million dinars and that running it without preparation or stable funding would mean further decline. A year later, when foreign companies pull out one after another, they are not reacting to the program. They are reacting to a context that predates the program.
Selector Spasoje Z. Milovanovic calls the participants’ decisions legitimate but describes their reasons as political.
“My task was, and still is, to work with the Board to make sure the festival takes place, is preserved, and returns its focus to the reason it exists: art and performances.”
His argument is institutional: for nearly six decades, Bitef has been one of the channels through which Serbian theater communicates with the world, and that channel does not close over a single season.
Ivan Medenica, a theater scholar, professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts and the festival’s longtime former artistic director, disagrees. He called the situation untenable and asked the Belgrade City Secretariat for Culture to shut down this year’s edition immediately. At that point, the dispute stopped being about taste and became a question of the founder’s responsibility.
What remains on the table is not an artistic problem but an administrative one. Two productions do not make a festival, and new names are not booked in August for mid September without accepting that it is the schedule, not the selection, that is being filled in. Bitef is a name that meant boldness and risk for half a century, and today it functions as a last lever: as long as it is still called Bitef, it looks like continuity survives. If a program assembled out of whatever is available shows up on stage in September, the name will be the only thing left of the festival, and that is less than a cancellation.
