They Boycotted Bitef, Now Head to ne:Bitef

Last December 15, the hall at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts was packed with people who came to see a show the official Bitef, in a year when the festival did not take place in any form, refused to stage. That is how the first ne:Bitef began, a guerrilla edition born out of censorship in a single selection. Nine months later, the story continues, only the cast has changed: the companies that walked away from the official 59th Bitef this summer are now coming to its alternative.

Who Is Coming to ne:Bitef

ne:Bitef organizer Jelena Knezevic, who directed Bitef itself until last year, confirmed to N1 that on September 20, at the second edition of the guerrilla festival, the very artists who refused to take part in the institutional program will perform. Among them is the German collective Gob Squad, whose founders Simon Vil and Helen de Buver are coming to Belgrade, and the Italian company Motus, represented by directing duo Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolo. They will be joined by Swiss director Milo Rau, whose censored production of “The Pelicot Trial” a year ago set off the first ne:Bitef in the first place, this time sharing a program with Bitef’s former artistic director Nikita Milivojevic. From Slovenia comes Dragan Zivadinov, one of the key figures of that country’s art scene in the 1980s.

The scale of the withdrawal is clearest in the numbers. Of the seven productions the official festival originally announced, only one survived into the new lineup put together by selector Spasoje Z. Milovanovic: “Black Gold” by Dejan Dukovski, directed by Oliver Frljic and performed by the Belgrade Drama Theatre. Everything else has been replaced with productions from Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, Turkiye and Tunisia, while the Russian production “Russian Blues” was shifted into the accompanying program. The list of those who pulled out of the official Bitef runs longer than the two companies now heading to ne:Bitef: alongside Gob Squad and Motus, Portugal’s Teatro Praga, the Slovenian National Theatre, Lebanese choreographer Ali Sahrur with his piece “When I Saw the Sea,” Argentine author Marina Otero and the Montenegrin National Theatre with “Medea Material” all withdrew as well.

“Completely Incompetent, Unqualified People Are Running Bitef”

Knezevic sees the institutional side of the story as part of a broader pattern, not an isolated dispute over a single festival. “This year we decided to mark 60 years of Bitef, usually such anniversaries are celebrated a bit more festively,” she told N1, leaving the bitterness of that kind of anniversary to speak for itself. In her words, all of this is also “part of the student struggle to preserve institutions,” and Bitef stands as “a good example here, its freedom was taken away last year.” Of the festival’s current leadership she does not mince words: “Completely incompetent, unqualified people are running Bitef.” She adds that no one has taken responsibility, either for last year’s selection or for this year’s.

Selector Milovanovic did not defend the new lineup as a replacement but as a response to the circumstances under which the festival is being held at all. In his statement explaining the selection, he wrote:

“Theater is not separate from these processes and holds no special authority or solutions that other fields have failed to find.”

The line reads like an admission that the institution cannot resolve its own crisis, only survive it while it lasts, and it is precisely that difference in direction, not in vocabulary, that separates two festivals which share the same founding year. The official program, as we reported when the new selection was announced, still runs as the 59th Bitef and opens on September 13 under the slogan “Dare to Know.” The organizers of ne:Bitef, on the other hand, are counting this year’s edition as marking 60 years since the festival’s founding, a jubilee one side celebrates quietly, in its own program, and the other celebrates loudly, in the street.

Sixty Stages Instead of One Hall

The second ne:Bitef, whose date and format we have already reported, is built as the opposite of everything a single auditorium implies: on September 20, from noon to 6 p.m., 60 micro-stages will open across Belgrade, each run by a local cultural worker proposed by the community, with free admission at all sixty locations. As it did last year, the program closes at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD), with a performance and a conversation featuring domestic and international artists who have been tied to Bitef for decades, supported by the Goethe-Institut as a partner.

The names now confirmed, and they are precisely the names that turned down the official stage, make a hard case to dispute, one ne:Bitef already made when it announced its date: that a festival is built by people, not by management. It is difficult to claim Bitef can be reduced to an administrative form when the very artists who left it choose to return to it, in a different way, in a courtyard and on a terrace instead of a hall with a jury.