Ostermeier and Pussy Riot Join Belgrade's NE:Bitef Sunday

On Sunday, September 20, Bitef will not have a single address. It will have sixty. Between noon and six in the evening, so many micro-venues will open across Belgrade that no single visitor could see them all. Instead, as the festival itself requires, everyone will have to piece together their own route through the city, choosing where to linger and where to simply pass by. Admission is free everywhere, and the program of the second NE:Bitef, marked as the festival’s 60th edition, brings together more than a hundred artists and cultural workers.

The name carrying the most weight in this lineup is Thomas Ostermeier, the longtime artistic director of Berlin’s Schaubuhne and a director whose productions, including “Disco Pigs,” “Nora” and “History of Violence,” have already passed through the regular Bitef program and left a mark on audiences. He is coming to Belgrade specifically for NE:Bitef, as a gesture of solidarity with a cultural community that spent last year without an official edition of the festival. His micro-venue is at the Faculty of Applied Arts, dedicated to the Schaubuhne repertoire, with a conversation with the audience scheduled there from 1 p.m.

That micro-venue is curated by Ivan Medenica, a theater scholar and professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, who once served as artistic director of Bitef itself. The gap between the institution where he teaches and the venue he is curating this weekend is not an incidental detail. It captures exactly how this festival operates: people who normally hold academic and institutional roles are working out in the field, away from the buildings where their offices sit.

The second major name is the group Pussy Riot. NE:Bitef will host Maria Masha Alyokhina, the Russian political artist, activist and author of “Riot Days” and “Political Girl,” along with Erik Breitenbach, who plays drums and produces electronic music for her performances. Their joint program, which combines live music, text and political performance, takes place Sunday evening. They arrive at a moment when a Russian court declared Pussy Riot an extremist organization at the end of 2025, which makes their appearance at a festival that presents itself as an act of resistance less of a coincidence than it would be anywhere else.

The list of participants goes further. Swiss director Milo Rau, the German collective Gob Squad, the Italian company Motus, Dragan Zivadinov, Tjasa Crnigoj, Milos Lolic, Anja Susa and Nikita Milivojevic are all appearing in person, while Eugenio Barba, Oliver Frljic, Jernej Lorenci and Nina Rajic Kranjac have confirmed online appearances. The presence of Gob Squad and Motus carries its own backstory: both groups withdrew from last year’s 59th Bitef in solidarity with Belgrade’s artistic community, after a program proposed to the festival board by Milos Lolic was censored. Rau’s connection to that same chronology is even more direct. His opening speech at the 58th Bitef in 2024, in which he spoke out against lithium mining, triggered the censorship of his production “The Trial of Pelicot,” which was eventually staged only in December 2025, at the first NE:Bitef.

That first NE:Bitef was itself created as a response to the cancellation of the 59th Bitef and to that same act of censorship. Rather than let the festival simply not happen that year, part of the cultural sector organized it themselves, with student support, and staged it as a guerrilla event outside the official production. The second edition, arriving Sunday, repeats the same principle on a larger scale: sixty micro-venues instead of a single hall, all curated by members of the cultural community itself.

The day closes at the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD), where from 7 p.m. all participants and the audience gather for the panel “Art, Resistance and Solidarity,” moderated by Ana Vujanovic and Ana Miljanic. The conversation is followed by informal socializing over cake to mark Bitef’s 60th birthday, celebrating the institution’s jubilee outside its own walls in a year when it did not hold a regular edition. This edition of the festival is supported by the Center for Cultural Decontamination and the Goethe Institute, and organizers are publishing the map and schedule for all sixty locations ahead of Sunday on the nebitef.rs website, leaving the audience to decide for themselves in what order to visit them.