Regardless of social circumstances, the role of the festival is to introduce us to another world - believes Aja Jung, director of the Belgrade Game Festival, which was held at the time of noisy and stormy protests.
Tonight, April 15, it ends 22th Belgrade Dance Festival. From March 7, in Belgrade, Subotica and Novi Sad, 17 companies from 13 countries presented 28 new choreographic settings in circumstances that were anything but suitable for dancing.
From the first night, from the play "Beitn" by Omar Razih's company "Maqamat" from Beirut, which was played in the "Balkan" cinema, while there was a large, very noisy protest not far from there in Trg Republike, until tonight's closing, the BFI took place with whistles and vuvuzelas. Festival director Aya Jung believes that social circumstances do not affect the Festival:
"No matter what the situation is outside, global, local or our own, the role of the theater is to introduce us to another world, to offer different ideas and impressions. Just like the theater, this Festival must fulfill its role, no matter how complicated, difficult or different the time is from what we dream about," said Aya Jung to the media, announcing the final performance.
And that is the solo performance "Drowsiness" by the French choreographer and performer Boris Šarmac, a kind of meditation on the state "between reality and sleep".
Šarmac, the director of the Pine Bausch Dance Theater in Wuppertal, said that this is his first solo, stressing that "solos are usually created by young choreographers while they are in the research phase", and not at the threshold of the fifties as he was at the time of covid when "Drowsiness" was created.
As he said, he didn't use recorded music, but just whistled the melodies that came to him spontaneously - from Enni Morricone's film scores, through Bach and Vivaldi's classics, jazz, to Billie Eilish's hits, which his children love. It remained the same in the play, and he included the kind of whistling heard on the street or during demonstrations.
The results of this year's Belgrade Game Festival expressed by the number of spectators will be announced soon. As far as is known, almost all performances were sold out even before the start of the BFI.
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