Can beauty save the world?

For the 58th Bitef, which starts on September 25, 60 percent of the tickets have already been sold, and they are only on sale for a few days.

Until October 4, in the main program of this most famous theater festival in the country, 10 plays from Germany, France, Switzerland, Bolivia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia will be shown, and all of them encourage thinking about the thesis that "Beauty (will not) save the world”.

Comedy française

It seems that when the selection team (Nikita Milivojević, Ksenija Đurović and Tijana Grumić) announced the program of the new edition of Bitef at the beginning of July, the lights immediately fell on Commedia Française.

At the time, it was said that this oldest ensemble in Europe had never been to Belgrade. And then recently, thanks to the Service for research and documentation of the National Theater in Belgrade, it became known that this famous theater was already in Belgrade - in 1936, as part of its first tour in Central and Eastern Europe. Then they performed two plays, "No joke with love" and "Big kids".

That discovery turned out to fuel even more interest in Comédie Française.

This time, they are coming to Belgrade with the play "Hecuba, not Hecuba" directed by Tiago Rodrigues, who is also the director of the famous Avignon festival. The play combines ancient drama and documentary material, providing a contemporary interpretation of the mythical heroine.

Softening

As expected, the Bitef audience's focus is on the performance that opens Bitef: the dance performance "Softening" by Dance On Ensemble from Berlin, choreographed by the Greek artist Christos Papadopoulos.

This German troupe is made up of dancers who are 40+, and their performance opens up questions about what it means to mature as an artist, how the body changes and how it affects the performance, both literally and figuratively. Softening in "Softening" is reflected precisely in the subtly implemented idea of ​​individual rebellion through barely noticeable breaking of set restrictions.

Photo: Bitef

Brazil

We know almost nothing about the cultural scene in Brazil, so the arrival of the play "The Power of the Bitch Trilogy - Chapter I: The Bride and Good Night, Cinderella" by Carolina Bianchi and her dance troupe Cara de Cavallo is reason enough for curiosity in itself.

Since the premiere of the first chapter of the aforementioned trilogy at the prestigious Avignon festival in July of last year, this play has become part of all leading European and world festivals, making Bianchi one of the most important new names in the world of performing arts.

The most exciting thing in this trilogy is the author's radical approach to the subject of sexual violence.

Starting from the story of rape through the prism of art history - from painting to performance art, Bianchi expands this context with her own experience of sexual violence and placing herself as a performer in the extreme circumstances of taking GHB (a popular substance used to physically incapacitate the victim before the attack ) on stage, in order to reconstruct the situation when she was drugged by the same drug during a night out.

Photo: Bitef

Amazon

Hecuba from the Comedie française is not the only heroine from ancient mythology at this year's Bitef.

In the play "Antigone in the Amazon" by the city theater NT Gent from Belgium

the ancient female figure is intertwined with the contemporary context. Four performers on stage and many more participants, members of the indigenous peoples of Brazil, present through video projections, recreate the story of Antigone, placing it in the context of a specific event from 1996. Rau moves all the time between video and live action on stage, between ancient drama and documentary material, between reality and fiction. For the purposes of working on "Antigone", Rau and his team were in Brazil, where forests and nature are consumed by capitalism and fire and where 1 percent of the population owns as much as 45 percent of the land.

Photo: Bitef

Prison

Project "Palmasola - prison village" by Christopher Frick, produced by KLARA Tetaterproduktionen from Basel. is based on years of research into one of the most notorious prisons in the world, the so-called Palmasola prison village in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.

The prison was built in the late 1980s and currently houses more than 6.000 men and women, only a quarter of whom are officially convicted. Frick and his team are the only artistic troupe that has so far received permission to spend some time in Palmasola, to talk to prisoners and other actors of that specific system and generally document their stay there, which was the basic structure of the play.

New form

It is also interesting to learn about the lecture-performance, which is a relatively new theatrical form for the wider audience here, and the selectors invited as many as three. All from the region and all dealing with reproductive rights, gender and work identities.

Thus, the play "Sexual Education II: The Struggle" by the young Slovenian director Tjaša Črnigoj talks about the struggle for reproductive rights in post-war Yugoslavia, at the same time informing the audience about the current context that defines that topic.

In "this is my truth, tell me yours", a co-production between Ljubljana and Zagreb, the author Jasna Žmak, alone on stage, tries to overcome her own inner turmoil, bravely and wittily examines the topics of misogyny, work in culture and homophobia both through her own experience as an author, as well as in the wider context of the performing arts in general.

From Serbia comes "We will do something about war, gender and freedom, it will be called: What would Chelsea say to me" by the author and performers Irene Ristić and Đorđe Živadinović Grgur, at the same time presenting a kind of theatrical investigation inspired by the American whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman and former intelligence officer of the US Army.

Serbia and Slovenia

Serbia is participating in this Bitef in another play, as its co-producer (Belgrade Drama Theater and Local Theater of Ljubljana). It is the "Future" of Žiga Divjak, an almost non-verbal performance of striking aesthetics that tells the story of the meeting of birds with the waste that people leave behind. Divjak explores the destructive effects of capitalism and consumerism on the natural world, creating a moving play that prompts us to urgently reconsider our own relationship to nature.

The local theater from Ljubljana also participates with the play "Pukotina" by Jan Krmelj, based on the text of the British author, who for the purposes of the performance was called Rose Selavi.

In the opening note of her text, the writer points out that the play must not be advertised under its real name and title. This indication alone gives the key to reading this text, which deals with the fate of two climate activists who were found dead in their apartment in 2021, and about whose lives and deaths there is no information on the Internet, even though it is supposedly a documentary story. The young director Krmelj recently received the prestigious Borštnik Award for directing that play.

The order of the performances in this text does not correspond to the order of the most requested performances for this year's Bitef edition, except for the first three or four. But when all is said and done, it is not excluded that the answer to the question of whether beauty can save the world will be positive.