The Shakespeare Festival, a unique festival in the country that has existed for 13 years, cannot take place in Vila Stanković this July, the Provincial Government announced. Reason: planned works. Sounds familiar
The city assembly did not respond to the proposal of the Bitef Board that Nikita Milivojević, the previous artistic director of the festival, continue the work he had started, and he wrote a letter thanking him for the offer. Svetozar Cvetković, chairman of the Board, believes that a solution will be reached after all
The Bitef board refused to decide on the program of this year's Bitef, as recommended by the Secretariat for Culture, because it is not according to the Festival Rules, and proposes that Nikita Milivojević be the artistic director for the second term as well
According to the decision of the City Assembly, Nikita Milivojević's mandate was not extended, and the new artistic director of Bitef was not elected. Thus, the list of international festivals whose work has been stopped by the City Assembly during the last month has been increased to four. It is assumed that the reasons are ineligibility and the Expo
Tonight ends the first part of the Shakespeare festival in Chortanovci, in which theaters from Great Britain, Italy and Serbia presented four plays that first come to mind when we think of Shakespeare
On Wednesday, the 57th Bitef begins with the German play "Children of the Sun", respecting the continuity with the previous concepts of the festival
"For my taste, so-called current plays often have a kind of superficial didacticism. When I say that, I mean a certain imposition of ideas on the viewer, what he should think and the like. In the theater, I'm not so interested in someone's intelligence, what remains hidden, inferred, is always much more important to me than what is said directly."
The third Teatrium begins, and the tenth Shakespeare Festival is underway. Both with programs befitting repertory theaters
Nikita Milivojević, the new artistic director, and his selection team have chosen nine plays which, judging by the first information, continue to boldly speak about our present, like the previous Bitefs.
Thanks to the new rules of the City Assembly, the government has the opportunity to influence the artistic and programming conception of 14 cultural manifestations of importance for Belgrade: it chooses a selector and appoints the president of the manifestation's board from among its own ranks. The new president of the Bitef Festival Committee is the Secretary of Culture of the City. For now, Bitef is working as if nothing happened, and they expect that it won't
Public reactions regarding the appointment of Nikita Milivojević as the new artistic director of Bitef are negative, but not because of this well-known director who succeeded Ivan Medenica, but because of the Secretariat for Culture of the city, which is the reason for Medenica's departure
"A situation has arisen in which the city secretary is directly pushing me to break the law, to falsely present myself to foreign partners as the artistic director of Bitef. I didn't agree to that"
