BITEF2024: With Concern About the World We Live in

Kamelia Nikolova*

The 58th edition of BITEF–Belgrade International Theatre Festival, Serbia, 25 September–4 October 2024.

The 58th edition of BITEF—one of the oldest and well-established international theatre festivals in Europe—has convincingly proved that it continues to maintain its importance as a space for meeting and dialogue between the most significant theatre trends, aesthetics and artists in the performing arts today.

According to its time-honoured tradition, the festival focuses on theatrical productions that engage with some of the particularly acute issues of the modern global world, such as the problem of social inequality, gender and sexual diversity and violence. In recent years, one of the recurring themes at BITEF has been the collapse of modern society and its increasing indifference to its basic moral values; the festival’s aim is to highlight the latest developments in the field of theatrical practice through which theatre reflects this collapse. The 2024 main programme, selected by the new artistic director of the forum, theatre director Nikita Milivojević (who in 2023 followed Ivan Medenica) and his team, which includes playwright Tijana Grumich and executive director Ksenija Durović, unequivocally confirmed their resolution to endorse the already established thematic and aesthetic policy of the festival.

The timeless story of Antigone is intertwined with a real event in Brazil at the end of the twentieth century in Antigone in the Amazon, directed by Milo Rau, NTGhent, Belgium. Photo: Moriz Van Dungen

Every edition of BITEF is marked by a slogan especially chosen by the curatorial team. This year’s motto was Beauty Will (Not) Save the World. Ambivalently reformulating Dostoyevsky’s famous quotation, the slogan expressed the desire of the festival organisers to present performances that assert the combination of outward and inward beauty in man, and its presence in his actions and relationships, as well as having a corrective value in our life today, but, at the same time, anxiously asked if this beauty is capable of saving the modern world full of divisions, wars and violence.

In order to materialise this concept, the curatorial team had selected productions that thematically deal with the traditional symbol of beauty—femininity. In different ways and from different points of view, the participating performances stated the need to reconsider the archetypal notions and the well-known myths and classical narratives about femininity.

Hybrid performance based on personal stories stood out as the festival programme’s preferred theatrical form for providing commentary on the issues outlined above. Another main feature shared by the selected performances is that they were built on the basis of rigorous preliminary research of specific events, facts and case studies, the documentary material then supplemented and upgraded with the personal experience and commentary of the participants, as well as with their own stories and experience. A significant part of the productions combined and juxtaposed emblematic ancient myths, such as the stories of Antigone, the Trojan War and Hecuba, with contemporary cases and personal stories of the actors.

BITEF2024 opened with the dance piece Mellowing, choreographed by Christos Papadopoulos, The Dance On Ensemble, Berlin. Photo: Jubal Battisti

The main programme of the 58th edition of BITEF included ten performances (most of them created as co-productions) from ten countries. The festival opened with the dance piece Mellowing by Christos Papadopoulos and The Dance On Ensemble, Berlin, Germany, followed by Hecuba, Not Hecuba by Tiago Rodríguez and Theatre Comédie–Française, France. Five performances from Serbia and its neighbouring countries Slovenia and Croatia were presented over the next few days. The most striking of these were Sex Education II: Fight, a devised performance/lecture by the young director Tjaša Crnigoj and four other performers; Rapture by Slovenian director Jan Krmelj, as well as the co-production This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours by Jasna Žmak (Croatia/Slovenia). The BITEF2024 competition programme closed with Palmasola—A Prison Village by Christophe Frick (Switzerland/Bolivia), Antigone in the Amazon by Milo Rau and NTGhent, Belgium and Cadela Força Trilogy—Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella by Amsterdam-based Brazilian performer Carolina Bianchi (Brazil/Netherlands).

I was fortunate to see most of the performances in this packed programme. The general impression of them—including several of the most outstanding and large scale European productions currently on the European stage, touring the world festivals this year, as well as the daring performances from Serbia and its neighbouring countries, dealing with the issues of femininity, difference and violence in the modern world—is, above all, of an extraordinary dedication to the subjects they explore and manifest professionalism. Several performances stood out, the majority of which became the recipients of the festival awards.

Antigone in the Amazon, directed by Milo Rau, received the Politics newspaper award for best direction. Photo: Kurt van der Elst

Antigone in the Amazon by the renowned Swiss director Milo Rau and the theatre in Ghent, Belgium, where Rau served as artistic director from 2018 to 2023, was undoubtedly the strongest performance at the 58th edition of BITEF. This production completes the Trilogy of Ancient Myths by the celebrated master of contemporary political theatre (Hate Radio, 2011; Civil Wars, 2014), in which he uses ancient myths to examine contemporary political and personal situations. The performance complements Orestes in Mosul (2019) and his provocative film The New Gospel (2020, a story about the migrants who live in the Italian city of Matera, where Pasolini and Mel Gibson filmed their films about Jesus Christ). In Antigone in the Amazon, the director explores in detail a specific event that took place in Brazil in 1996; namely, the brutal suppression of a riot of local agricultural workers, who demanded the return of part of the equatorial forests, taken centuries ago from their ancestors and systematically destroyed by the extraction of natural resources. Several protesters were killed in the riot, including their leader; his sister wanted to bury him, defying the unjust bans of armed police.

The director and four actors present the timeless story of Antigone and her doomed effort to bury her brother Polynices by interweaving it with a reconstruction of what happened in Brazil at the end of the twentieth century. For this purpose, they travel to the Amazon and create their performance in collaboration with the local organization of landless people fighting for their right to land (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra—MST). Milo Rau applies the strategy of storytelling and combines video projections featuring members of the Amazonian Movement with the live presence of the Ghent theatre actors. Thanks to the compelling directorial idea, complemented by the extremely masterful and impactful video projections (Anton Lukas and Dennis Diels) and the consummate acting, the performance became a firm favourite of both the audience and the theatre professionals. Antigone in the Amazon received the Politics newspaper award for best direction.

Hecuba, Not Hecuba by Tiago Rodríguez and Comédie–Française had premiered at the Avignon festival in 2024 and was later presented at numerous other prominent festivals such as Epidaurus and Pilsen. The performance is once again based on a modern interpretation of an ancient myth, this time the myth of Hecuba, who experiences the suffering caused by her inability to save her children in the Trojan War. The tragic fate of the ancient heroine is intertwined with the personal story of the actress playing the role of Hecuba. She is the mother of an autistic teenager, and her rehearsals are intertwined with her own efforts to protect the child from the cruelty that surrounds them. The performance was yet another tour de force of the Comedie–Française actors and, above all, of Elsa Lepoivre as Hecuba.

The daring stage conception is complemented by the inventive visual aspects of the performance in Rapture, directed by Jan Krmelj, Ljubljana’s City Theatre. Photo: Peter Giodani

Rapture by the young Slovenian director Jan Krmelj and Ljubljana’s City Theatre turned out to be one of the pleasant surprises of the festival. The performance confidently sits alongside the aforementioned high-profile productions by renowned directors and artistic teams with its profound and multifaceted case study of an environmentalist couple, who were found dead in their apartment during the pandemic, and immediately afterwards all information about them on the Internet and social networks was deleted. The director’s fascinating play with the multiple directions of interpretation of these events is complemented by the inventive visual aspects of the performance.

This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, by the Croatian playwright and performer Jasna Žmak, is a frank look at her own writing. Photo: Marcandrea

In her performance-lecture This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, the Croatian playwright and performer Jasna Žmak offered a witty and frank look at her own writing, trying to answer the questions of what it means for her to be a female playwright, what motivates her to write plays and to perform them, how to deal with topics such as misogyny, rudeness and one’s own anxieties. The performance received the Mira Trailović Grand Prize.

The production Cadela Força Trilogy IThe Bride and Goodnight Cinderella by Amsterdam-based Brazilian playwright and performer Carolina Bianchi and her troupe Cara de Cavalo, which closed the festival, was also constructed in the same performance-lecture format. Bianchi’s radical approach to the subject of sexual violence and to the attempt to experience the trauma it causes as viscerally and graphically as possible on stage was appreciated by the festival jury and brought her the special award named after Jovan Ćirilov.

How do we improve and change the world around us in such a way as to make it worth saving? This was the troubling question posted by the 58th edition of BITEF. 


*Kamelia Nikolova (PhD, DSc) is a theatre researcher, historian and theatre critic. She is Professor of European Theatre and Head of Theatre Studies Programme at the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts, Sofia. She is also Research Fellow at the Theatre Department of the Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and a visiting professor at other universities. Her research interests are connected with the history of theatre, theory of drama and performance and new theatre practices. The list of her publications includes eleven books and many articles published in Bulgarian and international journals.

Copyright © 2024 Kamelia Nikolova
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411

Creative Commons Attribution International License

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.