Bitef started on Wednesday, so far three of the ten performances of the Main Program have already been performed, and there is still talk about the speech of the Swiss director Milo Rau, who opened this edition of the Belgrade International Theater Festival.
Understandably, it was a speech for an anthology. That's why we'll be streaming it in full soon.
Milo Rau (1977) has signed over 50 plays, films, books and events, and is now the artistic director of the Vienna Festival. He is involved in the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), the largest (land) workers' movement without ownership of the land, around which nearly a million people have gathered, and he is currently very active in the artistic and political campaign against the strengthening of the right in Austria.
"If the theater does not try and does not want to achieve what it talks about, which are always the moral, social and cultural values of civilization, then it is not true and it is not a theater," he told "Danasu" in front of Bitef.
At the 58th Bitef, on October 2nd and 3rd at "Atelier 212", there will be his "Antigone in the Amazon", a project based on the land grabbing and the terrible massacre of farmers in Brazil in 1996. It will be impossible not to see her in the light of his speech:
"Dear audience,
I am very happy to be here, in Belgrade, at the Bitef festival. I love this festival for many reasons: it is a festival that is both local and international. A festival that is equally dedicated to beauty and protest. A bold, diverse festival.
I remember the first time I was at Bitef, exactly 10 years ago, in 2014. At that time, I was driving through the former Yugoslavia in a small Volkswagen, and behind the wheel was the brilliant Slovenian coach, Nevenka Koprivšek, who, unfortunately, has since passed away. We were doing research for our piece The Dark Ages about civil wars in the former Yugoslavia.
We drove from Slovenia, through Croatia, to Belgrade, and from Belgrade, through Bosnia, to Srebrenica and Sarajevo - through all the cities whose names we Westerners know because of the wars and massacres that took place there in the last century. I remember how impressed I was that I could still see traces of NATO bombing in Belgrade. I remember watching a play at Bitef in 2014 about Gavrilo Princip, the man who killed Franz Ferdinand in 1914. At the end of my trip through the former Yugoslavia, I had a coffee at Hotel Evropa, in Sarajevo, where Franz Ferdinand drank his last coffee before he was shot.
Photo: FoNetThe audience at the opening of Bitef
This morning, when I arrived, I heard that someone else had arrived in Serbia in a Volkswagen this summer - it was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He came to promote the mining of lithium for the needs of the German automobile industry, not far from here, in the Jadra valley. Scholz called on Serbs to make sacrifices for Europe, for so-called 'sustainable' energy. 'Europe' means, of course – Volkswagen. The displacement of 20000 families and the poisoning of fertile soil for future generations. Yes, that's what 'sustainable' means - sustainable in death.
'I will show you fear in a handful of dust', as TS Eliot wrote in A wasteland after the First World War. Today we are witnessing another war - an economic war that turns entire countries into a wasteland, a land of sadness and fear. This time I didn't come to Belgrade in a Volkswagen, I came with a Greek tragedy: a piece Antigone in the Amazon, about the struggle of the Brazilian Movement of Landless Farmers (MST) against modern mining companies - about the struggle of Antigone, the Theban princess, against her uncle Creon, the Greek Olaf Scholz.
The Amazon is 10.000 kilometers from here, but we live in a globalized world: the same tragedy, the same wasteland is everywhere. As in a teenage monster movie, the same company, Rio Tinto, mines lithium in Serbia and bauxite in the Amazon – minerals needed for Volkswagen's 'sustainable' future. No wonder there is a saying in the Amazon: 'When you hear the word sustainable, run as far as your legs will carry you'.
However, I think - and this is also the message of Antigone - it is better to defend your country. Antigone's fight is everywhere and her explicit NO to land grabbing is needed in Serbia as well as in Brazil. 'Beauty will save the world', quote from Idiot Dostoevsky, is the theme of this year's Bitef. Chancellor Scholz, Volkswagen, Rio Tinto: they don't want to save the world, they want to save their power and their bank accounts. In all countries, be it Europe or Brazil, the very people who use the words nation and homeland the most - nationalists - will sell the beauty of their country to international investors: some German Creon, or Serbian Creon, Brazilian Creon, etc.
"There are many terrible things, but nothing is more terrible than man" – this is the most famous quote from Antigone. Yes, there is something terrible, monstrous, something horrible about us humans. Something that sometimes makes me feel the urge to sit up and scream. So please: let us all be like Antigone. Let's all be like idiot Dostoyevsky: let's be naive, say NO to the deadly ideology of our time. We are fighting for Beauty, for the Beauty of life, for the Beauty of nature - our true homeland.
When I was in the Amazon, one sentence was written on all the books and flags: 'We nurture the earth and it nurtures us'. What we do to the earth will be done to us. Be it love or hate, tenderness or greed. Yes, we are living in the Dark Ages again, wars surround us. "We have a little time to make the living happy, and all eternity to love the dead," as Sophocles writes in Antigony. That's why we celebrate Beauty, togetherness and respect, here in Belgrade, and wherever we are.
I declare the 58th Bitef open."
