The sale of tickets for the 57th Bitef has started, which means that the fear of whether Nikita Milivojević will be able to compile a program for this year's edition since February, when he was appointed artistic director of this festival, was rushed. Bitef starts on October 3rd and lasts until October 10th, so then it will be possible to talk about its selection, about nine plays from Germany, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Sweden, Burkina Faso / Belgium and three from Belgrade.
At the beginning of July, the 10th "Shakespeare Festival" was held, of which Milivojević is the founder, and where only two of the eight performances were from Serbia, and the ninth, again foreign, will be shown in October. At the end of July, in Elefsina, Greece, where Aeschylus was born, he directed his Persians, and soon he will start directing Underground in Athens based on the motives of Emir Kusturica's film of the same name, drama Spring in January and novels Once upon a time there was a country Dusan Kovačević.
Well, let's get started.
"WEATHER" Your tenure as artistic director of Bitef started off stormy, and it seemed that you would do this year's selection under the pressure of that start. However, at least from the outside, it seems that everything went smoothly and as it should. Provided that the impression is not deceiving, how do you interpret the fact that the public's anger over the government's attitude towards important individuals and culture stopped as soon as some other problem became relevant? Is this a common phenomenon or is Bitef more important than any politics?
NIKITA MILIVOJEVIĆ: Nothing is more important than politics, at least it seems to me for many years. As for Bitef, we will soon have a press conference and at it we will officially announce the festival repertoire and all the details regarding the performances, that means that everything is really in order, the impression is not deceiving you.
At the beginning of the mandate, you suggested that we watch Ivan Medenica's selection this year, and you to be there, as you stated, symbolic. And then it is, you said, everything went in the wrong direction. In com?
When I called Ivan Medenica and told him that I had received an invitation from Bitef to come to his place, I still wasn't clear whether to accept it or not, that's what I told him too. My intention was for the two of us to talk first, first of all so that we could stop the weird habit of finding out about shifts from newspapers, phone messages and the like. We both know very well how it is done in the "normal" world, and it was quite natural for me that he would complete everything he had planned, and that I would eventually take over his role only next year. As far as I'm concerned, I believe that I did what I needed to do, and in that sense I would be happy if whoever comes after me does the same as I did. Everything else is a "theatre" for others, and in it everyone sees what they want to see, hears what they want... and as always in similar situations, everyone, of course, "buys" something for themselves along the way. Basically, I don't think it's worth a serious story anymore.
You introduced teamwork, co-selector program selection. What initiated this change? Short term maybe, because everything had to be finished in a few months?
The key word for it is exactly what you said - change. I will draw your attention to the fact that there is a certain consistency. Namely, in my first mandate at Bitef, we made several important changes in a relatively short time. I will remind you that, for example, the Bitef theater was the first in our country to introduce a block system of performances and, accordingly, the engagement of collaborators according to the principle of contract, something that I still consider an essential change that is missing in our theater system. In two key positions, executive director and coordinator of the main program, two young, brilliant people were hired, who became my closest collaborators. I think that in the history of Serbian theater, younger people have never been appointed to such responsible positions! I say this only because the co-selector team is a product of the same thinking. By the way, I didn't invent that way of working, it's something that has been around for a long time, many world festivals have a co-selector team. My co-workers Ksenija Đurović and Tijana Grumić are two extraordinary young people, extremely gifted, already with a lot of experience, in them I recognize all the best that this society has in the new generations and I am very glad that we cooperate. It is already clear to us that this kind of cooperation is manifold beneficial for Bitef.
What Bitef do we need?, was the subject of a discussion organized this spring. Were the answers, or will be, applicable in practice?
First of all, I have to say that this meeting exceeded all my expectations. For me, it was an example of how a group of people of different experiences, interests, and professions, who sat down together for the first time at the table, should talk. I believe that if it were discussed in this way in this society, his image would look completely different. After a long time, it was a meeting that gives me some hope again, at least as far as our theater is concerned. I think it's natural to have a meeting of this kind from time to time, it's nothing new or unusual. I have already said on several occasions that since I am first and foremost a director, teamwork is the most natural thing for me, because in the theater I realize myself through others, and this means, among other things, that you must know how to lead your team, but at the same time allow be guided We have a transcript of the conversation from that meeting, and it is now the subject of our internal meetings. I think some suggestions will be visible already at this year's festival, some ideas we will try to implement for the next festival, and for some things we are still not sure how they are applicable, so we need more time and discussions.
Nikita Milivojevic, director, 28.06.2016. photo by Marko Rupena...
"
Strong,
don't agree to be someone else's"
was promoted at the beginning of spring.
In the meantime, various things happened and gave it new meanings.
And this is about some kind of change. It seemed to us that in the search for a slogan it might be good to change the strategy. The slogan does not necessarily have to be under the pressure of reality, in the sense that it must always have a clearly visible specific message, be current and similar. Sometimes, of course, it has a certain effect and significance, but sometimes this type of message seems banal to me personally. In a conversation with our colleagues at Bitef, we agreed to try something else: instead of being terribly clever and original and competing to come up with a more attractive slogan, let's look for a solution in another way. That's how we came to the poetry, and then the verse of our young outstanding poet Radmila Petrović. It turned out, as always, that real poetry is never one-dimensional, it always hides a secret and multiple meanings, which time itself incorporates into it.
If you agree with the thesis that theater is the art of the moment,
to interpret what happens on the street on the boards,
does the theater still keep up with the current?
And Bitef?
I had the opportunity to speak several times on different occasions on a more or less similar topic about the current state of theater. In this sense, I remember very well a long-ago conversation at Bitef with the famous Otomar Krejc, in which he talked about exactly that. That was the first time I clearly recognized something that started to interest me more and more in the theater. It is about the fact that the theater is of course the art of the moment, in it, as in a mirror, we always somehow recognize the reflection of our own reality, but it should not run a race with its own reality. That is impossible. Theater is not a hippodrome. Chasing some kind of daily engagement and so-called actuality in the theater, we often overlook how shallow these daily truths are. Problems become obsolete faster than we think, especially intrusive problems that are full of our everyday life, and people still continue to love, to suffer, to be happy, unhappy, good, evil, lonely... We live not only in the present, but also in the past and in the future. the future. In addition, these so-called current plays, for my taste, 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. Personally, I'm not so interested in someone's intelligence in the theater, what remains hidden, inferred, is always much more important to me than what is said directly.
This year you had a lot of work around the Shakespeare Festival,
primarily because it is the tenth.
You have decided on modern adaptations of old Shakespeare.
What are the latest Macbeths,
Pericles,
Othello and others?
When the Shakespeare Festival started ten years ago, we could not even dream that Villa "Stanković" in Čortanovci, which was a completely unknown, non-existent place for the public, would become an incredibly lively, positive, exciting place, a real world stage. That there will be theaters from Iran, the USA, Finland, Georgia, Great Britain, Belarus, Turkey, Germany, Armenia, India, China, Greece, Slovenia... About 25.000 spectators have visited the Shakespeare Festival in all these years and seen more than 60 performances. . The fact that the festival was opened by Shakespeare's Globe Theater from London (no less and no more
Hamlet!?), it almost looks like that adventure of Fitzgerald with the opera, in the famous film by Werner Herzog. This year, for the second time in our ten years of existence, we expanded our auditorium, which speaks volumes for the attendance of the festival. It became quite clear that the Shakespeare festival has its audience and has established itself on the map of domestic festivals as very special. Macbeth, Othello, Richard, Hamlet... they are always new and different, depending on whose imagination and reality they come from. From this year's performances, I will single out one event that I will certainly remember for a long time as something truly special: the performance
Pericles adapted for autistic children, performed by the British Flute Theater troupe.
Because of the second part of the Shakespeare Festival,
and right after Bitef,
Charlotte Rampling is coming to Novi Sad.
This year, Isabella Rossellini was the guest of the Belgrade Dance Festival.
Can we hope for the return of big stars to these parts?
We should not be fooled: everything always depends on money. You can have whatever ideas you want, but if you don't have the money to back them up and make them happen, none of it. It has happened to us several times that our ideas for the Shakespeare festival have been taken over by, for example, the festival in Gdańsk, because they are able to realize them due to a much larger budget. As for Charlotte Rampling, the fortunate circumstance is that the Shakespeare Festival has good contact with the Theater Peter Brook (Bouf du Nord) from Paris, where her play Shakespeare and Bach is performed, and that it is not complicated organizationally.
This summer you also got to direct.
If I understood correctly from the media articles,
your emphasis on Aeschylus' Persians in Elephsina was on the conscience of the Persian emperor Xerxes,
which seems to be tempting to see in our area.
Is it possible?
Persians are probably the most demanding thing I've done so far, given that the play was performed in seven different locations: on the coast, on a ship, in the sea, on a pier, in a forest... and our audience is like once upon a time, in ancient times, almost on a kind of pilgrimage, followed all the time. It is actually a kind of inner journey of the Persian emperor Xerxes, whose conscience takes him to the last place he would like to go, to Salamis, the scene of the crime. Where thousands of his soldiers died, for which he is directly responsible. Of course, the most exciting thing in all of this is that the play was played in an authentic setting: the sea, the sky, the stars, Salamis, Elefsina... the remains of sunken ships below us at the bottom of the sea, everything that Aeschylus talks about in
Persians, everything was still there, in the same place where it was 2500 years ago, so in the play it is an experience in itself. There is a desire for the play to take place in our country as well, but we will see if it is possible and in what form.
You are about to start rehearsals for the play Underground in Athens,
why that choice?
Many years ago, I worked on an author's project for the festival in Delphi
My homeland seven dreams and in it I started something that I could call a "dialogue with my homeland". Probably because I have been away for years, physically less and less in my homeland, and accordingly, as time goes on, I feel more and more like a "foreigner", from time to time I have a need for such a "dialogue". In that sense
Underground it belongs to that type of my performances. Film, drama, or novel are three different forms of essentially the same story, so the adaptation I made is actually a kind of montage, a new whole with elements of all three parts. In it, there is a combination of absurdity, humor, drama, truth, lies... wrapped in a metaphor about a great illusion, in which one lives, works, is born and dies.
