BITEF: An International Theatre Festival

BITEF An International Theatre Festival Gautam Dasgupta FALL COMES TO BELGRADE WITH A difference. During the last two weeks of September, its luxuriant canopy of horse chestnut trees signals the arrival of winter by turning an earthy brown. Streets are matted down with splayed, over-sized leaflets. Squirrels dart in and out foraging for their winter harvest, unperturbed by the march of urbanity. And so it goes until dark, when the municipality's water cannons come barreling down the streets cleaning the day's debris, only to undo what nature, lying in wait, seeks to repeat the day after. Here in this verdant metropolis, embraced by the Danube and the Sava rivers at one end and huge tracts of forest green at the other, the play of man and nature fulfills its destiny in an endless display of cyclical variations. One such cycle that for the past twenty-two years has ushered in the glowing autumnal light of Belgrade is BITEF, an international festival of theatre that serves as a joyous prelude to an extended season of literary and music events. Welcoming home its residents from their summer escapes along the azure-blue Adriatic coast, the city, as if in gratitude, throws open its arms in a wide cultural embrace that is the envy of most other cities worldwide, excepting perhaps Berlin. But if the festive aura and its obeisance to international representation in theatre were all there was to BITEF-and there is indeed plenty of that-it would merely duplicate the operative norms of festivals elsewhere. High up on those lists is the desire to provide either a cultural sampling of works from different nations without hardly a clue as to how they each feed into one another, or the more in219 sidious need to invite star attractions from countries long after such companies have ceased to have any relevance in their own cultural spectrum. BITEF, on the other hand, is a cultural event of a higher order. Since its inception in 1967, the festival has continued to flourish under the watchful eyes and strong-willed determination of its director, Mira Trailovik. Alongside her, and sharing artistic responsibilities, is Jovan Cirilov, concurrently Artistic Director of BITEF and of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade. Under their guidance and imaginative stewardship, BITEF has over the years come to represent for theatre connoisseurs the ideal festival set-up. What is displayed here for consumption is an assemblage of ideas. Having taken their cue from the radical aesthetic agenda of Atelje 212, the legendary theatrical company in Yugoslavia of the post-war years (it was founded in 1956), Trailovi6 and Cirilov have formulated a serious, innovative , and artistically compelling purpose to BITEF. As a testament to their artistic integrity and acuity of perception, one has only to glance at the list of theatre companies and theatre directors who have participated at BITEF. For openers, here's a taste of BITEF 67: the Kathakali from India, Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory, Glasgow Citizens' Company, The Living Theatre, Czechoslovakia's foremost director Otomar Krejca, Nouveau theatre de poche from Switzerland, David Esrig from Rumania, and works by artists from the Soviet Union, France, and, of course, from Yugoslavia. With each successive year, the menu gets more and more tantalizing, with Victor Garcia, Jozef Szajna, Alwin Nikolais, Luca Ronconi, Jiri Menzel, Eugene lonesco, Claus Peymann, Andrei Serban , Ingmar Bergman, Roger Planchon, Hans Lietzau, Ariane Mnouchkine , Peter Stein, Miklos Janco, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, George Tabori, Yuri Lyubimov, Samuel Beckett, Patrice Chereau, et al.-and these are only some of the well-recognized directors whose works have been shown here. Participants have come from Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia. Not one to slight their own Eastern European neighbors, while steering clear of blatant chauvinism, BITEF has offered a home, consistently , to the best that these nations have had to offer. It is only now, during this period of thaw, that we in the West are becoming vaguely familiar with the exceptionally daring and artistically brilliant theatre that has been hid from view for so long by the Iron Curtain. And finally, BITEF's hospitality to its own artists in a forum of such international renown...