Bitef

Founded in 1967, BITEF - Belgrade International Theatre Festival survived 33 years as a festival of new world theatre tendencies keeping pace with tumultuous evolution of performing arts, from revolutionary Sixties to the Seventies, when avant-garde resaerch made its way into repertory theatres to the Eighties, the decade of postmodern theatre expression to the middle of this decade which brings us to the end of 20th century and the end of millennium, where theatre in general is exploring the limits of human physical abilities, the artistic outlines of which are still hazy. For 33 years, BITEF was one of the rare theatre festivals in the world that simultaneously in its program had avant-garde, experimental and research forms of performing arts and big main stream production. The number of the artists who appeared on BITEF as unknown, of hardly recognized, and later become the part of the 20th century history of theatre is impressive, so their names like:

Jerzy Grotowski, Living Theatre, Alwin Nikolais, Richard Schechner, Luca Ronconi, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Nuria Espert, Otomar Krejča, Peter Zadek, Claus Peymann, Victor Garcia, Ingmar Bergman, Roger Planchon, Arianne Mnouchkine, Gerome Savary, Patrice Cherreau, George Lavaudant, Joseph Chaikin, Andrei Serban, William Gaskill, Georgy Tovstonogov, Jury Ljubimov, Anatoly Efros, Antoine Vitez, Tadeusz Kantor, Konrad Swinarski, Jerzy Jarocki, Andržej Wajda, Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Giorgio Strehler, Karmelo Bene, Linsay Kemp, Eimuntas Nekrošius, Tamas Ascher, Gabor Zsambeki, Miclos Jancso, Ljubiša Ristić, Robert Sturua, Igor Vasilev, Erwin Piplits, Frederik Flamant, Karge-Langhof, Hansgünter Hayme, Alexander Lang, Odin Thetret and Eugenio Barba, La Mama Theatre, Pip Simmons, Charles Ludlam, Shujy Tarajama, Merce Cunningham, Roberto Ciulli, Peter Stein, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, La Fura dels Baus, Johan Kresnik, Meredith Monk, Wim Vandekeybus, Henrieta Janowska, Kama Ginkas, Roman Viktjuk, Lev Dodin, Valery Fokin, Silviu Purcarete, Dušan Jovanović, Joseph Nadj, Dragan Živadinov, Tomaž Pandur, Dejan Mijač, Slobodan Unkovski, Nigel Charnock, Christoph Marthaler, Saburo Teshigavara, Comediants, De La Guarda, Angelin Preljocaj, Théâtre De Complicité, Sasha Waltz, Thomas Ostermeier etc.

A great number of them was literally discoverd by BITEF. Among the first festivals in the World, BITEF put emphases on the trdicional forms of East theatre, such as Kathakali dance thetre (first premiere of Ist BITEF 67) or Bejing Opera. For all those years of devoted work on promoting intercultural influences in thetre BITEF antitraditional trdition has been preserved, even in the last ten years of cultural isolation of Yugoslavia by literally smuggling the art into the country. But even more important is the spirit of dicovering the new theatrical tendecies and research fields has been preserved. The concept of BITEF Theater was to stay open for all kinds of performing arts skills and forms, to be center of multimedia projects of all kinds, to explore a new theatrical trends in own productions, to work on the internacional exchange of artists, to organize workshops and wide scale of city actions and happenings. Using as mode, BITEF theatre was organized with a small number of employees with unlimited number of disciplines, skills and functions. Since it was concived BITEF theatre supported diffrent kinds of art concepts and varius scale of artists, developing that way a completely new Belgrade scene. Last year BITEF has been awarded by PREMIO EUROPA PER IL TEATRO, Taormina arte, Special Prize For 1999. BITEF is the first international theatre festival awarded by Premio Europa.