Bitef

Founded in 1967, BITEF - Belgrade International Theatre Festival survived 37 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 research made its way into repertory theatres to the Eighties, the decade of postomodern theatre expression to the middle of this decade which brings us to the end of 20th century and the end of the millennium, where theatre in general is exploring the limits of human physical abilities, the artistic outlines of which are still hazy. For 37 years, BITEF was one of the rare theatre festivals in the world that simultaneously in its program had avantgarde, experimental and research forms of performing arts and big main stream production. The number of the artists who appeared on BITEF as unknown, or hardly recognized, and later became 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, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jerome Savary, Patrice Chereau, George Lavaudant, Joseph Chaikin, Andrei Serban, William Gaskill, Georgy Tovstonogow, Yury Ljubimov, Anatoly Efros, Antoine Vitez, Tadeusz Kantor, Konrad Swinarski, Jerzy Jarocki, Andržej Wajda, Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Giorgio Strehler, Carmelo Bene, Lindsay Kemp, Eimuntas Nekrošius, Tamas Ascher, Gabor Zsambeki, Miklos Jancso, Ljubiša Ristić, Robert Sturua, Igor Vasilev, Erwin Piplits, Frederic Flamand, Karge-Langhoff, Hansgiinter Heyme, Alexander Lang, Odin Teatret and Eugenio Barba, La Mamma Theatre, Pip Simmons, Charles Ludlam, Shuji Terayama, Merce Cunningham, Roberto Ciulli, Peter Stein, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, La Fura dels Baus, Johann 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 Teshigawara, Comediants, De la Guarda, Angelin Preljocaj, Theatre de Complicite, Sasha Waltz, Thomas Ostermeier, Steven Berkoff, Eric Lacascade, Nicolas Stemann, Michael Thalheimer etc.

A great number of them was literally discovered by BITEF. Among the first festivals in the World, BITEF put emphases on traditional forms of East theatre, such as Kathakali dance theatre (first premiere of Ist BITEF 67) or Beijing Opera, For all those years of devoted work on promoting intercultural influences in theatre BITEF antitraditional tradition 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 discovering the new theatrical tendencies and research fields has been preserved. The concept of BITEF Theatre was to stay open for all kinds of performing 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 international 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 different kinds of art concepts and various scale of artists, developing that way a completely new Belgrade scene. 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.