Bitef

We shall also try to offer an insight into the long duration of inchoate political and social processes begun with World War I which shaped the picture of Europe and resulted, among other things, in World War 11, the Cold War and finally the wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. This selection does not address World War I as a kind of tribute and even less so as a remembrance jubilee as would befit a state. It raises questions about it it from the perspective of the present day, starting from projects literally dealing with World War I such as Front by Luk Perceval addressing it from the Western point of view to two productions based on present-day texts of Serbian authors with international prestige: Biljana Srbljanović and Milena Markovič ( This Grave is Too Small for Me and The Dragonslayers ) observing the historical events from the perspective of this territory and local political pathologies to a documentary theatre project Battlefield Memory 1914/2014 of Berlin's HAU directed by Hans-Werner Kroesinger who tries to thematise Western and Eastern, collective and personal, scientific and artistic perception of historical events related to World War I. There will be also several productions tackling other important historical dates emerged from the processes launched by World War I, such as the production based on the celebrated text by the Polish author Tadeusz Slobodzianek Our Class, laying the emphasis on the painful issue of the Lithuanian anti-Semitism in the recent history, (A)pollonia by the Polish director and international star Krzysztof Warlikovski is a walk through the 20th century and traumatic sites of the recent Polish and European history. Aleksandra Zec by Oliver Frljić speaks of the Yugoslav wars in the early 1990 s and an innocent victimised child as a metaphor for the_ sacrifice of one's own future. Borut Šeparović, another artist from Croatia, speaks of the current comfortable attitude to the social discontent which generated the r'n’r album Paket Aranžman in the early 1980 s, asking rhetorically Where's the revolution, scum ? Corinne Maier, a young Swiss author addresses the issue of personal history which is always

a product of the collective memory in Past Is Present, and the Slovenian director Jernej Lorenci asks in The Crazy Locomotive a self-reflexive and rhetorical question about the achievements and the revolutionary potential of the modern theatre in relation to the modern society. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, an Ivica Buljan's production, is based on Danilo Kiš’s book which has been one of the most controversial literary works in the Yugoslav history ever since it appeared in 1976 when it caused extraordinary stir in the literary circles and was proclaimed the “greatest post-war scandal in these lands". Ever since, it has been inspiring a multitude of renowned artists and has led to numerous political debates in the Balkans; the pseudo-documentary style and its epic structure of this novel offer an impressive foundation for the understanding and the interpretation of the history's mechanisms and different repressive systems. On trial together, jointly created by Saša Asentić and Ana Vujanovič is an artistic project made of theoretical and artistic research and performance. The research focuses on different historical and current forms of the social, cultural and artistic practice which make a "spectacle" of the collective and massive body and on the modern dance as an artistic discipline emancipating the visibility of a liberated individual body. The project is adjusted to the context within which it takes place and the authors watch pictures of the body within the social systems which marked the 20th century and through personal experiences of the East European socialism and Western neoliberal capitalism. Laureate of several Serbian theater festivals, performance Neoplanta directed by Andras Urban, inspired by prose of Lasio Vegel, is exoloring recent history of Novi Sad marked by traumatic events that define relationships and the identity of its inhabitants.

We have before us an edition of Bitef calling for an active political and social participation of the artists and their audiences; it does not offer light entertainment or easy oblivion, which problematises the policies of memory within the context of creation of ethnic and other identities and it presents to us theatre which issues a binding call to engage in a turbulent and an ever-uncertain dialogue between art and the human community. ★Anja Suša and Jovan Cirilov, selectors

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Past is Present

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