 The conference and all of our guests first welcome. First of all, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Senja Radulovic, assistant professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. And I will be the chair of this session or of this semi-plenary panel. As you know, the conference was organized by Bitev and UNESCO, Chair in Cultural Policy and Management of the University of Arts in Belgrade. Today, our theme is performing arts and geopolitical challenges. We have five participants from three countries, or maybe four, because Professor Aleksandra Juvici, which used to teach in Belgrade at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, but now in Italy. It was our pleasure to invite all of you to participate at this conference. Professor Aleksandra Juvici, Anya Susha, Bitev selector from Belgrade, our colleague from Ljubljana, Professor Barbara Orel, Mr. David Diamond from the United States of America, and Professor Radivo Jedinulovic, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sat. Yes. As you know, now that famous sentence follows, you have 15 minutes, and I will notify you if your presentation time is almost done, so don't worry, but please make sure that formal sentence, make sure that your presentation doesn't exceed it 15 minutes, but of course, if you need a few minutes more, it will not be a problem. Our first speaker is Anya Susha. As you know, Anya is Bitev Festival selector and theater director from Belgrade. Her paper deals with theater and Bitev festival after the political changes and social changes in our country, so after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic's regime from 2000 to now. And the title is Bitev in New Millennium. Anya, please. Yes, actually. OK. Can you hear me? Right? Yeah, OK. The title is exactly Bitev in the New Millennium from one crisis to another. Meanwhile, I've come up with this subtitle, and you will see why. I also have to say that, like Ivan Medenica, I'm also very tired, too tired to speak from my head, so I actually understood my participation at this conference very seriously, so I have a paper which I'm going to read. And I measured myself, and I'm going to exceed, I'm afraid, the given time of 15 minutes, but it's like I suppose if everything goes well, it will be 18 minutes, exactly, sharp. So let's get started. Bitev was founded in 1967 in a very specific political and cultural climate of socialist and federative Republic of Yugoslavia and in the rest of the world. It was the time of the 1960s liberation in all spheres of life and culture and the time that eventually led to the 1968 student rebellion worldwide. On a more local level, it was the time after the big conflict between the representatives of the so-called modernists and the so-called conservatives in literature, which took place in 1950s with the modernists coming out of it as winners. Many representatives of the Yugoslav surrealist movement who were additionally credited for being a part of the communist revolution movement during the Second World War took over the course of the fragile Yugoslav culture, which had been in the process of making after the war and during a very dangerous and insecure times followed by the informal resolution, which pinpointed the separation of Yugoslavia from the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. This is important to take into account in order to understand the social and cultural pretext which led to starting several very progressive and state-supported institutions, which just a couple of years, such as October Salon, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Bemus Fest, and of course, Bitev. This political decision clearly marked the divorce between the socialist ideology and realistic art which in other socialist countries had been using a criterion of an ordinary man as a supreme parameter in defining a proper socialist culture from an improper one. Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia thus played a great role in the cultural and social project of a great uniqueness in the contemporary history of Europe. It had its very dark moments, of course, being a part of a one-party system, culminating in a random banning of films or theater plays that were over the top for the socialist criteria, but generally speaking, in comparison to other socialist countries of the time, it was fairly rare and with a few severe consequences for the banned authors. The birth of Bitev clearly marked the course of Yugoslav international communication and diplomacy as well as the country's very specific, completely unique and carefully nurtured image in the Cold War's division between the East and the West. Not belonging to any of the blocks, trying to create its own identity and to be recognized as some sort of a bridge connecting the best of the two worlds, Yugoslavia paid a lot of attention to the field of culture, understanding it as a very precious tool to achieve that goal. At numerous meetings held in that period, Yugoslav communists expressed their concern about an increased level of commercialization and kitch in culture. In those times, communists were searching for an ideal model which would bring, quotation, genuine cultural values closer to the people. In regard to that matter, special attention was drawn to the necessity of creating long lasting cultural policy which would oppose primitive needs taken from the semi-rural small-scale capitalism and petit bourgeois glamour coming out of the giant industrial entertainment of the developed civil society, end of quotation. The emphasis was placed on the necessity of creating new socialist culture which would accompany new socialist society. Mira Trilovic, a director and Jovan Chirilov, a theatrologist, the main initiators of the International Theatre Festival described the atmosphere which gave birth to the first bit of quotation again. The world was a different place. The youth revolution was in the air and not only in the field of eroticism. America was troubled by Vietnam War, Spain and Portugal were ruled by aging dictators while other dictators just came in power in Greece. Egypt and Israel were at war. Soviet Union had been without Khrushchev and Yugoslavia without great international debts. Those were the days when Yugoslavia played an important role in the world when the rise in its standard promise our country would enter a big league of the developed, the days of increasing interest for foreign countries and for the wish to learn as much as possible about that world. Meanwhile, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, didn't have a single international festival end of quotation. It is a very important note to note that the idea to start an international theater festival was largely accepted among the politicians and that the festival was funded from the city budget. Hunger for other countries brought to be some of the most popular but also most controversial international theater artists, some of whom were the living theater from New York and Theater Laboratorium, Paerzy Krutowski from Poland. In order to fully understand how daring that first bit of selection was, we should take a look at the typical Belgrade theater's repertory at the time. So most of the theaters in 1967 followed well-trodden paths of classics occasionally opting for contemporary plays by authors from Serbia and from abroad. I'm just giving you a couple of the titles, The Quiet to Dawn, Tisopitis is a Whore, then The Death of Worse, the Fifth, George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House, Clara Dombrovska by Osip Kulundic, The Woman from Khvar, Henry IV by Pirandello, Pig in a Poke by Feido, The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, and so on and so on, Wedding in Malinovka and so on. Speaking of the effects, a bit of a cause, placing, thus, Yugoslavia in an interesting position by turning it into one of a kind theater place, equally interesting for artists from the East and from the West, Mira Trilovic wrote, quotation, that, in short, was the path which has led us into this present phase of a theater which, without any false modesty, managed to enter people's minds, not only in the Balkans, but in the world as well. It still happens occasionally that some friends from afar mentioned theater from Czechoslovakia, thinking of Yugoslavia, while some others still think that Bitev is a theater and Atelier is a workshop, but that is not important. What is important is that we have managed to win our place under the sun and that this society has accepted and supported one unconventional movement which promotes the ideas that have not always matched typical ideas of art. Still, art is wider than current trends, so the society accepted the liveliest and the most valuable ideas this theater relied on, end of quotation. Skillfully balancing between the East and the West, the state provided generous funding to culture exchange between Yugoslavia and other countries. Grants for residences, trips, tours, as well as tours or foreign authors, visits to Yugoslavia, notable inflow of theater literature, new plays and journals, all of that contributed to establishing stronger links between Yugoslav and international theater production. At that time, special contracts were signed with significant number of countries from the Eastern and from the Western Europe. The document kept in the Republic Secretariat for Culture in 1968 demonstrates the frequency of visits of Yugoslav theaters to other countries. According to the conventions about cultural cooperation made with foreign governments in the period between 1960 and 1968, 428 people stayed in 28 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and America in the overall duration of 3987 months. The same document also states that in the field of arts and culture, altogether 117 people stayed in overall duration of 833 months. It is also stated that the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia will in the school year 1969, 70, use foreign governments grants for 416 months apart from a certain number of grants for Greece, Turkey, Iran, Tunisia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Chile. The call for grants by foreign governments which was issued by the Republic Secretariat for Culture and Education in 1968 shows that there is an equal share between the grants by East European and West European governments. What is interesting is that the contracts of international cooperation made with France and Poland state that France and Poland each guaranteed to try to bring one of their theater ensembles to Bitev in 1968. Communist League of Serbia also paid close attention to detail the analysis of problem in the field of arts and culture. It was similar on the federal level. The predominant attitude was that the contemporary Yugoslav society needs an open culture of politics and the freedom of artistic creation. Communist League of Yugoslavia is of, this is another quotation, Communist League of Yugoslavia is of opinion that the struggle for culture freedom is an inseparable part of struggle for the freedom of men. The League will therefore strive towards securing freedom of creation which is closely connected to the establishment of cultural politics and the democracy based on self-management. It is inseparably linked with further reinforcement of free developments of cultures of all the Yugoslav peoples, their openness towards international trends and active participation in them. This was very, as you could say, can see very, very unusual and unlike in other socialist countries. With the downfall of Yugoslavia and the change of the geopolitical frame for bitev, this festival came to a very gloomy and dark phase in its existence, almost reaching the point of non-existence due to heavy sanctions against the country which included the culture embargo as well. It was really hard to sustain an international festival without an international program. It was thanks to Jovan Cirelov that the festival survived during that time and reached the shores of the new millennium which was at the same time the period of a new optimism and a huge belief in the sentence, Serbia is the world, which stood at the banner that symbolized the rebellion against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Serbia really wanted to be a part of the world and that was the beginning of much better and happier times for Serbian culture and for bitev for that matter. I was invited to join the festival in 2006 by Jovan Cirelov and I remember the first couple of years as very easygoing with decent budget and a lot of big plans. One might say that after the dark times of the 1990s, this was the time of some kind of a new internationalism which exploded in Serbian culture both on institutional and on the independent scene. There was a lot of exchange going on between institutions and on an individual level. This was the time when bitev came back to the world map after being away for the whole decade of the 1990s. The festival started doing serious international networking as well as connecting to the rest of the theater festivals universe by doing big co-productions with important and prominent international partners. It was also a part of the strategy of Serbia to become an equal participant in progressive tendencies in the world's politics. In spite of the very good climate and the official support to the Serbian culture in the beginning of 2000s, it's neither easy nor true to say that it was a part of some defined and articulated culture strategy of the state as it was in the 1960s. It was more a general feeling of joy and freedom after the years of repression and the huge appetite for the rest of the world which was opening more and more, reaching its climax with the suspension of the visa regime for the EU countries. The lack of real strategy and vision was very clear which created the possibility to leave the Serbian culture after 2000 almost entirely in a somewhat arbitrary position and completely dependent on the level of competence of individuals who were appointed by different political parties to run different institutions at the time. Luckily, thanks to the new optimism, there were a lot of competent and hardworking professionals who accepted the challenge and took over some of the most important theater institutions and the results were actually very good. So the lack of general culture ideology paradoxically opened a lot of small niches for brave and daring individuals to make some difference. I consider this time to be very productive even if short for the Serbian culture. The changes in the political climate which were enhanced by the global economic crisis left a big mark on the entire Serbian society as well as on culture. With the change of a political paradigm and the rhetoric which started while the Democratic Party was still in power, the Serbian culture and the festival started facing yet another challenge. The neoliberal paradigm about the market and culture contaminated the political elite and the so-called politics of saving completely took over. This opened a new chapter in the history of Bitev faced with the continuous budget cut-downs that have been ongoing since 2009. During that time, the budget was cut down to almost one third of the budget that the festival was using for its 40th anniversary. It was the time when the budgets for the international exchange in theater institutions were also completely suspended. Clearly enough, this was the time when the state obviously didn't care much about the Serbian culture as a potential tool for diplomacy. This was a time of a strong and nationalistic political discourse focusing mostly on flirtation with the still only present nationalistic tendencies and not being able to make clear cuts with the recent past in order to change the dominant political course that would lead to serious and very much needed political changes and reforms. This was also the time when Bitev was again forced to question its program orientation. Using its unique position of the most popular or at least most visible theater festival in the former Yugoslav region, during the last couple of years, the festival has turned more towards the idea of using its fame to establish a platform for the international presentation of theater from the post-Yugoslav space. It wasn't playing on nostalgia so much even though for many Yugoslav theater makers, it has always been a very important element of their theatrical reflection, but it rather tried to bring all the small and not visible enough post-Yugoslav theater practices to a bigger international arena. It started as a showcase of the Serbian theater in the early 2000s, but then it became clear very soon that Serbian theater alone can't produce enough shows that would suit the requirements of the festival like Bitev. So the strategy was developed further into the direction of the entire post-Yugoslav space. The breaking point was the addition of Bitev from 2009 when the Grand Prix of Bitev festival was awarded to the Serbian performance, the enthusiasts, by young director Miloš Lolić. This course of thinking about the selection continued further on to the next editions of the festival which presented some of the most interesting and authentic theater artists from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, which hugely supported their visibility and strong artistic presence in the international theater context. I'm speaking about the artists such as Dalia Ačin, Borut Šeparovic, Oliver Frlić, Tomi Janežić, Andra Šurban, Bojan Djordjev, TKH Collective, Matija Ferlín, Boris Lješević, Anna Tomović, Ivana Saiko, Simona Semenić, Maja Pelević, Milan Marković, Bidena Serbjanović, et cetera, et cetera. All of those artists have become more visible through Bitev and it seemed that after so many years of facing an identity crisis resulting from the political events from the 1990s, Bitev has finally reached the new identity position in the international theater universe. This resulted in a significantly increased number of foreign guests and programmers and more attention in the foreign media which were naturally more interested in the authentic theater that could only be seen in Belgrade and not in the big expensive shows that were anyway cruising the big festivals. After the latest political change in 2014, which was more like a personal change because of the general lack of ideology in the Serbian political spectrum, this very interesting and internationally recognized and supported orientation of Bitev has been put under the question mark. The political change has led to even stronger neoliberal obsession about an art market and to even more severe cut downs of budgets for culture emphasizing the prefix national as the most important, defining the national heritage as the basic value of Serbian culture. Contemporary art and independent culture have either almost disappeared or have come to the verge of invisibility and complete atomization. The institutions have been suffering too but they have been at least granted some minimal financial means to make them up and running. That unfortunately has been the case of the Bitev festival as well. Even though there hasn't been a direct intervening in the concept of the festival, the official attitude was clearly stated by the most drastic cut down of the festival's budget which happened at the last year's edition of the Bitev when it was given the lowest amount in its history. That edition was also the first one after Jovan Chirilov had passed away and the decision made by the founder of the festival, the city of Belgrade, carried a lot of symbolic potential since the festival was dedicated to the memory of Jovan. This went hand in hand with the more or less direct messages from the top that Bitev should give up the policy of reuniting the region and continuously bringing Croatian and Slovenian directors to the festival with an argument that this is not a Yugoslav festival. Here is another example of not understanding the contemporary festival politics and its diplomatic potential in the very sensitive political process in the region which have been one of the most outspoken priorities of the current government, especially in the field of economical exchange which is very bizarre. This example either casts a shadow on the true nature of that kind of political messages or just shows the lack of interest of our state for culture, failing again to see its enormous diplomatic potential, the enormous diplomatic potential of this festival and culture in general. So to conclude with, without too much hesitation, we can conclude that the cultural diplomacy and Bitev that we are discussing here today and tomorrow were closely linked only during the period of former Yugoslavia and that from today's perspective it appears like a long lost and forgotten concept. Thank you, Anya. I will give a brief introduction of the next speaker, Barbara Orel from Ljubljana. Barbara is associate professor of performing arts and head of the research group of the Academy of Theater, Radio, Film and Television at the University of Ljubljana. Also, she co-founded the journal of performing arts theory named Ampheter and was an editor and she curated the Slovenian National Theater Festival, the week of Slovenian drama or Ted and Slovenske drama and the Maribor Theater Festival named Borshnikovo Srečanje. The title is Srečanje, sorry. The title is Curating Performing Arts in the Globalized. Voila. So do I have to use the microphone? And unfortunately this computer does not work so if you can, perhaps. No, no, we can make it up and running. Wait. Yeah. Oh, I made it. I made it. Kevin, are you going to shut it down? Yeah. Well, in the meantime, I can, yeah, I can start. Well, I will speak about curating performing arts in the globalized world. Is it all right? Okay. Well, I will speak about curating performing arts in the globalized world and I would like to point out the issue of addressing the audience that this issue and this question is crucial question in curating the international performing arts festivals. Well, I will not speak about Bitta Festival but about the concept of curation and the vision of curating the international performing arts festivals and I would like to convey the message that the crucial thing in curating the international performing arts festivals in the globalized world is the way in which the audience is addressed. Now, how to address the audience coming from all over the world, how to address the individuals and spectators of diverse political convictions coming from diverse nations and belonging to diverse political beliefs. I will focus on the role of art and culture in negotiating the relationships between state authorities and diverse social groups and I will exemplify this by the long-term art project, the NSK State, which started in 1992 by the Noia Slovenia Sekunst Art Collective and this art project is very successful precisely in the way of addressing the audience coming from all over the world and this is a prime example of an art project that has been successfully transgressing the limitations of the existing societies for the last 25 years and at the same time it is also an excellent example of the most progressive curatorial practices of the last decade, those establishing platforms for a tidal wave of side-based participatory and relational performances that open up a specific public space with the power to transcend the political, social and economic limitations of the existing societies. First let me briefly present this project and this project started in 1992 when the group of artists, the NSK Art Collective this is the abbreviation of Noia Slovenia Sekunst. Many of you know this art collective of course. Well, since the early 1980s the NSK have been developing art as the idea of the state and in 1992 they also formally established the so-called NSK State in Time. This is a paradigmatic transnational state that does not have a territory and whose citizens can still today become individuals regardless of their nationality, race, religion or political orientation. To become a citizen of the NSK state all one has to do is to apply for the NSK passport. Well, I would like to present, yes, yes, please. Well, I'm at the third photo so I don't know what to do, whether to wait or to continue, oh I see. Okay. Well, it's okay, well, this NSK State is a virtual state. Yeah. Well, it's okay, well, this NSK State is a virtual state. Well, this NSK State is the virtual state and which was enabled by the internet. Communication, technologies. Well, well, this is the virtual state, the NSK State is a virtual state that is enabled by the internet technology and the artists also denoted this as the first global state and the NSK State is actually a result of the specific historical conditions in post-1989 Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe which gave rise to new states including the NSK State. This was the time of the intense fragmentation of European political space in the post-communist condition marked by nation-state tendencies on the one hand and transnational idealism on the other. Many interpreted the founding of the NSK State as a reaction to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the primary aim of the NSK Collective was to respond to the founding of Slovenia. Slovenia as a state was founded in 1991 and the NSK State was founded a year later in 1992. As a group that used to play with elements of the Slovenian national identity in a very provocative manner, the NSK Collective could potentially lose its radical stance and subversive power in the new social context and the NSK State was formed out of the need and I quote their manifesto, out of the need to find completely new political and aesthetic organizational forms in order to establish an ostensible new world order, a world in which the nation state will have become a dangerous anachronism and in which the idea of a dominant globalism is useless to regions with suppressed national identities. Now, let us have a look at how this state operates. The inclusion of an individual into the global state, into this global state takes place through a simple administrative procedure of passport acquisition and all one needs to do is to fill out the form and paid 24 euros and in five weeks time, one receives a passport along with NSK citizenship and the NSK State has no formal government, no central committee, only citizens, few bureaucrats and some administrators and the last two only deal with technical issues and this is keeping the state formal. It is based on self-management and non-alignment and it coexist as a parasite within the existing already established bodies in the entire area of time and the connecting links and the integrative factors of the NSK State are artistic activities and they are performed by NSK citizens at artistic events organized, especially for this purpose at the so-called consulates and embassies. Well, these consulates and embassies are actually can be considered as kind of festivals taking place at diverse locations all around the world. Well, they are performed by the NSK citizens and the first so-called consulate was opened in Moscow and it was followed by the embassies in Sarajevo, then at the Volksbühne in Berlin, at the Venice Biennial, then in Ghent in Belgium, in Dublin and elsewhere. So, well, these were the locations where the artistic activities of the NSK Art Collective took place and at the time, when these diverse events, performances, exhibitions and other social events accompanying these projects, for example, in Ghent, Dublin, and elsewhere where they were performed and took place, this territory was pronounced and declared as a territory of the NSK state. But what I would like to point out, these events, they were considered and performed as festivals. Yes, yes. In the last two decades of its existence, the NSK state has acquired several thousand citizens. And after 2000, the citizens also started organizing themselves and taking the initiative for inventing new modes of socialization. In 2010, they organized the first NSK citizens' congress and it took place at the house der Kulturendelwild in Berlin. I would like to point out that the NSK artists are very successful in a way of addressing their audiences. By forming the NSK state, they established a mode of address that Boris Budin would term it the heterospheric mode of address. I wouldn't like to theorize here, but it is important to point out that this kind of address addresses the heterogeneity and contingency of social, cultural and political issues in the globalized world. And I would like to propose that the vision of curating contemporary performing arts and the international performing arts festivals in the future is in the articulation of the so-called heterospheric mode of address. Well, it is the way of addressing a heterosphere of diverse national territories, diverse states, people belonging to diverse political orientations or religious beliefs. Well, and this is a heterosphere in which a nation state of course is exposed to erosion and so is the mode of being that has been captured in the freight of the nation state's production of subjectivity. It is essential to invent a mode of address that would reach out to addresses by whom the functioning within the identity frames of the nation, the nation state or ethnicity is experienced as alien. And this was precisely the aim of the NSK artists when they established the NSK state. According to Ida Choufer, she's a dramaturg and also a major theorist of the NSK art collective. According to her, the NSK state has the ability to provide a point of identification for those who reject the cage of national culture and to generate a sense of disquiet. And the NSK state has established a utopian political space that possesses the power of transcending the ideological, physical and economic limitations of the existing societies. Also numerous NSK state passport holders have indicated that the citizenship of the state in time is to their greater satisfaction than their actual national status as the later is frequently connected with the prevalence of a certain ethnic group or ideology perceived as threatening or exclusive. In the NSK state, many recognize the possibility of transitioning from their communities into other social structures, as well as an opportunity to acquire a better social position that may otherwise not be accessible to them. And that the NSK state is more than just an imaginary sanctuary, showed in 1995 in the besieged Sarajevo when the NSK state passports were mistaken for real documents and enabled their holders to leave the city. Actually the NSK state passports look like real passports and are also manufactured with the same kind of machines as the Slovenian passports. Although the NSK state passports have a symbolic value only, they were used as real valid documents and in 1995 this was not the only case when they had real effect, but a decade later in 2006, there was a great search of applications for NSK state citizenship by Africans, mainly Nigerians, who hoped to escape from dictatorial regimes and enter Europe by means of NSK passports. The amount of passport applications increased to such an extent that this caused trouble for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia and they asked the artists to put up a warning on their website that the NSK passport is not a valid document for crossing state borders. The artists did so, but the number of the applications did not diminish. On the contrary, in some cases the identification with the NSK state was so strong that people actually claimed that they have visited the state and they found it very beautiful. So the NSK state has not only established only a utopian political space, but also a global community of artists positioning themselves on the art market. The global community connecting NSK citizens predominantly consists of the admirers of the NSK groups inspired by NSK aesthetics and concepts and they are not just their fans, but also imitators, producing their own NSK artworks and tributes while mainly reprocessing the NSK aesthetic materials. And since the 1980s these practices have become so numerous that Alexei Monroe coined a special term for them. This is folk art. I just have one page, so two minutes. For example, in 1989 Donald Campbell produced the first printed edition of the Leibach Fencing and in 2000 Haris Hararis put up the Athens-based website NSKState.com which has grown also into a primary NSK information resource. And many mistake it for a website of the NSK of the NSK state. The post-territorial and post-national NSK state connects its citizens into a global community whose identity is based on culture and its main procedure is the active practices of citizenship participation. And this is precisely a very successful strategy of addressing global spectatorship and creating the mode of address that connects the multilingual, multinational, multireligious and also the high-tech audiences into a community. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Barbara, thank you for your interesting and in a way familiar presentation for us from former Yugoslavia. And now I'm so glad to introduce the next speaker, Professor Alexandra Jović, which from Alasapienza University in Italy. And her theme is between popular and subversive festivals as social dramas and metaphors. Alexandra, you have about 15 minutes. Okay, it's fine, even shorter for me because this is a work in progress. And if I have some lacunas or things which you don't understand, please accept my apologies in advance because it's a work in progress and something inspired by Dragon Clyde when he started his research project on festivals. We never believed in that very much, but Dragon proved that it was a very good idea to do something on festivals. And I have been very ambivalent toward that because there was always like, I missed some kind of methodology in research of festivals because usually people are talking about the festivals as something very positive, very multicultural, happy festivities and stuff like that. And I was always asking myself, what is the dark side of the festivals? And I didn't find it yet, but I... There are many. There are many. I'm not talking from the point of view of the organizers and producers of the festival. I can imagine all the frustration with the money and fundraising and stuff like that. I'm talking from the point of view of the audience. I'm talking from the point of view of what kind of audience you generated from the festivals, how they're educated, who are you addressing during this festival? It was always an issue with Bitev, and I didn't want to talk about Bitev today, but Bitev, I remember, as a student, I mean, we struggled as students to enter there. Meanwhile, the political elite was invited, of course, but they didn't go, and so we knew the ways, we invented all the ways how to get through and sit at the best seats in the theater because these people did not come. That was a great time. And now, that was... I mean, Anya presented a great history of Bitev because Bitev first represented this kind of bridge between East and West and these blah, blah, blah stories. I mean, everybody has their own Bitev story, how they initiated, what they saw, what inspired them forever or made them angry. But the second part of the festival, which I think it's really a victim of a transition of capitalist, whatever, late capitalist production, and it is becoming like, how would you say, a shadow of itself, a figment of itself. It's not anymore that festival we used to know, and these days we are all inspired because two of them are celebrating the 50th anniversary and we are all excavating our memories and our personal archives on what has been Bitev and I think it's not the fault of the organizer or the curators of the festival. It's like that the world is changing, the world in constant dialectics. So my study of festivals as social dramas and metaphors is based on the idea that social world is a world in becoming and not a world in being always in the process of changing and transition. And that festivals reflect these changes in symbolic and metaphorical ways. Departing from the anthropological studies of Victor Tarner, who coined the concept of social dramas and metaphors as a method for analyzing social processes, I will try to apply it on festivals as forms of cultural performances. Understanding this methodology means grasping how festivals are generated, how are they staged in a focused manner, how are they nested within larger social and political events, and what are the long-term effects. The events and festivals industry has been growing exponentially and with that growth, there is an urge for creating new methods and innovative ways to examine this ever-growing phenomena. And therefore, I would like to single out two categories by Victor Tarner as crucial for analyzing festivals, liminality and communitas. For Tarner, the liminal is a moment in and out of the time, a state in which the society is restructured, reclassified, and where the social roles and statuses are redistributed. In festival terms, the liminal is moment of discontinuity of historical usual time, in which a new time takes place, causing a symbolic standstill and collapse of social order. Liminality refers to any condition outside or on the peripheries of everyday life, turning it into the sacred time and sacred space. Therefore, festivals belong to liminal moments as those practices where social structure is temporarily breached, reflected and restructured by means of collective actions in public that presuppose both bodily movement and affective experiential aspects and their symbolization, which instead of relying on pre-existing language and symbols advance new ones. However, in modern societies, liminal practices are often liminoid, being the result of professional, cultural, artistic work and the professionalization of human play. They promise change, but in fact, they're only homeopathically healing the endangered social equilibrium. Communities or social anti-structure is a more comprehensive notion and deserves a more extensive elaboration. It is a potential community, a community in becoming, and carries a possible connotation of togetherness. The community and equality among people when social order and social roles are suspended. According to Viktor Tarner, there are spontaneous or existential communities which breach the norm government social structure and directly confront it. It is immediate and usually short-lasting. Its main power and quality is the experience of participating. Then there are ideological communities which compromises history and theory, conceptualizing previous communities and it may offer a utopian model of society. And finally, there are normative communities which are organized in perduating social system and thus can be very slow and long-lasting. Therefore, the festivals could be broadly defined as extraordinary events in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time for short-lasting communities. The original World Festival comes, of course, from the Latvian World Festum, which means a time of celebration marked with special observances. Feast, a periodic season or program of cultural events or entertainment, gaiety conviviality. And this is from the Webster Dictionary The World was created in 1589. In today's world festivals have lost the ritual, sacred character and are rarely connected to certain religious and state holidays which turn the everyday life into a time and place for celebration. The turning point, and then there is a whole issue where the festivals existed during the Renaissance, of course, in the Greek times and Roman times and in the Renaissance and also in the Middle Ages. And then there is a gap. There is a long, here I'm thinking about artistic festivals or performing arts festivals. There is a huge gap until the time, the turning point with Richard Wagner, a founder of the first musical festival in Bayreuth in 1876. And many theater historians use this year of the foundation of this festival as the start of the modern theater. And there is a famous play by Jan Faber, The Power of Theatrical Madness where the girl tries to climb the stage but cannot because she doesn't know the code word. And the code word is the year when Wagner founded this festival. So even Wagner was aware of what the festival meant and defined them as an ideal cultural product. And today, of course, the term festival refers to a far more diverse, complex and multifaceted reality that combines different artistic and professional visions where identities of certain cities and regions are confirmed and internationalized. And here I have some kind of statistic of Eiffel, which I will not read because I don't believe in statistics and these numbers can vary. Everybody can go to that site and check it out. As Xenia says, I live in Italy in the last eight years and I followed their festival scene over there because it's a big country, very decentralized and each city, of course, has a large festival and there is a large proliferation of festival of every genre in almost every city being it small or large. In a country which is ideologically torn apart and in a huge economic crisis, festivalization of its culture also reflects this division since almost every larger town has several festivals or even festival venues or different political and economic nature. And you can really see how in different Italian cities the shift from left to right, I mean from the right wing or left wing politicians, you can see through the festivals. If somebody who is from the left, then there are lots of festivals when you have a mayor who is more right wing oriented than festivals that are dying, don't receive enough support. But there is also something, I noticed something outside of this, what can we define the festivals of performing arts which are very well known like the festival in Spoleto, Sant'Arcangelo, Rome and so forth. There are festivals of economy, philosophy, science, communication, ideas and as such represent a certain, according to myself, vulgarization and simplification of serious intellectual debate. This debate has been switched to this kind of festivals. So these people are not like Roberto Saviano or other philosophers, Umberto Eco died recently, but philosophers and writers, even Giorgio Agamben and these people like that, they have been completely taken out from the television program. So they need the public arena and the public arena is now becoming a festival where they can present their intellectual thoughts or opera, excuse me? Like to the, no, but it's exactly at this very moment. And there are two sides of this kind of, it seems that we are dealing with the kind of carnivalization, a sort of mini world expo for the latest dimensions and big names placed into pseudo-intellectual framework. But on the other hand, these festivals with cultural and artistic agenda promote a quality debate, otherwise absent in the wider society and perhaps they could become subversive because they assert alternative modalities of thinking and debating. These festivals are in effect and engaged in education and the emancipation of an audience and create the only space in which intellectuals can exist as public figures. Perhaps new ways of social exchange emerge in those festivals, although they can be criticized from an instrumental viewpoint, they can be successful from an educational or emancipational point of view. And as I said, certainly this kind of festivals represent a certain vulgarization and simplification of serious research and experimentation. But at the same time they attract a large number of ticket-paying audience, although at a symbolic price of two euros, who attend these events to amuse themselves and not to study. For example, latest festival of communication in Modena has brought together biggest names of international scientific research in different disciplines, along with journalists and artists from various fields and it was presented in a form of scientific carnival without a real impact on our society, bringing together some of the most famous Italian writers with international writing stars who are all those who were all there to promote their latest works. However, on the second thought, I came to another conclusion that such festivals are used as an opposition to the today's society of spectacle as reflected in electronic media which are placed in the center of social life, especially by internet and television from which any serious cultural content has been expelled completely. By large, these festivals as decentralized and marginal events represent a counterpoint to an overwhelming new populism and anti-intellectualism in most societies which is reflected not only in television programs but also in a larger political debate as well as on every level of social life, university included. In this sense, how much time do I have? Two minutes, okay. Okay. Okay, in this sense, these kinds of festivals become almost subversive because they become new modalities of emancipation and education of the audience. And all this makes me think that if we today are witnessing that the cultural elite as defined by Pierre Bourdieu and noted in recent research by John Goldrup is disappearing that we can conclude the disconciliation of limits between high and popular culture although seems futile and immediate could bring a greater impact on our society. It can create a new relationship between the intellectuals and emancipation of society making it almost an underground endeavor of a new community. And I have a conclusion based on a work of Jacques Ranciere on ignorant school master. And, but, yes, ignorant school master or ignorant teacher. Yes, and, but maybe I don't have time for that. Some other time, okay. Thank you. Thank you, Alexandra, but this festival doesn't represent organization or simplification. Anya, you have to go, okay. We are honored to have Mr. David J. Diamond with us today. David Diamond serves on the steering committee for Theater Without Borders which recently produced socially engaged performance, a global conversation. He's an author and community activist and his presentation is about performing arts and geopolitics. Please. Thank you very much. I'm very, very pleased to be here with all of you today. I wanted to congratulate Bittiff on 50 years. It's a great, great achievement. I work with La Mama Theater and La Mama is celebrating this year our 55th anniversary. So it's a long period of time to consider all the changes that have occurred over these years. I also wanted to thank the Fulbright Commission who have sponsored my travel here today and Diana Milosevic and the Da Theater with whom I'm working while I'm here. It's a great honor and I wanted to also reflect on the, Mikhail from Russia was talking about Ellen Stewart and Ellen Stewart who started the founder of La Mama Theater who many of you know was very connected with Bittiff Festival in the past and she always would loved to be part of the festival and made many great relationships with artists here. So I feel like I'm sort of continuing the tradition of La Mama being connected to Bittiff today with you. So I don't have a written report or a paper to read but I did want to share with you the kind of work that I've been doing and I titled this non-talk talk. The geopolitical is personal and to me it's all about and I think was for Ellen Stewart about the artist and the development of the artist as an individual so the artist can be prepared to take on the challenges of the world that we all find ourselves living in. I don't know how many people have had an opportunity to read or hear the World Theater Day message from Brett Bailey that came out a week ago from International Theater Institute. I wanted to share with you one quote from that message. It's quite inspiring so if you get a chance to look it up Brett Bailey is a South African artist whose work has been challenging people all over the world because of its boldness and experimental anti-conventionality. His current piece is about displacement of Africans and the whole refugee crisis situation. He actually was traveling on the refugee boats with the Africans who were coming to Europe so his next piece which is coming out soon will be based on that. So in his quote from World Theater Day speech he said, in a world of unequal power in which various hegemonic orders tried to convince us that one nation, one race, one gender, one sexual preference, one religion, one ideology, one cultural framework is superior to all others is it really defensible to insist that its artists should be unshielded from social agendas. He's calling to action the artist to engage with the politics of the time. And in my personal experience when I first started in the theater working in New York in the 1980s it was my very first job was at La Mama and Ellen Stewart was a very strong influence and big part of my life. She introduced me to Tadeus Cantor who was also mentioned and who had a piece earlier in the festival which unfortunately I wasn't here to see but Cantor's work had a profound effect on me personally and seeing several of the pieces over the years at La Mama was vital to encouraging my work in the theater as well. What Ellen Stewart was able to do at La Mama was to provide an opportunity for a New York audience and American audience to see what's going on around the rest of the world. When she came to festivals like Bitef and others around the world she would find the artists who she wanted to then bring to New York to engage with an American audience. And this exchange back and forth became central to her life in the theater as many of you know I'm sure. Along the way an organization which I'm proud to be part of called Theater Without Borders was formed and this was about I guess about 15 years ago now and Theater Without Borders was formed by a intense desire by theater artists in the United States to connect with other artists internationally but not through any formal political or governmental means but just individual artists to individual artists. So Theater Without Borders as an organization you can't even call it an organization because it's basically a non-organization. It has no staff, no budget, it writes no grant applications. Everything it does is a volunteer group of people who host a website where people who want to connect with other people internationally can do so through this site. So for example if you wanted to connect with artists in Finland or Australia or somewhere like that you could go to Theater Without Borders and they will have no people in those places that will host you, will introduce you to a new community of artists that you don't know. They will find these connections for you and put you in touch with other artists who could become potential collaborators or people that you can learn from and share best practices. So Theater Without Borders when it does events collaborates with other existing organizations that are already, that may be able to do some fundraising. In their very first conference in 2005 a hundred people attended. In 2010 I was part of the organizing committee for a conference called Acting Together on the World Stage Theater and Peace Building in Conflict Zones. And this conference, which again, we started with absolutely no budget, our collaborating partner was Brandeis University and Cynthia Cohen, if you know who she is, so great thinker about theater and social change. We put out to the world of artists that were doing this conference in New York City at La Mama and we invite you to attend. We have no support for anybody. This is a new model for how to put a festival together but it was really a conference with performances so it was in fact partially a conference or partially a festival. 300 people from 60 countries showed up on that weekend and it was a weekend that changed my life. Doth Theater, my first exposure to them was there at that conference. The Albuca Theater from Sudan came. The Shahid Nadeem and Yjoka Theater from Pakistan. Theaters from all over the world felt the importance of having a conversation about this subject of peace building and theater and what can we do as theater artists in this area. So we did a combination of conversations, speeches and things but also engaged people in the practices of the artists who were there. So they did workshops, they showed you how they do the work they do. So you got an embodiment of the practice of the artistic work which is really, really vital and something that I carry with me in the other work that I do that I'll tell you about in a minute. And also we saw performances and we got a chance to actually engage with the performances from all these different countries and the conversations were quite deep and what they did was they connected people who had never met each other who were working in the same general arena of theater and peace building. And so they started to have conversations with each other and lots of new initiatives developed out of that one conference that we held in 2010 in New York City. This last year, the most recent one was a conference on theater for social change and in this case we collaborated with La Mama, Theater Without Borders and La Mama together and we added another element which we could do now because of technology and through a part of La Mama called Culture Hub, which some of you may know which is a telepresence studio. So it's kind of like a place where you can bring artists in from all over the world through video technology for collaboration and for having conversations. So we brought in several artists from abroad through this video technology who were able to engage in this conversation. So those are two of Theater Without Borders' collaborations but a third one that has been extremely important to us and I think to the international theater community was a collaboration with OnTheMove.org. Do people know what OnTheMove.org is? I mean OnTheMove.org, I call it, I say that because it's called On The Move but I always add the .org in my mind because on-the-move.org, if you look it up on the web, if you don't have the dashes, then you're gonna get some kind of travel site so it's a different thing. But OnTheMove is all about cultural mobility. So the idea for OnTheMove is that if artists are gonna collaborate with each other, if they're gonna learn from each other, then yes, you can do a lot through technology but ultimately being in the same space with another person is the ultimate way to connect and this is what OnTheMove is all about. It's finding ways for artists to travel from one country to another. So a huge part of their work is involved with advocacy for visas and visa lowering restrictions on visas which I think is something we all need to participate in constantly letting our governments know that artists need to travel and to meet with each other across borders. But what we did with OnTheMove is we collaborated on something called a Artist Mobility Funding Guide. So there's lots of organizations around the world that will help fund artists to travel but they were never actually coordinated into one place. So OnTheMove started this process in Europe by creating a European Cultural Mobility Funding Guide and Theater Without Borders decided to take on North America and create an Artist Mobility Funding Guide for the Americas. So that is now free available online. You can find it through the Theater Without Borders website through the OnTheMove website and also through the Martin E. Siegel Center another one of our partners at the City University of New York. So these are just a couple of the collaborations. The most recent one which I'll call to your attention is something that I haven't heard talked about a lot but I think of it as both one of the key political issues of our time which is climate change. And climate change which we can talk about at Infanitem my question is and our question is at Theater Without Borders what is an artist's responsibility relative to climate change? What can we as artists do to provide some kind of education to provide a relationship to what's going on with the actual physical world around us? So a wonderful artist, American artist Chantal Bilodeau if you know of her work she's written the most extensively about the arts and their relationship to climate change created something last year called Arctic Cycle which was artists from 40 different countries doing artistic works based on this idea of climate change simultaneously I think it was a year ago October. So she pointed a spotlight on this issue by encouraging artists in many different places of the world so it became an international globalized effort. And I think that that's something that is really valuable to learn from and to understand how this issue which has no connection to political viewpoints or one country or another it's not about borders it's about our planet, it's about our lives it's something that's gonna affect us all whether we like it or not so how can artists engage in this important issue? The other project that I work on is called La Mama Ombria International and La Mama Ombria International which is a part of the La Mama overall work takes place at a villa in Spoleto, Italy and it's also we've also become sort of festival organizers in the sense that we have the La Mama Spoleto Open Festival which is our little renegade minor we call it like the fringe of the main Spoleto Festival where we present the more experimental work. This past summer we had Ibiza Bullion's production of Pilade based on the Pasolini which was quite extraordinary and that sort of toured around Europe. But the idea of La Mama Ombria and this was Alan Stewart's idea she took over this former convent in the hills of Ombria outside Spoleto and she made it into a residence for artists a place where artists could come to work on projects to share work with each other. And about, I guess it was about 18 years ago now I was visiting her one day in this beautiful place that she created and even if you knew Alan she had an eye for beauty and she made sure that this place was incredibly beautifully rendered as with all of her things she's collected from all over the world. And I was talking to her and I said you know this amazing place maybe we could do something for directors because it really was connected to directors and another job I had. And I thought well we could really bring directors from around the world together to this place. And she said okay baby you do it. And that's the way she was. She's like do it, you do it. If you have an idea you do it. So one year later from that day was the first La Mama Ombria International Symposium for Directors. And every year since I've been going there with my colleagues and we've been creating this environment where artists from different countries of the world come together to teach. They teach workshops on their particular philosophy and their particular way of making theater. And the reason I think this is so vital is that the things that we see you know the shows that we see the projects that come to us we don't, the younger theater artists they can learn intellectually, they can study in school but to have an actual workshop with the person that created that form when Yuri Labimov came when Adriana Milosevic came when the most extraordinary, you know this year we had Tian Mancha from China, we had Marianne Weems from New York, Martha Clark, Lee Brewer, I think you saw Lee Brewer on one of the earlier tapes from Mabu Mines. These are the artists who created these forms and you as an artist are getting to learn from them. And passing on that knowledge and that way of working to me is been like the sort of the vitality of my kind of work in the theater as a curator of that project is how can we engage the greatest artists in the world to bring to the next generation you know their methodologies. This year we also had Bernardo Rey and Nubé Sandoval who won the Ellen Stewart Award and they brought refugees from, living in Rome but who were from African refugees and engaged them in this production of Antigone and Exilium which we produced in the festival which combined the story of Antigone with their story of the escape that they had to go through from their home countries to get to Italy. So yeah, one minute, okay. I really talked about the main things I wanted to talk about. So I just guess the challenge that I wanna put forth is something that we're going through at La Mama and I know a lot of companies and maybe Bittiff is going through the same thing. When you've been around for a while, it's sustainability. How do you keep an organization going? How do you, especially when a founder, when a very important founder or a very important curator or artistic leader passes then it's up to the next generation to take over and what is it that allows an organization to sustain over time? And this is the question of the day for a lot of me and my colleagues. I wanted to close with another quote from Brett Bailey. With the power that we have to clear a space in the hearts and minds of society, to gather people around us, to inspire, to enchant, to inform, and to create a world of hope and open-hearted collaboration. That's what I wish for. Thank you very much. Thank you, David, for a very interesting presentation and the last speaker is Radivoje Dinović, professor at the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad. A bright image of Yugoslavia culture or alternative stages of Bittiff as paradigm of spatial liberation. Thank you, Xenia. Thank you to everybody who are here. I need to, for start, to introduce myself. On a few different levels. At the professional level, I am an architect, mainly dealing with the space for theater or other performing events. On personal level, I was born in theater almost literally because my parents and my grandparents and so on spent their lives making theater. And maybe most important for me personally on ideological level, I am an ancient Yugoslav communist. So I need to clarify, I need to clarify that my personal position just to not to be misunderstood. Sometime ago, I decided not to participate anymore in any conference, from two reasons. One is that I am too old to have anything more to say. And the other reason is I am too tired to listen from anybody else. So I decided to come here today in spite of that decision because Milena didn't ask me permission to put me in the program. So when I found my name on that program, it was really unpolite to say no because Milena was always say yes to any of our proposals and participate in anything I did so far. So many of us was here 20 years ago when we started with our conferences in that cycle, theater city identity and many of pioneers of that, let me say, utopistic idea of, or belief that we can make something by organizing conferences is here today. So I didn't write anything for this conference and also I didn't write even that abstract of mine because the title is Milenas. I decided not to intervene in that because it is something which provokes me. And even that abstract is not original. It is recycled from one text I was written for the Prague quadrennial and they decided not to publish that. So it is the fragment of my thinking about Bitev, of course, starting in 1967. And I think ending somewhere in 70s or maybe early 80s when from my point of view Bitev died when moved to Sava center in Melgrade. I think that Bitev was closely related to the space and to spatial issues. And because I was a fan of Bitev from the second hand, I was too young to so the greatest performances at the festival, but my mother was here and she always with her colleagues and friends commented those performances almost without any understanding of it because it is not familiar. It was not familiar to her point of view. And Bitev for me was something really interesting and important and big. And I really wanted to be a part of that. Then in 1985 I became a member of Atelier 212 ensemble as a technical manager. And in that time, I don't know if it doesn't matter, everybody who worked in Atelier 212 was connected with Bitev festival. So I had an opportunity to be together with some theater troupe. I don't remember which was it, but in Zvezdara theater in Belgrade. And I decided not to do that anymore again because I didn't find Bitev in the middle of 80s. That sort of energy, that sort of belief, that sort of result data. Because with all my respect, I can't see that today also. I can't feel Bitev festival as important as it was in 70s maybe or 60s. And it is of course obvious that it can't be. But constantly I'm coming to festivals as a part of the audience. And constantly I'm going out of the theater not very satisfied and not very happy. And which is for me the most important, not very moved. And I'm always searching for catharsis. That is the reason why I'm going to see performance or to be in the theater. And it is not, for me personally, it is not so important as a, I don't know, mean of cultural policy or of education or so on. Because there are so many different ways to educate people or to address to somebody. I need theater to just to arouse me, to make me different. To go out with some other experience, with some other feeling of myself, with some thoughts about me, about relationships, about the society, about ideology, about revolutions, about changes, about everything. And I'm not going to theater to teach something or to receive some lecture. And it is not so important to me anymore. And I'm going to see theater performance rarely. And if I had had an opportunity to see, for example, Latko Pakuric's performances, then I'm very happy because of that reason of why he's working as a theater director in spite of all complaints I can have, I can take or make, I can make two different professional issues or layers. It is important because it is sincere, it is something from himself, entirely from himself. And I'm searching for that type, that kind of theater, I can't find it at festivals anymore. So that is the one, I'm okay, I'm okay. That is the, let's say, environment, mental environment in I am living today. But the other thing is the space by itself. And most of you know that Stavodin Prosperov-Novac wrote a very important book, Planet Držić, some time ago. And he wrote that sentence, it is extremely important that from Renaissance time until today, everybody who owns the space, owns at the time the play in the space. Which means that everybody who controls the space controls our relationship in the space and everything's going on in it. So that is the most important thinking I have about Bitta Festival. Because when Bitta Festival went out from the theater buildings, searching for other premises from other space, not belonging to state or to city or to private owner or somebody else, but to try to make performances everywhere or anywhere. Everywhere or anywhere. It was not only artistic question, it was also ideological question, it was also the question of liberation. And that is the reason why I accepted this title. Because the spatial liberation is from my point of view the most important question today. We need to find a way to liberate our self from the space of neoliberal community in which we are, yes, yes. But we need to invent or we need to rebuild or we need to construct a new public space because we have no public space anymore. There is no public space in our two days with us society. And this is the main question I just, I wanted to share with you and to try to open discussion about it. Thank you, Radivu Yedinovich. Now unfortunately we have limited time for discussion that we have. If you want to share some of your thoughts or if you want to ask something to discuss. Oh, first time, the second time. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's my support. I mean, and many of these performances we saw, they seem alternative and they deserve to be in different places and spaces than the regular theaters. So I don't know if women, I'm asking this question. I don't know if women will be here. I don't think we'll talk about that. Okay. But can you answer in front of the public? I cannot answer. Why? Why? Because the presentation is the one. I mean the right person. Maybe when, but well, I'm a push as well. Yes. That was like, I'm curious. It's nothing, it's not a criticism. It's just curiosity. Yes. I don't need that. You need it because of the court. But actually we, Borka Pavichevich, Bila sam dramaturgo, Atelyevusat sam director central as a court on decontamination, we walk rules. Oh yes, I have to speak in English. That's my name is Borka Pavichevich. And I think, Sanya, that you already get an answer. Because there is a manager who is taking care about that. So you got the answer. And we got the answer about the public spaces. Isn't there is a public spaces now on the demonstration against the Berlin underwater. So I mean, this is very important. What you ask and what you say. And what Linulovic has said that this is a question of being whole. It's a question of philosophy. It's not a question of anything, anything technically. And we are living in the time when you have a segments and when you have a technical decisions, like today the people know to drive the car. But technically, they don't know what is beside them. They don't know so what is in front of them. They are just driving the car. And that's what is going also in our, in our area. And I just want to thank you Linulovic for that. Because if I learn anything on BITEP is a space. A space is a destiny. A space is a choice. A space is a duet. A space is a Yugoslavia. A space is a world. I mean, what, how it is important. We have the opening right, the man who is dealing with the time and space. That was Bob Wilson. And it's eternal because of that. Nobody who is not dealing with the space and time will not be eternal. So our epoch has very rare cases, which are eternal. And I just want to add something, not to develop that. That which was Noeslvenišekunst. And that was the Scipio-Nasica. A space. The first operation of Draganživadinov, group Irvin, was in a broyry, in a new sensibility brought by Ljubi Šaristić. It was the press conference up in Atelier 212. The guy who was working in Matjaž Vipotnikatelje Miran Mohor, I know from the year. That was a scandal. We need a scandal. He just on this interpretation, pure one table up, and we can find the person on the license all over around. This is a bit of, you know, this is Noeslvenišekunst. This is whatever Svetlana Slapsak, my colleague of mine was thinking in that time, about the space. They came in broyry. That was 84. And on the upper floor, it's destroyed, as you know. All the spaces are destroyed. Now there are the shops. The shops. We are in the mall, practically. And then, I saw that Ljubi Šaristić is very kind to me, which is never useful. And Abster was an exhibition of Irvin. And let's give you all you day drink coffee and so on. I mean, let's see each other for a moment. I was thinking, and I understood very quickly what's happened. You come down in the cellar of the broyry and you saw Dragan Živodinov in a black suit and all steepier nazitsa, what they did. They burned the whole, who's he called, a chmej? The whole, that was from where beer is produced. It was left there. Chmej. They just make a fire or all that space. And then you see the ichthios. I mean, the fish, as you know, this is the proclamation, passports are after us. That was a fish going with a factory machine. They used the factory in fire for Kasta Diva and for a space. This fire was a using of the space. So that's the connection between the content, the ideology, the politic and the space is one really of the crucial thing of the Bitef. That was Barotana. That was Siam. That was all spaces in bed raid, which has been in a theater-alized use. And today I remember, which become a theater, which become art. We are talking too much about culture. But you know, if you read the history of the biggest festivals in Europe now, we are very Euro centering, but it's like that. They all acquired new spaces, lift the London Theater Festival. I mean, on the South Bank, they really, they decided to abandon the usual neighborhoods which are up going and gentrified and go to the neighborhoods of four people and bring theater to them and not to ask them to come to the theater. So it is really a great project and we know all the other great theater festivals are always dealing with public spaces and expanding the use of this public space. There is a Rur Triennale guided by Heiner Gebers, which is also using all these ex factories, all mines and everything as gallery spaces and not only performing spaces. But this all what should, I'm sorry, I'm Katarina Pejevic, I'm a dramaturg. Zagreb-based, Belgrade-born Slovenian cities, whatever. NSK, I have an NSK passport and I actually cross twice the border with the NSK passport. I had the other one in my pocket, but it worked. I'm very happy actually that somehow this whole session turned into something which is very concrete and yet can be also very metaphysical. But talking about space and the politics of space, what happened with BITF, I think was a very slow gentrification process. You use now the word gentrification if we can apply it to BITF in that way. What Radilwe mentioned is really true. Symbolically, it was the death of BITF already when the opening started being so spectacular in Sava Center. And it was already, I think in 82. I think it was the first one. And then some other of the big spectacles that came. But at the time, I think still there was some kind of consciousness of mixing the impossible, which actually BITF was from the very beginning. And I think that was a fantastic formula because at the same time from the very beginning of 67, there were highly institutionalized performances that came from the top mainstream productions of both Eastern and Western countries. We keep forgetting the Western Europe. I mean, all the German streak of influence on BITF was also very important apart from the Eastern European theater and American avant-garde theater. This was a kind of footnote. What I wanna say, BITF was always combining so the highly representative mainstream theater with the most bold avant-garde achievements at the moment, the most experimental things which were really shocking not only for the unaccustomed Belgrade audience, but for audiences everywhere because they were just pushing the borders of theater thinking plus the third, let's say the third line, the ethnic theater, the theater that came back to the roots which actually has to do with Antonin Arto. I mean, it was not such a, it was completely BITF like to have Katakali as the first performance, whether it was offered by Nehru or whatever, but it made complete sense from Katakali to the Aboriginals and so on. I mean, we saw so many amazing things coming from various cultures. So this process was really slow. Of course, there was a kind of hiatus that happened with 91. That was a big shift and we can speak about, let's say this small period between 89 and 91 and then what happened was a new era of BITF, but I think it has to do with a kind of battle. This is how I experienced it. I'm gonna talk a little bit about it later in the afternoon because I consider myself as a child of BITF in a literal sense. The battle between the love for mainstream that is very, very strong here in Belgrade and the battle for a different way of thinking which is being led by a few people constantly, valiantly ever since, but BITF actually made a very, very small influence on Belgrade theater for a long time. Nothing could be seen apart from very few exceptions which actually confirmed the rule. It made the greatest influence to the farthest parts of Yugoslavia, to Slovenia, to Croatia, but not so much to Belgrade at all. And this is something what Alexander and me, for instance, we're talking about for a long time. And I feel that this was actually the battle where the mainstream won. And BITF was practically taken over by the mainstream thinking. Plus, of course, it's not such a simple thing. It's a very complex process with the introduction of art markets all over the world. And the festival networks and the festivals that were commodifying theater, actually, theater companies making productions for festivals and so on and so forth. Wanting to enter the network. In my feeling, in my view, BITF lost the battle. The BITF that was once at a time. It's not completely true because I would like to say something. When it was BITF, BITF, really avant-garde and presenting all these performances, the audience was not ready for it yet. Absolutely not. But now I would say I see the new audience which are the students. There is this synergy which was created between our faculty of drama and the festival. And I see the new generation of theater goers who are the artists for the theater performing artists but also directors and writers and so forth who are connecting very well with it and understand. But it's like, I mean, from the previous generation, it's the same thing, you know, when Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, he was referring to the avant-garde, historical avant-garde and not to the previous decade. So I think there is something about this new generation like they are relating to what BITF was because nothing to do with what BITF is right now. So it's like, I see this new generation and I see this... Yes, I apologize if it turned out to be like it didn't happen. It was a long process for a long time, it didn't happen. But now definitely, I mean, and there is also the independent art scene here and all the contemporary art scene, the contemporary dance scene that has emerged, you know, ever since and it certainly has to do with BITF, with the continuous influence of BITF. But, you know, paradoxically, we probably now have much better equipped viewers than we used to have back then when people were just considering everything like an excess, I was going through, I was sifting through the bulletins of BITF, you know, from the early years. It all seems like a circus, really, you know, people were coming to see performances, just to see if they're going to be spilled with flour, you know, or spat upon, you know, or thrown water on, not thinking about the artistic value of that, you know. So, yeah, sorry, I took a lot of time. Diana Milosevic, Duck Theatre director. I would like to add, so thank you, really interesting conversation, but I would like to add a little bit different perspectives, especially having in mind and speaking about this year's BITF, because we're speaking about the site-specific places, and, you know, you, those of you who know our work, you know that we work most of the time in site-specific spaces, including our space that is non-tactical space and so on. So, I'm not speaking from the perspective of someone sitting in the big theater with the classical Italian stage and so on, but what they found subversive in a good sense, and I would like to offer a bit different perspective to this conversation in this year's edition of BITF, is exactly that almost all performances I've seen, I would love that I had seen them in different spaces, like clubs or like sellers or like many other, but I think the fact that, for example, the last night's performance that we saw in a national theater was a national theater, and it would be far more appropriate to be at the Center for Culture, the Contamination, or in some cellar and so on, speaks about the importance of bringing that kind of the work in so-called mainstream spaces. There are also people who would never, ever go to see that kind of the performances would be exposed and maybe eventually would be influenced. And also another thing that I would like to point out, I really liked the idea to bring migrants to that performance and not only that, because of course many of us go and do perform at bus stations where they live or in the places for the refugees and so on, but from also our experience of my theater is that people like to feel also like humans in a way they like to come to the theater, they like to come into kind of the proper theater and again feel as the part of society. So I think this is also kind of the perspective that we should have in mind, especially speaking, I'm not speaking about the past beat-ups because also I was not a lot here since due to our tours, but with this beat-up I was first in myself also complaining and then actually started really to love this subversiveness that I don't know was it deliberate or was it like I mean by chance or because of production conditions, but I think it really works. And this is something that I think could maybe be like the whole new perspective for beat-up so that it's not only like the big mainstream glossy productions before being placed in national theater, atelier, so on, so on, but that we can really create more diversity in that sense. Thank you. Any more questions or no? Okay, in closing, we are very thankful to all speakers, participants, all guests, to all of us, of course. Now we have a short lunch break and the conference will continue at two o'clock of course in several sessions in the afternoon and tomorrow, thank you.