Raging bull of a festival

Raging bull of a festival

The 50th Belgrade International Theatre Festival was a rigorously intellectual affair

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Raging bull of a festival
The Belgrade International Theatre Festival. Photos courtesy of BITEF and IATC

From Sept 26–30, I had the opportunity to attend the 50th Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF). This year, the festival was held in conjunction with the 28th Congress of the International Association of Theatre Critics, a biannual event that gathers scholarly and journalistic theatre critics from around the world.

BITEF is considered one of the most important theatre festivals in Europe. A critic from Bulgaria told me that it's the only one of its kind in the Balkans region. This is where people in the Balkan countries can come and see works by eminent names in the performing arts from around the world.

This year, the festival, headed by new artistic director Ivan Medenica and curated by Anja Susa, was themed "On The Back Of The Raging Bull". The theme refers to the abduction of Europa, after whom the continent of Europe was named, by Zeus who had transformed himself into a white bull before carrying her off to Crete.

The theme also evokes an image of distress, like the Chinese and Thai idiom, "Once you're on the tiger's back, it's difficult to get off". And BITEF selected many productions that painted pictures of a Europe in crisis, a Europe forced to do some soul-searching as it struggles with its past and current economic, political and identity crises.

The selection has a strong anti-capitalist bent. And if you have a quick glance at the festival's programme, the productions from Western Europe seem ridden with white guilt to an infuriating degree. But that's precisely what's exciting about the festival: it has a clear critical stance. The programme also stands out for the number of documentary theatre and lecture-performance productions -- genres and theatre-making processes that remain a rarity in Thailand.

This is the kind of theatre festival Thailand needs.

We have the enduringly festive Bangkok Theatre Festival (BTF), which was cancelled this year to respect the national mourning period. The BTF is the biggest and only unjuried theatre festival in Thailand. But most of the shows in the festival, even the ones by the more established theatre companies, are short and/or casually put together for the purpose of the annual ritual that is BTF. And for the first time this year, we were treated with the Bangkok International Children's Theatre Festival.

We also have small theatre festivals that have emerged in the past few years, namely Take Off Festival, which showcases selected works by recent university graduates, and Low Fat Art Fest, which not only presents short performances but also initiates collaborations between Thai and non-Thai artists. These are wonderful platforms that can help jump-start careers and place professional artists in unfamiliar creative situations.

But what the Thai performing arts scene still lacks is a major juried festival that commissions, showcases and imports boundary-breaking and intellectually challenging works. More Thai artists need to be pushed creatively and out of their comfort zone by having their work presented on the same platform as high-quality and difficult works from abroad.

That's what an international juried festival with a progressive vision can do: hold all artists, regardless of their nationalities and respective limitations, to the same standards.

And Thai audiences should get to see more challenging theatre in Thailand from local and international artists. We don't need the Thai audience to be kinder or more encouraging than they already have been. We need them to be more critical and demanding.

For more than a decade, the BTF has done a remarkable job at announcing, establishing and celebrating the existence of Thai theatre artists. Now we also need a festival that takes the next step of raising standards and expectations and widening the worldview of Thai artists and audiences alike.

The Ridiculous Darkness
Burgtheater (Austria)

Written by German playwright Wolfram Lotz and directed by Czech director Dusan David Parizek, the German-language play showcased some of the rawest performances I’d ever seen. Based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the play begins with a monologue of a Somali pirate facing a tribunal in Germany. We then enter the Afghanistan jungle with two soldiers on a mission to kill a crazed officer. The Ridiculous Darkness dismantles dominant narratives through words, the performers’ bodies and the performing space: All the four white female performers embody the other male and/or non-white characters. The actresses disassemble the stage piece by piece and feed it to the wood grinder as they tell us about the male-dominated narratives they heard as children. While the first half riveted, the second meandered and became overstuffed with symbols. The ferocity and calibre of the performances, though, was undeniable.

SoftMachine: Rianto + Xiao Ke x Zihan
Choy Ka Fai (Singapore/Germany)

Berlin-based Singapore artist Choy Ka Fai’s SoftMachine project tells stories of Asian dancers and choreographers through performances in conjunction with a photo exhibition and video documentaries. BITEF selected the accounts of Indonesian artist Rianto and Chinese husband-and-wife team, dancer-choreographer Xiao Ke and audio-visual artist Zihan. Presented as two separate performances, both pieces explore how these artists migrate from traditional dance to contemporary dance and from East to West, and how these migrations and coexistence of dance cultures in their bodies inform their identities and works. These stories are told with subtlety and intimacy, but their rebellious messages are clear. As we watch Xiao Ke and Zihan find their critical voices in oppressive China and Rianto defy categorisation of his gender and dancing body, Ka Fai is constantly asking us to rethink the current definitions of traditional and contemporary dance. What these two pieces essentially do is to decentralise the Western-centric concept of traditional and contemporary in dance.

Samo Moje (Only Mine Alone)
Station: Service for Contemporary Dance (Serbia)

Dancers and choreographers Ana Dubljevic and Igor Koruga had an important topic to explore, especially for artists living in a country with a tumultuous recent history: that of taboo emotions and our inability to articulate said emotions in a capitalistic society. The idea to set the piece in a rectangular box, too, signalled an intense and intimate experience for the audience. But the BITEF Theatre was too large for us to feel the sense of claustrophobia and repression the performers wanted us to feel. The repetitive movements and robotic way the performers uttered similar patterns of phrases and sentences were effective for the first 15 minutes. They used the remaining 35 minutes to repeat the points they had already made. The piece simply lacked depth and, in the international festival context, failed to show us how any of this is specific to the Serbian experience.

Riding On A Cloud
Rabih Mroué (Lebanon)

Rabih Mroué’s brother Yasser was shot in the head by a sniper in 1987, three years before the Lebanese Civil War ended. He survived, but the injury left him with a language impairment called aphasia. Yasser also found that he had difficulty with representation, which made him stop going to the theatre and began making videos. In this tender and tough performance, stage and visual artist Rabih brings together reality and fiction almost as a tribute to his brother’s condition. Yasser plays a character whose stories resemble his own. He is physically present with us in the room as a character while the videos containing his life stories unfold on the screen. Together Yasser and the character he plays reconstruct his journey with wry humour and wonder. Riding On A Cloud is a testament to the ability of fiction to provide us the space not only to look for and find ourselves, but also to stand at a distance and make up for that which we have lost.

SoftMachine: China - Xiao Ke & Zihan at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, Singapore.

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