BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD
Opening Speech
Bitef International Theatre Festival
Belgrade, Serbia, 25 September 2024
Dear audience,
I am very happy to be here in Belgrade at the Bitef festival. I love this festival for many reasons: It is a festival that is both international and local. A festival that is as committed to beauty as it is to protest. A brave, a diverse festival.
I remember the first time I was at the Bitef, exactly 10 years ago, in 2014. At the time, I was driving in a small Volkswagen through Ex- Yugoslavia, and at the wheel was the brilliant Slovenian curator Nevenka Koprivšek, since sadly passed away. We were researching for our show The Dark Ages about the civil wars in Ex-Yugoslavia.
We drove from Slovenia through Croatia to Belgrade, and from Belgrade through Bosnia to Srebrenica and Sarajevo: through all the cities whose names we Western Europeans know because of the wars and massacres that happened here in the last century. I remember how impressed I was to still see, here in Belgrade, the signs of the NATO bombings. I remember that in the Bitef Festival of 2014, I saw a show about Gavrilo Princip, the man who shot Successor to the throne Franz Ferdinand in 1914. And at the end of my journey through Ex-Yugoslavia, I took a coffee at Hotel Europa, in Sarajevo, where Successor to the throne Franz Ferdinand himself took his last coffee before being shot.
When I arrived this morning, I heard that someone else with a Volkswagen came to Serbia this summer – it was the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He came to promote the mining of lithium for Germany's electric car industry, not far from here in the valley of Jadar. Scholz called on the Serbs to sacrifice themselves for Europe, for the so-called “sustainable” economy. “Europe” means of course: Volkswagen. Dislocating 20,000 families and poisoning the most fertile soil for generations to come: Yes, that is "sustainable", sustainably deadly.
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”, as T. S. Elliot wrote in Wasteland after the First World War. We are witnessing today another war: an economic war that transforms whole countries into wastelands, lands of sorrow and fear. This time I did not come with a Volkswagen to Belgrade, I came with a Greek tragedy: Antigone in the Amazon, which is about the fight of the Brasilian Landless Movement against modern mining companies – the fight of Antigone, the princess of Thebes, against her uncle Kreon, a Greek Olaf Scholz.
The Amazon is 10’000 kilometers from here, but we live in a globalized world: the same tragedy, the same wastelands everywhere. Like in a teenage monster movie, it is the exact same company, Rio Tinto, that mines lithium in Serbia and bauxite in the Amazon – minerals for the “sustainable” future of Volkswagen. No wonder there is a saying in the Amazon: "When you hear the word sustainable, run for your life."
But I think – and this is the lesson of Antigone: it's better to defend your land. Antigone's struggle is everywhere, and her radical NO to the plundering of nature is just as needed in Serbia as it is in Brazil. "Beauty will save the world" is the theme of this year's Bitef Festival, a quote from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot. Chancellor Scholz, Volkswagen, Rio Tinto: they don’t want to save the world, they want to save their power and their bank accounts. And in all countries, whether in Europe or in Brazil, it is precisely those people who use the words "people" and "homeland" the most – the nationalists – who sell the beauty of their countries to international investors: there is a German Kreon, a Serbian Kreon, a Brasilian Kreon, and so on.
“Many is monstruous, but nothing as monstruous as man”: this is the most famous quote from Antigone. Yes, there is something monstruous, something wrong with us, the humans. There is something that, sometimes, makes me sit down and howl. I therefore ask you: Let us all be like Antigone. Let us all be like the “Idiot” from Dostoyevsky: let us be naïve, let us say NO to the deadly ideology of our time. Let us fight for Beauty, the Beauty of life, the Beauty of nature – our true homeland.
When I was in the Amazon, there was a sentence written on all books and flags: "We cultivate the land, and the land cultivates us." What we do to the land, will be done to us. May it be love or hatred, gentleness or greed. Yes, we live in Dark Ages again, wars surround us. “We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead“, as Sophocles writes in Antigone. Let us thus celebrate Beauty, togetherness, and respect, here in Belgrade, and wherever we are.
I declare the 58th Bitef Festival open.
Milo Rau
Artistic Director Vienna Festival | Free Republic of Vienna
