Having in mind the long-term tradition of Belgrade Summer Festival (Beogradskog letnjeg festivala - BELEF), as well as its multimedia nature, it is very difficult and ungrateful to accept selector’s work, and not to be wrong regarding someone’s taste and expectations. The Summer Festival is always confronted with high requirements, because its offer is very often the only cultural offer in Belgrade in summer, so it is expected from this Festival to simultaneously be amusing, but artistically ambitious, to offer programs for people „from 7 to 77“, but also to be provocative, searching, to offer chance to young people, but not to neglect confirmed artists, etc. Many of those requests are sometimes very contradicting, and therefore it is not a coincidence that often in the history of BELEF it happened that, due to the wish to please variegated expectations, the Festival offer turned into a charade, where one could see programs which are internally unrelated to conceptually or esthetically. The fact that a theater is just one of three BELEF sections, additionally burdens this task and prevents this Festival to be of general topic kind, as some other Festivals in our environment (BITEF; Sterijino Pozorje, etc..).

One of the most important functions that should, according to my opinion, be satisfied by the theatre program of this Festival, is to show, besides fun in sultry summer months, also a serious ambition to actively influence by its production, the existing theatric area primarily of Belgrade, Serbia in the perspective and Balkans (let’s hope for even more!). This can be achieved by support to daring concepts and innovative artists regardless of their affiliation with certain generation. In short, BELEF should not represent a continuation of theatre season, nor should it offer the repertoire that can be seen in one of the city theatres within the regular theatrical offer, only „in the open“, because it is not the role of theatre festival. On the contrary, this Festival should be the place where limits of those who engage in artistic practice as well as of public are crossed. This task does not in any way cut out fun and entertainment (it is a fake contradiction, very popular with advocates of boulevard theatre and the thesis that „public needs laughter“), but fun and entertainment must not be the final reach of this Festival. Elite art is what should have a prominent place during BELEF, as is the case with the other significant theatre festivals, without imperative that all plays equally successfully communicate with different tastes of theatre public. This means in practice that it is possible to combine programs which are of very high quality but understandable to a wider audience, with those who are not qualitative, but possess the other type of quality, because they enrich us with some new experiences. Co-productions with foreign Festivals and theatres about which it was not possible to think this year, because there was not enough of time for that, should by no means become one of the conceptual milestones of this Festival in the future, that would help to improve the image of Serbian theatre in wider scope than the local, and enable beneficial exchange of ideas and information which is for long time already usual in the Festival practice of a larger part of Europe.

Having that ambition in mind and with very little time available, I tried to compile my proposals of theatre program for this year’s BELEF, but also to indicate the direction in which this Festival should move in the future.