Битеф

15

THE REST IS SILENCE HAMLET (falls) : О, I die, Horatio. The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit; I cannot live to hear the news from England; But I do prophesy the election 'lights On Fortinbras; he has my dying voice;. So tell him, with the осей rents, more or less, Which have solicited. - The rest is silence. (Dies.) This year Bitef does not have a subject, a logo. Needless to say, it does have a concept. Beneath the subtitle New Theatre Tendencies it nevertheless says - The rest is silence. The last words uttered by Hamlet. Many commentaries have bee written about this sentence since Shakespeare wrote his best-know tragedy in 1600, The sentence has remained a mystery, even more so than the first line of the best-known monologue in the same drama:"To be or not to be". The mystery is what this sentence means, but why there is no logo, an umbrella subject of this year's festival is not a mystery. Whatever the former logos and no matter how much we have kept explaining that Bitef never intended and never could cover by its logo all the productions shown during a particular festival, there have always been voices which disputed a given logo or noted that not all the productions could be subsumed by it (which Bitef always acknowledged and emphasised). The festival of new tendencies merely wanted, following in the steps of the old Aristotelian tradition, to try to generalize or problematise the programme and encourage reflections about the theatre of our days. This time we shall problematise the question: with or without a logo? In the early days of 44th Bitef 2010 friends and 'foes'of Bitef will meet at a round table to say what they think: with or without a subject. And the rest is silence... Jovan Ćlrllovi Anja Suša