The focal point of the Biennial is still the Main Exhibition in the Museum of Applied Art, which displays the most outstanding works from the Biennial selection available in the catalogue, published for the first time, in a form of a multi-media presentation.

This year, also for the first time, we have added a foreign touring exhibition to the Main Exhibition. The first country to present a glimpse of its theatre production to our audience is the Czech Republic. This is no accident. The homeland of the great Josef Svoboda and the country where the Prague Quadrennial takes place, this being the largest world exhibition dedicated to theatre design and architecture, is the country which made its theatre culture (with a strong emphasis on stage design) something of a national ‘brand’. There is probably no country in the world which supports stage designers or promotes them in a better way, and anyone into stage design knows that every four years Prague turns into a theatre mecca - a place to be if you want to meet the entire “international community” of profession’s members.
The exhibition “Between Documentation and Fine Arts” presents works by three most important Czech theatre photographers, Viktor Kronbauer, Josef Ptáček and Bohdan Holomíček, created in the period “covered” by the Biennial selection. Their works are not merely examples of supreme photographic art, but also a valuable visual anthology of contemporary stage design in Europe since they were created in some of the most respectable European theatre and opera houses. With this exhibition, produced by the Theatre Institute in Prague, we wanted to stimulate comparisons between this Biennial’s selection and contemporary European designs and to contextualize them in the wider framework. This is a concept we also intend to pursue in the future.

The emphasis of this year’s Biennial is on new technologies in performing arts. We believe that the next task for our “theatre community” after the reconstruction of a large number of Belgrade theatres and beginning of reconstruction of a large number of theatres in Serbia is to train theatre staff for creative and technical challenges imposed by new digital technologies and convergence of traditional set design with electronic media. Consequently, the program of this year’s Biennial is mostly “educative” and targets young designers and technicians who will be carrying out this technological “revolution” on our stages. Our great asset is successful cooperation with partner institutions: the Museum of Applied Art, BITEF Festival, O3One Gallery, the Museum of Yugoslav Film Archives, the British Council and the Belgrade Youth Cultural Centre helped us prepare a comprehensive and dynamic program, with participation of a large number expert guests from Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Canada, Hungary, Poland, Russia and other countries, who are sharing with us their experiences with new theatre technologies. This Biennial also continues its ongoing and close cooperation with the postgraduate program of the University of Arts in Belgrade (Department for Stage Design), whose lecturers prepared a special “experimental” educational program in the Museum of Applied Art.

Here we would particularly like to spotlight an exhibition by students of the Scenography Department of the Faculty of Applied Arts, on display at the O3One Gallery, under the mentor guidance of prominent Serbian scenographers Todor Lalicki, Geroslav Zarić and Jasna Dragović. The sponsors of this exhibition – namely EXIT Festival and the National Theatre in Užice (the producers with acknowledged sensibility for innovative stage design and technical production) – award ‘grants’ to the most successful participants of this exhibition by commissioning them as designers on their projects next season. In so doing, we want to stimulate faster and more efficient inclusion of young designers in our stage production, and will be ‘monitoring’ their professional development with great interest when selecting works for future Biennials.

This initiative is the best illustration of our hope for the Biennial to become a “junction” and a meeting place for all “agents” with a professional interest in stage design and technology, who can contribute to promotion and development of these disciplines. These are namely educational institutions, media, people and institutions in the public sphere, as well as producers themselves.

The Sixth Biennial of Stage Design
Belgrade, 7-30 September 2006

Download full program in pdf format

  Program 6 BI [2.34 MB]