Having seen 67 performances, some submitted for the festival, some by personal invitation or at other shows and festivals, in such colorful and diverse offer, whether it is about the level of production, text, theme, technique, and the way of performing the plays in question, my observation is that in a qualitative sense, at least to my knowledge, sensibility, and ultimately taste, there haven’t been any significant changes compared to the previous year.
With that in mind, my selection of the 2nd Novi Sad Theater Festival will consist of 12 plays that would be in the official competition.
I am not one of those selectors who find a common title for the selected plays, nor was I guided by a given theme. The concept of the festival, without a title, is specific to the Novi Sad Theater Festival, and the basic guideline in the selection of performances was a good performance - that's how I came to this selection.
While watching all those performances, I noticed that the basic guidelines regarding the staging of the plays that are offered to children and young people has not changed. We are still heavily influenced by Covid; it is still used to blame our theatrical failures on it and has remained a basic tool in the defense of lower quality, superficial, ‘safe’ ways some plays are being delivered.
This year's selection of NTF differs from other festivals with a concept of no restrictions, be it in terms of production, genre or anything else. It is important that every play captures the attention of the audience: children or young people. Each of the twelve performances is in itself different from the others and brings some peculiarity that we can hardly see anywhere else. Naturally, they haven’t been chosen just because they were different from the others, but they imposed themselves, whether they brought with them some new skills, techniques, virtuosity, aesthetic experience, innovation, or simply love for the theater.
Mihajlo Nestorovic, Selector and Director of the Novi Sad Theater Festival