World Theatre Day 2024

 

[The statements below are from the website of the International Theatre Institute.  ITI, an NGO in formal associate relations with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was officially inaugurated during the meeting of its first World Congress in Prague in 1948, organized on the initiative of UNESCO and a group of international theater experts. 

[ITI’s charter objectives are: To promote international exchange of knowledge and practice in the domain of the performing arts; to stimulate creation and increase cooperation among theater people; to increase public awareness of the need to take artistic creation into consideration in the domain of Development; to deepen mutual understanding and contribute to the consolidation of peace and friendship between peoples; to join in the defense of the ideals and aims of UNESCO; and to combat all forms of racism or social and political discrimination.

[To further its goals and especially to spread the idea of theater as a bridge-builder for peace and mutual understanding, in 1961 ITI created World Theatre Day, celebrated annually on 27 March.  Each year the Executive Council of ITI selects a message author and circulates the international address all over the world.  The message is translated into more than 20 languages.

[I’ve published on World Theatre Day several times before on Rick On Theater, and ROTters who are interested should check out the past posts to read earlier messages: “World Theatre Day 2012,” 24 April 2012; “World Theatre Day: 27 March 2022,” 4 April 2022; “World Theatre Day 2023,” 27 March 2023.] 

WORLD THEATRE DAY: INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE 2024
Jon Fosse

Art Is Peace

Every person is unique and yet also like every other person. Our visible, external appearance is different from everyone else’s, of course, that is all well and good, but there is also something inside each and every one of us which belongs to that person alone—which is that person alone. We might call this their spirit, or their soul. Or else we can decide not to label it at all in words, just leave it alone. 

But while we are all unlike one another, we’re alike too. People from every part of the world are fundamentally similar, no matter what language we speak, what skin color we have, what hair color we have.

This may be something of a paradox: that we are completely alike and utterly dissimilar at the same time. Maybe a person is intrinsically paradoxical, in our bridging of body and soul—we encompass both the most earthbound, tangible existence and something that transcends these material, earthbound limits, against what lies deep inside all art.

Art, good art, manages in its wonderful way to combine the utterly unique with the universal. It lets us understand what is different—what is foreign, you might say—as being universal. By doing so, art breaks through the boundaries between languages, geographical regions, countries. It brings together not just everyone’s individual qualities but also, in another sense, the individual characteristics of every group of people, for example of every nation.

Art does this not by levelling differences and making everything the same, but, on the contrary, by showing us what is different from us, what is alien or foreign. All good art contains precisely that: something alien, something we cannot completely understand and yet at the same time do understand, in a way. It contains a mystery, so to speak. Something that fascinates us and thus pushes us beyond our limits and in so doing creates the transcendence that all art must both contain in itself and lead us to.

I know of no better way to bring opposites together. This is the exact reverse approach from that of the violent conflicts we see all too often in the world, which indulge the destructive temptation to annihilate anything foreign, anything unique and different, often by using the most inhuman inventions technology has put at our disposal. There is terrorism in the world. There is war. For people have an animalistic side, too, driven by the instinct to experience the other, the foreign, as a threat to one’s own existence rather than as a fascinating mystery.

This is how uniqueness—the differences we all can see—disappear, leaving behind a collective sameness where anything different is a threat that needs to be eradicated. What is seen from without as a difference, for example in religion or political ideology, becomes something that needs to be defeated and destroyed.

War is the battle against what lies deep inside all of us: something unique. And it is also a battle against art, against what lies deep inside all art.

I have been speaking here about art in general, not about theater or playwriting in particular, but that is because, as I’ve said, all good art, deep down, revolves around the same thing: taking the utterly unique, the utterly specific, and making it universal. Uniting the particular with the universal by means of expressing it artistically: not eliminating its specificity but emphasizing this specificity, letting what is foreign and unfamiliar shine clearly through.

War and art are opposites, just as war and peace are opposites—it’s as simple as that. Art is peace.

Translated by: Damion Searls

Biography of Jon Fosse
Norwegian writer, playwright 

Jon Fosse is a renowned Norwegian writer born in 1959. He is known for his extensive body of work, which includes plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books, and translations. Fosse’s writing style is characterized by minimalism and emotional depth, making him one of the most performed playwrights in the world. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his innovative plays and prose that give voice to the unsayable.

Fosse’s work has been translated into over fifty languages, with productions presented on over a thousand stages worldwide. His minimalist and introspective plays, often bordering on lyrical prose and poetry, continue the dramatic tradition established by Henrik Ibsen [Norwegian; 1828-1906] in the 19th century. Fosse’s work has been associated with post-dramatic theatre, and his notable novels have been described as post-modernist and avant-garde due to their minimalism, lyricism, and unconventional use of syntax.

[Post-dramatic (or postdramatic, post dramatic) theater is a term coined by German theater scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann (b. 1944) in his book Postdramatic Theatre (1999). It represents a departure from traditional, text-based, and plot-driven drama. Lehmann describes a shift away from the traditional dramatic elements of plot, character, and dialogue to a theater characterized by a focus on the performative and visual aspects rather than a structured narrative. The linear narrative, cause-and-effect relationships, and character development are often fragmented or discarded.

[Post-dramatic theater—which arose in the modern theater in the middle of the 20th century, though examples exist in classic drama—treats the performance as an event rather than a representation. The experience of the audience is crucial, and the boundaries between the stage and the audience may be blurred. Some key characteristics of post-dramatic theater include non-linear and fragmented narratives; emphasis on the live, embodied performance itself; blurring the boundaries between the stage and the audience; and challenging the conventional separation between performer and spectator.]

Fosse gained international acclaim as a dramatist with his play “Nokon kjem til å komme” (1996; “Someone Is Going to Come,” 2002), known for its radical reduction of language and powerful expression of human emotions. Inspired by artists like Samuel Beckett [Irish; 1906-89] and Thomas Bernhard [Austrian; 1931-89], Fosse combines local ties with modernist techniques. His works portray the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of human experiences without nihilistic contempt. In his plays, Fosse often leaves incomplete words or acts, creating a sense of unresolved tension. Themes of uncertainty and anxiety are explored in plays like “Natta syng sine songar” (1998; “Nightsongs,” 2002) and “Dødsvariasjonar” (2002; “Death Variations,” 2004). Fosse’s courage in delving into everyday life’s anxieties has contributed to his widespread recognition.

Fosse’s novels, such as “Morgon og kveld” (2000; “Morning and Evening,” 2015) and “Det er Ales” (2004; “Aliss at the Fire,” 2010), showcase his unique language characterized by pauses, interruptions, negations, and profound questioning. The trilogy “Trilogien” (2016) and the septology “Det andre namnet” (2019; “The Other Name,” 2020) further demonstrate Fosse’s exploration of love, violence, death, and reconciliation.

Fosse’s use of imagery and symbolism is evident in his poetic works, including “Sterk vind” (2021) and his poetry collection “Dikt i samling” (2021). He has also translated works by Georg Trakl [German poet; 1887-1914] and Rainer Maria Rilke [Austrian poet; 1875-1926] into Nynorsk [an official form of written Norwegian].

Overall, Jon Fosse’s works delve into the essnce of the human condition, tackling themes of uncertainty, anxiety, love, and loss. With his unique writing style and profound exploration of everyday situations, he has established himself as a major figure in contemporary literature and theatre.

—From the International Theatre Institute

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WORLD THEATRE DAY: U.S. MESSAGE 2024
Luis Alfaro 

Hello Friends,

I am so happy to be speaking with you from the ancestral lands of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation, otherwise known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora, la Reina de Los Angeles, or as we simply say, Los Angeles.

On this very special occasion, I hope I don’t sound like a crazy optimist when I say that theatre saves lives. I know this because it changed mine.

As an artist who was raised in poverty in a barrio in downtown Los Angeles, I am conscious of a violence that accompanied me in my youth. A way of thinking about my limited choices which were constantly confirmed in mainstream images that distorted my culture and its options.

The message was clear, survival was the objective. For some it meant joining gangs, addiction or learning prison systems. For others, like me, it was the refuge of a public library where I discovered, that I was, what they called, an artist.

Which is to say that exploring and practicing expression was a way of learning what freedom was.

Discovering this freedom in every play I checked out from the library, showed me that language was attached to feelings that lived in bodies that had metaphorical wings, capable of transport.

Words, as I read them carried me far when I was growing up. They were comfort in a harsh world. When I wrote words as a teenager, my restlessness to know more stories, took me on real journeys. To you, and your stories, which, I often find, are my stories. The details are different, but the feelings, the same.

Theatre has an extraordinary power to cross all borders and let us see each other, not just on stage, but in the audience as well.

My parents, with their farmworker history, did not know how to access this world. We simply could not afford it, but they desperately wanted it for me.

I collected cans and bottles. At football soccer games, I sold sandwiches my mother made. I raised enough money to buy tickets to see theatre.

My parents drove me to see the first national tour of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ starring the legendary Asian American actor, Mako.

Then, they drove me to my first play, the first national tour of Ntozake Shange’s ‘For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf’.

Then, Luis Valdez’s seminal Chicano work, ‘Zoot Suit’, a history of Los Angeles and Mexican Americans. My Story.

They waited in the car across the street from the Mark Taper Forum Theatre at the Music Center of Los Angeles County.

My parents had no clue what I was seeing, but they could see that something was expanding in me.

I began to understand that the world was much bigger than the one I had been given. There was another world out there. I had little idea how it worked, but I could see that even if it was foreign, it was also capable of being me.

Each play, from the Mahabharata [a Hindu epic poem; a film version of Peter Brook’s 9-hour stage version was released in 1989] to Nagamandala [a 1997 Indian drama film by T. S. Nagabharana based on a play by Girish Karnad], were my story too.

I collected more bottles and cans. I sold my mother’s tamales in my neighborhood. I was able to go to New York to see Broadway shows when I was fifteen.

My best friend and I held yard sales until we had enough money to go to London.

Eventually, the theatre paid me! To go to Chicago for my first production. To London for my first residency. To Mexico City to perform in my native language. To Canada to meet Canadian-Latinos telling their own immigrant stories.

A play is an invitation to another world.

I am a Chicano, a politicized Mexican American. I yearn to tell more audiences the stories of my people. For me, these are often hard stories, about the disproportionate poverty and violence we are born into. But they are also love stories.

I have adapted the Greek classics so that you can see that we belong to the world too. Our humanity is not limited to barrios and prisons, regardless of what the dominant culture often portrays us as.

I am – a world artist; I belong to the shared humanity of our stories. We, my people, built civilizations, and systems, and rituals, and meaning, from the very dirt we will be buried into.

In La Kech. We believe that we are the other you, or should I say, you are the other me. Your story is also my story. We are one expression of feeling in a world of languages. [In Mayan tradition, the law of In Lak’ech Ala K’in means ‘I am you, and you are me. Your story is also my story.’ It is a statement of unity and oneness.]

This is a difficult time for the world. Violence, poverty, hunger, war, fueled by the lies that support such actions.

We artists must stand in truth, both our own, but also in yours.

In La Kech. Tu eres mi otro yo. You are the other me.

Let us speak to each other in stories, through words and feelings.

This is what theatre does best. We learn how to be better human beings, by coming together and wrestling with all that is conflict, and all that is joy.

The communal experience. This is what I share in the theater, and with you. On this day, when we get to share each other.

Gracias and thank you.

Luis Alfaro’s Biography

Luis Alfaro [b. 1963] is a Chicano playwright born and raised in downtown Los Angeles. He was the Associate Artistic Director of Center Theatre Group at the Music Center of Los Angeles County (2021-2022), home of the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson & Kirk Douglas Theaters, where he produced over one hundred new play commissions, productions, workshops, and readings.

He is the only playwright in the history of the Kennedy Center to have received two ‘Fund for New American Play’ awards in the same year. An Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, he is the director of the MFA in Dramatic Writing program. He was previously on faculty at California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts), Writers Program at UCLA Extension and a University of California Regents Fellow at U.C. Riverside.

He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, popularly known as a “genius grant,” awarded to people who have demonstrated expertise and exceptional creativity in their respective fields.

He is also the recipient of The United States Artists; Ford Foundation Art of Change; Joyce Foundation; Mellon Foundation; PEN America/Laura Pels International Foundation Theater Award for a Master Dramatist, among others.

He was the inaugural Playwright-in-Residence for six seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2013-2019); Playwright’s Ensemble at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre (2013-2020); Inaugural Imaginistas Latinx Playwrights at the Los Angeles Theatre Center (2021-); and served in numerous positions for the Ojai Playwrights Conference (2002-2022).

His plays include Electricidad, Oedipus El Rey, Mojada, Delano, Body of Faith, Alleluia the Road, Black Butterfly, Bruja, and Straight as a Line, which have been seen at regional theaters throughout the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe.

His most recent play, The Travelers, was produced at the Magic Theater in San Francisco and is the winner of the Bay Area 2024 Glickman Prize. The production traveled to the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where it was named one of the nine best productions of the year by the Los Angeles Times.

Luis spent two decades in the Los Angeles Poetry and Performance Art communities, where he regularly presented at Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Beyond Baroque Poetry Center.

His book, The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro, is the winner of the prestigious Greek & British Hellenic Prize, and licensed by Dramatists Play Service.

He is a local Emmy winner, and Emmy nominated for his short film, Chicanismo, which was produced by PBS, named Best Experimental Film at the San Antonio CineFestival and Best Short at CineAccion in San Francisco.

His recording, down-town, released on SST/New Alliance Records, was awarded Best Spoken-Word Release from the National Association of Independent Record Distributors.

He was a student of playwright Maria Irene Fornes [1930-2018], performance artist Scott Kelman [1936-2007], and a product of the Inner-City Cultural Center in downtown Los Angeles.

—From the Theatre Communications Group 

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WORLD THEATRE DAY: U.S. EMERGENT ARTIST MESSAGE 2024
Caitlin Nasema Cassidy 

Hi. My name is Caitlin Nasema Cassidy. I’m an actor, director, and producer.

I live in New York City, and I make work within and about our climate and ecological emergencies. As a storyteller, I am working to connect climate science to history to the lifecycle of a firefly, for example. Within my theater company LubDub, we often say: When it’s all very big, it helps to go small.

This is an offering in honor of World Theatre Day 2024.

Beat.

Lorca was a first love.
I read his lectures and his plays
mourned his brutal death
Learned from his desire to suggest
Not delineate
To animate
In Madrid 1928, he wrote:
“Wherever there is a dark corner, I wish to direct toward it light.”

This winter, I learned that fireflies, or lightning bugs, are neither flies nor bugs
They are beetles
And they live a good portion of their life underground
Before they can direct their light, they spend a lot of time in dark corners
There are a lot of those these days

I’m afraid to name everything the last year has taken
Holding my breath, haunted by ghosts of displacement
I’m reading the IPCC report like, “How many more statements?”
Crying on the B train ‘cause this morning my dad texted: Ivory Billed Woodpecker Extinct
Wondering what the Wall Street Journal thinks
Do they know most wasps are peaceful creatures, who do not sting?

And
In a small rehearsal room here in the city
We dance across worn wooden floorboards
Let deep breath in
Marvel that our diaphragms can move like this
We practice patience and consent
We brace for what’s next
With gentleness
We keep the magic in our fingertips

In an auditorium in Dearborn,
We’re studying how our ancestors shook their hips
Building process around relationship
We’re singing to the mountains
Conducting research on the sea
From an office in Marseille, Uncle Ramzi says:
“That’s your job as artists. You imagine what could be.”

In a theater in Stockholm
We are synchronizing our heartbeats with strangers
We are practicing the broad, sustained awareness our screens have endangered
We are turning over the soil
And this not a rehearsal
It is life

Along a river in DC
We’re choreographing burlesque with biologists
Telling tales to honor the return of the shad fish
Leaning into silliness

On Zoom
We’re telling stories that recall our vital connections to earth
Celebrating grandmothers, goddesses, and birth

In a garden in Tangiers
In a skatepark in Brooklyn
In a dance studio in Tunis
In a gymnasium in San Juan
In a black box in Jenin
In a classroom in Franklin
In a community center in Istanbul
At a top golf in Virginia
In a rehearsal room in New York City 

We are writing new worlds
With our bodies and our words
Building cultures of care
On a budget
Crafting cardboard castles
Making the best of plastic chairs
We are (re)storying the future

Like lightning bugs and Lorca
The theater and its artists
Are directing our light toward the darkest corners. 

CAITLIN NASEMA CASSIDY’S BIOGRAPHY

Caitlin Nasema Cassidy ([b. ca. 1989]; she/her) is an actor, director, and producer making experimental performance that is physical, collaborative, and poetic. Her practice is rooted in joy, embodied research, and (com)post-activism. Theatre includes NY Times Critic's Pick The Vagrant Trilogy at The Public Theater, the world premiere of Paradise at Central Square Theatre (2018 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress), NY Times Critic’s Pick Pay No Attention to the Girl with Target Margin, and Ferry Tales at The John F. Kennedy Center. Caitlin is a Grist 50 List Fixer, Social Impact Community Partner at the John F. Kennedy Center, and recipient of a National Performance Network Creation and Development Fund Award. She holds the Artist-in-Residence position at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute for the Environment and Sustainability and is Co-Artistic Director of LubDub Theatre Co.  CaitlinNasemaCassidy.com

 —From the Theatre Communications Group

World Theatre Day 2023

 

[The statement below is from the website of the International Theatre Institute.  ITI, an NGO in formal associate relations with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was officially inaugurated during the meeting of its first World Congress in Prague in 1948, organized on the initiative of UNESCO and a group of international theater experts. 

[ITI’s charter objectives are: To promote international exchange of knowledge and practice in the domain of the performing arts; to stimulate creation and increase cooperation among theater people; to increase public awareness of the need to take artistic creation into consideration in the domain of Development; to deepen mutual understanding and contribute to the consolidation of peace and friendship between peoples; to join in the defense of the ideals and aims of UNESCO; and to combat all forms of racism or social and political discrimination.

[To further its goals and especially to spread the idea of theater as a bridge-builder for peace and mutual understanding, in 1961 ITI created World Theatre Day, celebrated annually on 27 March.  Each year the Executive Council of ITI selects a message author and circulates the international address all over the world.  The message is translated into more than 20 languages.]

World Theatre Day was created in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI). It is celebrated annually on the 27th March by ITI Centers and the international theatre community. Various national and international theatre events are organized to mark this occasion. One of the most important of these is the circulation of the World Theatre Day International Message through which at the invitation of ITI, a figure of world stature shares his or her reflections on the theme of Theatre and a Culture of Peace. The first World Theatre Day International Message was written by Jean Cocteau (France) in 1962.

It was first in Helsinki, and then in Vienna at the 9th World Congress of the ITI in June 1961 that President Arvi Kivimaa proposed on behalf of the Finnish Centre of the International Theatre Institute that a World Theatre Day be instituted. The proposal, backed by the Scandinavian centers, was carried with acclamation. Ever since, each year on the 27th March (date of the opening of the 1962 "Theatre of Nations" season in Paris), World Theatre Day has been celebrated in many and varied ways by ITI National Centers of which there are now almost 100 throughout the world.

Each year a figure outstanding in theatre or a person outstanding in heart and spirit from another field, is invited to share his or her reflections on theatre and international harmony. What is known as the International Message is translated into more than 20 languages, read for tens of thousands of spectators before performances in theatres throughout the world and printed in hundreds of daily newspapers. Colleagues in the audio-visual field lend a fraternal hand, more than a hundred radio and television stations transmitting the Message to listeners in all corners of the five continents.

* * * *

2023 WORLD THEATRE DAY MESSAGE

World Theatre Day is an opportunity to celebrate Theatre in all its myriad forms. Theatre is a source of entertainment and inspiration and has the ability to unify the many diverse cultures and peoples that exist throughout the world. But theatre is more than that and also provides opportunities to educate and inform.

Theatre is performed throughout the world and not always in a traditional theatre setting. Performances can occur in a small village in Africa, next to a mountain in Armenia, on a tiny island in the Pacific. All it needs is a space and an audience. Theatre has the ability to make us smile, to make us cry, but should also make us think and reflect.

Theatre comes about through team work. Actors are the people who are seen, but there is an amazing set of people who are not seen. They are equally as important as the actors and their differing and specialist skills make it possible for a production to take place. They too must share in any triumphs and successes that may hopefully occur.

March 27 is always the official World Theatre Day. In many ways every day should be considered a theatre day, as we have a responsibility to continue the tradition to entertain, to educate and to enlighten our audiences, without whom we couldn’t exist.

* * * *

INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE BY SAMIHA AYOUB

To all my friends the theatre artists from around the world, 

I write this message to you on World Theatre Day, and as much as I feel overwhelmed with happiness that I am speaking to you, every fibre of my being trembles under the weight of what we all suffer – theatre and non-theatre artists – from the grinding pressures and mixed feelings amidst the state of the world today. Instability is a direct result of what our world is going through today in terms of conflicts, wars and natural disasters that have had devastating effects not only on our material world, but also on our spiritual world and our psychological peace.

I am talking to you today while I have the feeling that the whole world has become like isolated islands, or like ships fleeing in a fog-filled horizon, each of them spreading its sails and sailing without guidance, not seeing anything on the horizon that guides it, and despite that, it continues to sail, hoping to reach a safe harbour that contains it after its long wanderings in the midst of a roaring sea.

Our world has never been more closely connected to each other than it is today, but at the same time it was never been more dissonant and farther from each other than it is today. Herein lies the dramatic paradox that our contemporary world imposes on us. Despite what we are all witnessing in terms of the convergence in the circulation of news and modern communications that broke all the barriers of geographical borders, the conflicts and tensions the world is witnessing exceeded the limits of logical perception and created, amidst this apparent convergence, a fundamental divergence that distances us from the true essence of humanity in its simplest form.

Theatre in its original essence is a purely human act based on the true essence of humanity, which is life. In the words of the great pioneer Konstantin Stanislavsky, "Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing – all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art – at the door." When we ascend the stage, we ascend it with only one life within us for one human being, but this life has a great ability to divide and reproduce to turn into many lives that we broadcast in this world so that it comes to life, flourishes and spreads its fragrance to others.

What we do in the world of theatre as playwrights, directors, actors, scenographers, poets, musicians, choreographers and technicians, all of us without exception, is an act of creating life that did not exist before we got on stage. This life deserves a caring hand that holds it, a loving chest that embraces it, a kind heart that sympathizes with it, and a sober mind that provides it with the reasons it needs to continue and survive.

I am not exaggerating when I say that what we do on stage is the act of life itself and generating it from nothingness, like a burning ember that sparkles in the darkness, lighting the darkness of the night and warming its coldness. We are the ones who give life its splendor. We are the ones who embody it. We are the ones who make it vibrant and meaningful. And we are the ones who provide the reasons to understand it. We are the ones who use the light of art to confront the darkness of ignorance and extremism. We are the ones who embrace the doctrine of life, so that life may spread in this world. For this, we exert our effort, time, sweat, tears, blood, and nerves, everything we have to do in order to achieve this lofty message, defending the values of truth, goodness, and beauty, and truly believing that life deserves to be lived.

I am speaking to you today, not just to speak, or even to celebrate the father of all arts, “theatre,” on his world day. Rather, I invite you to stand together, all of us, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, to call out at the top of our voices, as we are accustomed to on the stages of our theatres, and to let our words come out to awaken the conscience of the entire world, to search within you for the lost essence of humanity. The free, tolerant, loving, sympathetic, gentle and accepting human. And to let you reject this vile image of brutality, racism, bloody conflicts, unilateral thinking, and extremism. humans have walked on this earth and under this sky for thousands of years, and will continue to walk. So take your feet out of

the mire of wars and bloody conflicts, and leave them at the door of the stage. Perhaps them our humanity, which has become clouded in doubt, will once again become a categorical certainty that makes us all truly qualified to be proud that we are humans and that we are all brothers and sisters in humanity.

It is our mission, us playwrights, the bearers of the torch of enlightenment, since the first appearance of the first actor on the first stage, to be at the forefront of confronting everything that is ugly, bloody, and inhuman. We confront it with everything that is beautiful, pure, and human. We, and no one else, have the ability to spread life. Let us spread together for the sake of one world and one humanity.

—Samiha Ayoub

 Translated by: Hessa Alfalasi, UAE/Fujairah Centre of ITI 

*  *  *  *

[Samiha Ayoub is an Egyptian actress, born in the Shubra neighbourhood of Cairo.  She graduated from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in 1953, where she was taught by the playwright Zaki Tulaimat (1894-1982).  Her credits on the stage over the course of her artistic career amounted to approximately 170 plays, including Raba’a Al-Adawiya, Sekkat Al-Salamah, Blood on the Curtains of the Kaaba, Agha Memnon, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

[Although theatrical works dominated the majority of her artwork, Ms. Ayoub had many contributions in cinema and television.  In the cinema, she was distinguished through several films, including The Land of Hypocrisy, The Dawn of Islam, With Happiness, and Among the Ruins, and on television, she presented many prominent works, the most important of which are Stray Light, Time for Roses, Amira in Abdeen, and Al-Masrawiya.

[She received many honours from several presidents, including Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70; President of Egypt: 1956-70) and Anwar Sadat (1918-81; President of Egypt: 1970-81), as well as Syrian president Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000; President of Syria: 1971-2000) and French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1926-2020; President of France: 1974-81).

[I posted an earlier World Theatre Day statement by John Malkovich in "World Theatre Day 2012," 24 April 2012.]

Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986

[In the mid-1980s, when I was working on a graduate degree in Performance Studies at New York University, I was hired to launch and edit the newsletter for a new organization for stage directors and artistic directors, the American Directors Institute.  

[ADI’s founder and Artistic Director, Geoffrey Shlaes, and I determined that the newsletter, which we decided to call Directors Notes (the title Notes was already in use by a music-oriented association), would not only cover news and announcements of the organization, but articles of interest to theater directors across the country.  

[So when the biennial celebration of worldwide theater, the Theatre of Nations, was about to open in Baltimore, Maryland, Geoff thought I should attend the festival and write about it for the DN.  For theater folk, this gathering was a big deal: it was the first (and so far only) TON held in North America and press coverage, not to mention spectator interest, was expected to be huge.  

[So I got press credentials, went to Washington, D.C.—a 45-minutre drive away from Baltimore—to stay with my parents, and headed to the City of the White Stoops.  It turned out to be the most intensive theater experience I’d ever had; I frequently saw two shows a day, and occasionally three, plus formal interviews arranged through the press office, and ad hoc conversations and meetings at informal venues like Club 45. 

 

[My original intent was to cover the festival, a program of the International Theatre Institute, an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for DN, but during the intermission of one performance, I saw Richard Schechner, a professor of mine at NYU and the editor of The Drama Review, attending the same show.  

[I went to say hello and he asked me why I was at the performance.  I explained my assignment, and Richard asked me if I’d like to write up TON for TDR as well.  He was planning to devote an entire issue to the festival (the coverage turned out to bleed over into a second issue) and I’d write the general article on the overall event, with the rest of the issue filled with articles on individual productions, artists, and issues.  

[I readily agreed, and the article below, “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” is the result.  It ran as “Theatre of Nations” in TDR in the spring issue of 1987).  A much-abbreviated report was also published as “World Theater Artists Meet in Baltimore” in Directors Notes in September 1986.]

 

Between 15 and 29 June 1986, Japanese theatre came to Baltimore, Maryland.  So did Indian theatre, and  Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Brazilian, Polish, British, Irish, Canadian, Italian, Swedish, and American.  Principally through the offices of Producer T. Edward Hambleton; Theatre Project Director Philip Arnoult; and the U.S. Director of the International Theatre Institute (ITI), Martha Coigney, “The City of the White Stoops” captured the first North American presentation of the Theatre of Nations, sponsored biennially for the past 30 years by ITI. 

 

There were 103 performances of 33 works by 22 groups and solo performers from 13 countries in 16 spaces during 14 days (Monday, June 16, was dark).  Along with the international companies and performers, 10 entries from the United States showed 13 works from New York, San Francisco, and Baltimore.  The pieces exhibited ranged from traditional drama to ballet to non-conventional theatre to performance art. 

 

Not that all went smoothly.  Just as in the 1981 International Theatre Festival, Baltimore-area blacks objected to the appearance of a South African company, despite the fact that it featured two distinguished but banned black performers, and succeeded in having it sent home, a Soviet protest over the inclusion of Peter Hall’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm forced ITI President Wole Soyinka to separate the National Theatre of Great Britain’s production from the official festival activities.  Animal Farm went on as scheduled, but was considered an “independent” production.  

 

Shortly after the festival opened, another Eastern Bloc country caused a momentary flap.  Newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Back Stage, reported that Bolek Polivka, touring with his group Divadlo na Provazku [theater on a string], had been recalled to Czechoslovakia by his government.  No reasons were given, and neither the Czech Embassy in Washington nor Polivka himself claimed to know anything about the recall.  In the end, Polivka’s The Jester and the Queen went on as planned, playing to full houses including, at his opening performance, the Czech Ambassador, the Cultural Attaché, and their wives.  After his last performance, Polivka married his “Queen,” French actress Chantal Pollain, on the stage of the Theatre Project. 

 

Aside from covering the Animal Farm protest and the Polivka rumor, there was next to no national press notice of the Theatre of Nations.  Sarah Fenno Lord reported in Warfield’s that the “thirty to fifty journalists, from out of state and all over the world, . . . writing ‘Dateline Baltimore’ stories,” as one of the festival’s principal financers had hoped, did not materialize. 

 

For some, such as the Shaliko Company’s Leonardo Shapiro, a national spotlight was an important reason for performing at the festival.  Shapiro, regretting also the absence of representatives of other festivals, had hoped that The Yellow House, an exploration of Vincent Van Gogh through his letters to his brother Theo, would be picked up for further productions as a result of coming to Baltimore.  He was bitterly disappointed with the press apathy: “I thought Jack Kroll [of Newsweek] was going to write. . . .  He was here the first week and he left.  He told me he would come back and he didn’t.  There has been no national press.  I got a great review in the Baltimore Sun, which is not going to get me anywhere.  So, if I don’t get some kind of national press out of this, this is the end of [The Yellow House].”   ITI’s Martha Coigney, when told by a visiting New Yorker at the end of the festival that the Times had given almost no space to the festival, aside from the Animal Farm brouhaha, was “angry as hell at their apathetic attitude.”

 

Nonetheless, the Theatre of Nations was chock-a-block with some of the best and most interesting performances available in the participating countries.  Just as the works on view were varied in style and content, so were the audiences.  Certainly some people went to many different performances, and theatre folk were ubiquitous, but the more traditional offerings such as Animal Farm and, even though it was performed in Bulgarian, the Ivan Vasov National Theatre’s Retro, attracted an older, tie-and-jacket crowd.  The more experimental pieces, such as Fred Curchack’s Inquest for Freddy Chickan, Shaliko’s The Yellow House, and the work of the Swedish-international collective Jordcirkus and Poland’s Gardzienice Theatre Association, appealed to a younger, more blue jeans-and-sneakers audience. 

 

Some performances had more specialized draws: Northern Ireland’s Charabanc Theatre Company, because it was dubbed a feminist company (it is not), had a heavily female audience; the Theatre Pardes from San Francisco, because it was once called A Traveling Jewish Theatre (it is), had a predominantly Jewish attendance.  Sprinkled among the spectators were theatre celebrities such as actresses Helen Hayes, Mildred Natwick, and Celeste Holme; La Mama’s Ellen Stewart; and producer-director Hal Prince.

 

Since each show was presented only one to eight times, there were opening nights right up until June 27.  Something new was available almost every day of the festival and, despite matinees and varying curtain times, it was not possible to see everything. 

 

Many groups, particularly the international companies, came to Baltimore as part of an extensive tour, arriving from another venue and departing for a new one somewhere else.  Some groups brought one piece and some two or more.  Most of the works were not new.  Ghashiram Kotwal (Ghashiram, the Police Chief) by the Theatre Academy of Pune, India, had been in that company’s repertory for 15 years, while Shaliko’s The Yellow House was reconceived especially for the festival.  One performance was a genuine premiere: Fred Curchack’s Freddy Chickan.      

 

Aside from the obvious boost to the tourist trade, and the interest to habitual theatergoers in a gathering of performers from far and wide, there is an important benefit of international festivals for American theater professionals.  They need to rub artistic elbows with colleagues doing different kinds of work elsewhere in the world.  Without cross-fertilization, theater stagnates.  Philip Arnoult, whom Martha Coigney called “a card-carrying internationalist” in Warfield’s, accused American theater artists of being “criminally isolated, not only from the rest of the world, but from each other.”  (This and all other unattributed statements were made in interviews and conversations with me during the festival.)  Even the established geographical regions, such as the Mid-West and the Boston-Washington Corridor of the east coast, behave as if they are walled off from each other. 

 

American directors, for example, do not talk to one another, asserted Stan Wojewodski, Jr., Artistic Director of Baltimore’s Center Stage and a Theatre of Nations co-director.  They seem threatened by cross-fertilization and will seldom travel to Los Angeles, Chicago, or Louisville, much less Paris, Edinburgh, or Avignon, to see shows by colleagues.  Festivals give artists an opportunity to see the work of a collection of others compacted into a short time.  Wojewodski said a number of the participating artists had expressed delight at being in Baltimore for the festival.  Geoffrey C. Shlaes, a free-lance director and Artistic Director of the American Directors Institute, was taken enough with Shaliko’s The Yellow House to spend more than an hour discussing the work with Shapiro.

 

Shapiro himself explained that being in Baltimore was “important to me for the same reason that having a company’s important to me—to be a citizen and to find some way to have a base from which I can say something about the way things are done.  I think the festival’s important because American theater is completely closed in—just like the rest of the society.”  Mohan Agashe, President of the Theatre Academy of Pune and a leading actor in Ghashiram Kotwal, expressed the same thought: “The reason we also go to national theater festivals [in India] is also to get input.  If you keep on getting lost in things only you are doing, I’m sure you’ll run out of your own resources very soon.  At some point, it’s very necessary to see the work of others.”

 

Despite Wojewodski’s indictment of American directors, Shapiro spoke enthusiastically of the work of colleagues whom he respects and on whom he draws for inspiration.  He praised the puppetry of Marcos and Rachel Ribas of Brazil’s Grupo Contadores de Estorias (The Storytellers) and is in contact with Dario Fo, who, along with everything else, is an expert on masks, advising Shapiro on two future Shaliko projects, a production of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe and Punch!, a new Punch-and-Judy show.  Agashe was drawn to Poland’s Gardzienice, and described several performances from Africa, Spain, and Belgium he saw at the International Theatre Fortnight in Quebec City where the group had been before Baltimore.  Many of the other Theatre of Nations artists were in the audiences during their times off and gathered nightly to chat at Club 45, the make-shift cafe behind Philip Arnoult’s Theatre Project.  It is a way, as Agashe put it, to “know where you really stand in the world scene.”

 

Despite this evidence, however, such exchanges are still rare in the United States.  One reason that the Theatre of Nations is such an important event is that, past festivals in Baltimore (1977, ’78, ’79 and ’81) and the recent ones in Los Angeles (1984) and Chicago (1986) notwithstanding, festivals, popular in Europe and India, are uncommon here.  One reason, of course, is the great distances.  Regardless of borders and governments, it is still logistically less daunting to transport a company from Budapest to Paris or Helsinki to Edinburgh than it is to bring one from Europe, Asia, Africa, or South America to New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.  Transportation aside, Ghashiram Kotwal, which has a simple set and few props, cost $20,000 [almost $43,000 today] to produce at the festival.  This figure is at the low end of the spectrum because the Indian company does not pay its personnel.  Shaliko, who only had to transport their production from New York, spent $46,000 [over $98,000 in 2014] to come to the Theatre of Nations.  Unable to raise their original projected budget of $70,000 [nearly $150,000], the company persuaded the artists to take severe cuts in pay to get the show produced in Baltimore. 

 

The entire festival was originally budgeted at $1.5 million [$3.2 million].  With $335,000 provided by city, state and federal agencies, $309,000 raised from the local business community, and $150,000 expected from sales of tickets ranging from $6 to $25, that would leave a short-fall of over $700,000 and necessitated a reduction in budget plans.  San Francisco, initially slated to share the festival with Baltimore, could not raise the required $300,000 bond [$640,000] because of apparent lack of interest by local business interests and relinquished its claim to half the event.

 

Logistics and distance are not the only costs, however.  Americans have an attitude about money that, according to Agashe, makes mounting festivals difficult.  In negotiating a tour in Europe, Agashe noted, “the inevitable sequence would be what work it is, then they would discuss time, and finally we would come to money.  But invariably here in America nobody would even ask me a single question about the work.  The first thing they ask about is money.”  If the work is worth doing, Agashe maintained, money can be found, but not if the project is dismissed out-of-hand on the basis of finances alone.

 

Americans are also language chauvinists.  According to Agashe, Martha Coigney warned that “to take any non-English-speaking theater to America is next to impossible.”  In Passport, the Theatre Project’s newsletter, Philip Arnoult admonished that our “one-and-a-half language society,” as he calls it, prejudices Americans against foreign performances, regardless of dependence on language.  Unless it is Tango Argentino, Marcel Marceau, or grand opera, Americans just will not accept it.  Agashe traveled throughout the United States before bringing the Pune Academy here, and, despite the warnings, decided, “O.K., it’s difficult, but if we leave it at that, it will not happen at all.  Somebody has to go ahead and do it.”  The Theatre Academy’s sixteen North American performances, he points out, have been well received by both audiences and critics in such cities as Dayton, Ohio; Fullerton, California; and Rockville, Maryland.  This was borne out by reactions at performances of Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo (Comic Mystery) and Franca Rame’s Tutta Casa, Lietto e Chiesa (It’s All Bed, Board and Church), in Italian with live translation and supertitles; the Suzuki Company of Toga’s Clytemnestra, mostly in Japanese with one actor speaking English; and the Ivan Vasov National Theatre’s Retro, entirely in Bulgarian. 

 

Other performances did not depend on language at all, such as Grupo Contadores’ silent puppet plays, Hungary’s Gyor Ballet and Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, or were presented in English by multilingual performers such as Jordcirkus and Bolek Polivka.  Still, these performances do not get seen in the U.S. often enough to break down our prejudices and fears of not understanding them because, it seems, we simply do not have a tradition of sharing our work. 

 

John Strausbaugh, formerly Associate Director of the Theatre Project, quoted Philip Arnoult’s philosophy on this subject in Passport:

 

I’ve said it many times—art is fundamental to the sanity of the planet, and that one of the most important gifts we can give one another is to share our artistic visions among nations and cultures. . . .  I think it’s a very sane impulse.  In the last five or so years there’s been a lot of official talk by governments about establishing a cultural policy and formal exchange programs.  That’s good, but in truth it’s mostly still talk.  The truth is that it’s only when artists meet artists and artists meet audiences that the real exchanges happen.  There are artists and audiences in Baltimore, New York, San Francisco and Montreal who are seeing what artists around the world are doing.  They’re sharing visions, accepting and rejecting one another’s ideas.  But there needs to be more.  It’s a two-way street. 

 

It was to permit “theatre artists . . . to communicate unencumbered by the pressures of politics”  that ITI was organized in Paris in 1948 as an arm of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), according to an ITI press release.  The Theatre of Nations was first held in Paris in 1956, and remained there until 1975 when it became a biennial event hosted by a different country each time.  Nevertheless, it has taken eleven years for the festival to come to North America, mostly because, as Agashe asserted “it’s just not customary.”  Well, now we have tried it and, despite being ignored by the press and other festival representatives, it has worked.

 

Within the smorgasbord of offerings, there was a decided bias towards the experimental.  According to Wojewodski this was neither an accident nor the result of the personal interests of the planners.  In most major American cities there are good companies that present Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, O’Neill, Mamet, or Shepard.  What is needed is more exposure to the out-of-the-ordinary.  What would be the point of a festival that featured only what everyone is already familiar with?  Who would travel any distance to see it?

 

The experimental bent of the Theatre of Nations had also another rationale.  Philip Arnoult remarked that the American avant garde of the ’60s was greatly influenced by Europeans such as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Eugenio Barba.  American groups in the ’70s synthesized the European influences into an indigenous form, and returned the impulse to Europe, where it was picked up by new experimental troupes.  Now, in the ’80s, the work of American experimenters is better known in Europe than it is in America, and both Arnoult and Wojewodski are endeavoring to “complete the circle” by reintroducing new European work to American artists.  They saw the Theatre of Nations as a way of bringing receptive artists together in a big way.

 

Theories and intellectual projections aside, the Theatre of Nations festival was a success from the point of view of audiences who saw and enjoyed a great selection of theater.  As Martha Coigney said of the reactions she had overheard, “This is what it should be about—people just saying, ‘My kid saw that and loved it’; ‘My wife thought it was fun.’”  No criticism, no analysis—just enjoyment.  There was certainly something for everyone to enjoy.  A sampling: 

 

To begin with there was Animal Farm, controversy aside.  Peter Hall’s production is a straightforward rendering of Orwell’s fable with lyrics by Adrian Mitchell and music by Richard Peaslee, who also did the music for Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights.  This pair also composed the music for the Royal Shakespeare’s Marat/Sade and US.

 

As a small child sits at the down-right corner of the forestage, reading the novella with his back to the audience, the anthropomorphic beasts of Manor Farm create and then subvert an animal workers’ paradise.  With costumes and masks ranging from full-heads for the horses, cows, and donkeys to snouts for the pigs, and stilts of varying heights for the animals’ forelegs, the production style is as simple as a child’s pop-up book, and the theme as subtle as a sledgehammer.  Orwell’s blunt anti-totalitarian, specifically anti-Stalinistic, moral was neither diluted nor enhanced by the National Theatre’s interpretation.  No wonder the Soviets objected.

 

Jordcirkus, a ten-year-old communal theater group, brought four pieces to Baltimore.  They performed one of their street pieces, As the Bird Flies (Fagelvag) at the opening ceremonies, presented one matinee performance of a children’s play, A Little Princess (Draken), and several performances each of Blood and Champagne (Blodsband) and The Duel (Duellen). 

 

Blood and Champagne, inspired by Latin American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, recounts the four-generational history of the Montoya family as a young man learns it from the ghosts of his ancestors.  Anselmo has been locked in a room since childhood to hide his family’s shame at his illegitimate birth.  When he emerges from his prison, there is no one left in the house—except voices from the past. 

 

In a fast-paced and physical presentation, Jordcirkus actors double and triple as many characters, some real, some long dead, some purely imaginary.  The company, adept at mime and circus arts as well as conventional acting, has combined many styles and techniques, using bits of costume and a jumble of a set made of corrugated metal and wooden slats, into a performance that alternately draws the audience in and assaults its senses.  Often hard to follow intellectually, the story unfolds in fits and starts, confusing reality with fantasy and past with present.  Though each actor often seems to be in his or her own production, the energy never flags.

 

In a more conventional vein, the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Bulgaria presented Retro, a straight comedy by Russian playwright Alexander Galin.  In subtle but conventional Stanislavskian realism, the six actors are able to communicate, with the aid of an English synopsis, the tenderness and most of the humor of the situation.  The story is of a young couple, frustrated by an elderly, widowed father who never leaves the house.  They invite three lonely women over for a visit in the hopes he will marry one of them.  Though the visitors are supposed to come at different times, they all show up at once—and the old man refuses to cooperate.

 

The incongruity of a Russian play performed in Bulgarian before an American audience is momentarily disconcerting, but the truthfulness of the performances and the consistency of the characterizations manages to come through.  Of all the Theatre of Nations presentations, Retro was the most dependent on language and, though a simultaneous translation was proposed, it was rejected by festival producers as too complex and expensive. 

 

Not depending so much on language, but on traditional Asian storytelling techniques of music, mime, and dance, the Theatre Academy of Pune presented Ghashiram Kotwal.  Written for the company by Vijay Tendulkar, the two-act play is the story of a corrupt nineteenth-century mayor of Pune who appoints an even more corrupt police chief who becomes a vicious tyrant.  Combining techniques of Western theater with those of traditional Indian performances, especially the moving human wall, borrowed from the khele, a kind of performance game or play-acting the young servants in Bombay engage in during their time off,  the Academy actors sometimes portray characters and sometimes present themselves as performers as they unfold a political satire appropriate to today’s India.  Stepping in and out of the wall, which itself may serve as scenery, chorus members play many roles.  The Sutradhar, or Narrator, drawn from ancient Sanskrit theater, also alternates between standing outside the action and entering into it.  The Marathi-speaking company, drawn from fields as diverse as medicine, engineering, and business, conducts seminars and workshops, promoting experimental theater using Indian and Western forms. 

 

(The appropriateness of Ghashiram Kotwal to other societies as well as contemporary India was demonstrated by an anecdote Mohan Agashe told me.  When the Academy performed the play in one city in Europe, they were required to preface the production with a disclaimer that the characters were fictional.  Instantly, the audience assumed that the play related to local current events and began searching for the keys to the “true” identities of the Indian characters.)

 

Language provided no barrier at all for the Grupo Contadores de Estorias of Brazil.  Puppeteers Rachel and Marcos Gaetano Ribas presented two wordless pieces drawn from Brazilian folk life, Indian lore, and contemporary life using foot-high, doll-like puppets manipulated directly without strings or rods.  Pas de Deux is a play of urban life, and Mansamente (“softly,” “smoothly,” or “gently”) tells three stories about Brazilian Indians and peasants.

 

Set to Brazilian flute music, Mansamente first depicts the solitary life and death of a peasant couple as they farm their small piece of land.  The second story is the adventures of an Indian boy who changes places with a squirrel he chases up a tree.  In the third tale, a young Indian couple from a tribe made extinct by syphilis caught from Europeans enjoy life and then make love in consonance with nature.  The Ribases, dressed in black from head to toe, gently and gracefully manipulate the puppets.  In the meticulously set scene, lit from floor level as the puppeteers loom in the shadows, the puppet characters go about their various activities—tilling the soil, climbing a tree, flying, making love—as if they were in a dream.  No word is spoken—the only sounds are the haunting music and the occasional squawk of a bird—heightening the dreamlike quality of the performances.  Even the Ribases seem to sense this: at the end they quietly leave the Amazonian lovers so as not to disturb them. 

 

Pantomimist Bolek Polivka’s The Jester and the Queen is a different kind of dream world.  Combining the sensibilities of Stanislavsky, Brecht, Marceau, Bill Irwin, and Doug Henning with a slightly bleak outlook and large measures of humor and personal charm, Polivka depicts the life of a clown in service to a queen who requires him to make her laugh whenever she commands.  In this exploration of the relation of art and power, Polivka, who can perform in English as well as a number of other languages with equal ease, makes points about theater, directors, Brecht—and life.  He shows us how his magic works, particularly a wonderful flying bit done with a mirror, and explains why he does certain things before he does them.  These revelations do not diminish the way his material delights and even stuns the audience. 

 

In another example of virtuoso solo work, San Franciscan Fred Curchack premiered his Inquest for Freddy Chickan at Theatre of Nations.  In what he bills “A Sci-Fi, Horror, Romance, Mystery, Musical, Comedy, Improv . . . ,” Curchack played all the characters in a search for popular TV comedian, Freddy Chickan, who had mysteriously disappeared.  The performance actually begins in the lobby as Curchack, in the guise of a hard-bitten New York detective, baits and rails at the audience.  He frequently returns to the audience for his comedy, which often fell flat at the opening performance, and even directly confronted the camera team from Maryland Public Broadcasting covering the performance.  Using masks, wigs, recorded and electronically enhanced voices (his own), and some unusual lighting and shadow effects, Curchack becomes, among others, the detective, Freddy’s lover, his agent, a space visitor and, of course, Freddy Chickan himself. 

 

Most striking in the 90-minute performance, however, is Curchack’s use of light and shadow.  When he retreats behind a white curtain to transform into one of the characters, he has an uncanny way of manipulating the shadow of himself changing costume that gives it a life independent of the artist.  He uses floor-level electric lights, candles and even a flashlight to create some bizarre shadow-and-light effects that include flashes, flares, floating bodies, and others that defy description. 

 

We in America need to sponsor more international festivals like the Theatre of Nations.  It’s an education none of us should deny ourselves —or our fellow artists.  As Philip Arnoult sees it, as reported in the Baltimore Sun, “This gathering . . . will change the face of world theater.”  In an article in the Baltimore City Paper, David Bergman sums up the event by quoting Percy Shelley: “‘Poets,’ by which he meant all artists, ‘are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’  For two weeks in June they were making new laws in Baltimore.”

 

[The first Theatre of Nations (Théâtres des Nations) festival was in 1956 in Paris, the headquarters of UNESCO, the parent agency, where it remained based until 1975.  These early biennial Paris festivals, where dozens of international theater companies perform in their native languages, hosted the introductions of Beiing Opera, the Berliner Ensemble, Kabuki, and the Moscow Art Theater to Western audiences.  

[In 1975 the International Theatre Institute, the UNESCO organization, founded in Prague in 1948, that runs the festival, decided to site each TON in an applicant city at 2-year intervals.  Held first in Warsaw in 1975 and then in a series of other cities, the Theatre of Nations has moved around the world to nearly every continent (though the 1986 Baltimore festival remains TON’s only North American appearance).  

[In 1998, the ITI established the Academy of the Theatre of Nations, which offers workshops for young performing artists.  Currently, a TON designation is awarded by ITI when an approved application is made to the institute.]