World Theatre Day 2026

Friday, 27 March 

[World Theatre Day was created in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), and is celebrated annually on March 27 by global ITI centers and the international theatre community. Various national and international theatre events are organized to celebrate an international message and remarks from national cultural leaders. The Global Theater Initiative (GTI), a partnership between Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics (the Lab), encourages U.S. theatres, individual artists, institutions and audiences to celebrate the occasion annually on the 27th of March. 

[Since 1962, World Theatre Day has been celebrated by the circulation of the World Theatre Day Message through which, at the invitation of ITI, a figure of world stature shares their reflections on the theme of Theatre and a Culture of Peace. The first World Theatre Day international message was written by Jean Cocteau in 1962. Succeeding honorees have included Arthur Miller (1963), Ellen Stewart (1975), Vaclav Havel (1994), Ariane Mnouchkine (2005), Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi (2007), Augusto Boal (2009), Dame Judi Dench (2010), Jessica A. Kaahwa (2011).

[In GTI's role as the U.S. center of ITI, a U.S.-based author is chosen to circulate a national message for World Theatre Day in addition to the international message. Past U.S. honorees have included Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp (2021), Indigenous Direction (2019), Heather Raffo (2018), Kwame Kwei-Armah (2017), Ping Chong (2016), Diane Rodriguez (2014), Jeffrey Wright (2011) and Lynn Nottage (2010). 

[In 2022, for the first time, GTI invited a U.S.-based Emergent Artist to pen a message and that author was storyteller/activist Jasmin Cardenas. This is now a continuing feature of the U.S. celebration of World Theatre Day.

[To learn more about World Theatre Day, visit the official website at www.world-theatre-day.org.  —"About World Theatre Day,” Theatre Communications Group website.]

INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE
by Willem Dafoe

[Willem Dafoe (actor, theater maker; b. 1955), Artistic Director of the Theatre Department at La Biennale di Venezia, was among the founding members of The Wooster Group.  Based at The Performing Garage in New York (1977-2004), they developed a distinctive approach to avant-garde theater.  

[He then went on to collaborate with Robert Wilson (1941-2025; director and playwright of experimental theater), Marina Abramovic (b. 1946; Serbian-born conceptual and performance artist), Richard Foreman (1937-2025; avant-garde experimental playwright and director; founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater), and Romeo Castellucci (b. 1960; Italian theater director, playwright, artist, and designer).  

[In the early 1980s, he also began working in cinema and since earned international acclaim for his versatility across both independent and mainstream films.  He has received four Academy Award nominations and was awarded the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 2018.  

[As an actor, he’s received numerous accolades including nominations for four Academy Awards (1987 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Platoon [1986]; 2001 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Shadow of the Vampire [2000]; 2018 Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Florida Project [2017]; 2019 Best Actor nomination for At Eternity’s Gate [2018]), a BAFTA Award, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards.  

[He received four Independent Spirit Award nominations winning twice for Best Supporting Male for his roles in Shadow of the Vampire and The Lighthouse (2019).  On 8 January 2024, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[Dafoe’s commitment to theater continues to shape his artistic vision and performance practice.]

I am an actor principally know as a film actor. But my roots are deeply in the theatre. I was a member of the Wooster Group from 1977-2003 creating and performing original pieces at The Performing Garage in NYC and touring throughout the world. I have also worked with Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci. Now, I am the Artistic Director of The Venice Theatre Biennale. This appointment, the events in the world, and my desire to return to theatre work has strongly formed my belief in the unique positive power and importance of the theatre.

At the humble beginning of my time in The Wooster Group, the NY based theatre company, we would often get very little public at some of the performances at our theatre. Often the rule was if there were more performers than public we could choose to cancel. But we never did. Many of the company were not trained in the theatre but were people of different disciplines that came together to make theatre—so “the show must go on” was not really our mantra, however we felt an obligation to keep our meeting with the public.

We would also often rehearse during the day and in the evening show the material as a work in progress. We would sometimes spend years on a show while sustaining ourselves with touring of older performances. Working years on a piece would often become tedious for me and I found rehearsals somewhat trying but these works in progress showings were always exciting—even if the tiny public was a damning judgment of the level of interest in what we were doing. It just made me realize how no matter how few people, the audience as witness gave the theatre its meaning and life.

Like the sign in the gambling hall says “YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN.” Shared experience in real time of an act of creation, that may be scored and designed but is always different, is certainly the obvious strength of the theatre. Socially, politically, theatre has never been so important and vital to our understanding of ourselves and the world.

The “elephant in the room” is new technologies and social networking, which promises connection but seemingly has fragmented and isolated people from each other. I use my computer daily even if I have no social media, I have even googled myself as an actor, and have also consulted AI for information. But you have to be blind not to recognize that human contact risks being replaced by relationships with devices. While some technology can serve us well the problem of not knowing who’s on the other end of the circle of communication runs deep and contributes to a crisis of truth and reality. While the internet can raise questions, it very seldom captures a sense of wonder that theatre creates. A wonder based in attention, engagement and a spontaneous community of those present in a circle of action and response.

As an actor and theatre maker I remain a believer in the power of theatre. In a world that seems to get more divisive, controlling and violent, our challenge as theatre makers is to avoid the corruption of theatre solely as a commercial enterprise dedicated to the entertainment by distraction or as the dry institutional preserver of traditions, but rather to foster its strength to connect peoples, communities, cultures and above all to question where we are going. . . . . .

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to imagine what we aspire to.

We are social animals and designed biologically for engagement with the world. Every sense organ is a gateway for encounter and through this meeting we achieve greater definition of who we are. Through storytelling, aesthetics, language, movement, scenography— theatre as a total art form can make us see what was, what is and what our world could be.

*  *  *  *
U.S. MESSAGE
by Moisés Kaufman 

[Moisés Kaufman (Venezuelan-American theater director, filmmaker, and playwright; founder of Tectonic Theater Project based in New York City, and co-founder of Miami New Drama in Florida; b. 1963) received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama (b. 1961; 44th President of the United States: 2009-17) in 2016.  

[Kaufman’s a Tony and Emmy-nominated director and playwright whose Broadway credits include Paradise Square (2022; 10 Tony Award nominations), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song (2018), Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams (2011; Pulitzer Prize Finalist), The Heiress with Jessica Chastain (2012), 33 Variations with Jane Fonda (2009; wrote and directed, Tony nomination Best Play), and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2003; Tony Award, Pulitzer Prize).

[Other productions include: Pulitzer Prize finalist Here There Are Blueberries (2018), Velour: A Drag Spectacular (2024), Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard (2023), Seven Deadly Sins (2021; Drama Desk Award).  He is the co-writer of The Laramie Project (2000) and the writer of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997).  He’s an Obie and Drama Desk award winner and a Guggenheim fellow.]

Hello everyone, I’m Moisés Kaufman, I am a playwright, director and Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project and I am honored to have been asked to address you on World Theater Day 2026. 

Hola, soy Moisés Kaufman, soy escritor, director y director artístico de Tectonic Theater Project. Y me siento honrado de haber sido elegido para dirigirme a ustedes en este Día Mundial del Teatro 2026.

There are moments in history when the world feels as though it is breaking apart — when language itself becomes unstable, when facts are contested, when communities fracture along lines of fear and suspicion. In such moments, we may ask ourselves: What is the role of theatre?

I was born in Venezuela and came to the United States as an immigrant. To leave one’s country is to experience rupture — of language, of belonging, of certainty.

It was through this experience of displacement that I began to understand theatre not simply as performance, but as a space of encounter. A place where identities can be examined rather than assumed. A place where complexity is not feared, but honored. My life between cultures taught me that the act of listening across difference is both fragile and transformative.

When we founded Tectonic Theater Project, we were driven by a simple curiosity: How do we understand the world through the stories of others? How do we gather narratives from the real world, fragments of memory, contradiction, silence — and shape them into something that allows us to see more clearly?

So we asked how a group of artists might come together not merely to interpret a story, but to examine the forces beneath it, to gather voices, to sit with contradiction.

This process has taught me something essential: theatre is not the art of certainty. It is the art of inquiry.

Theatre, at its most urgent, is an act of investigation.

When we created The Laramie Project from the voices of a small American town grappling with an act of violence, we discovered that the stage could become a civic space. Audiences did not come simply to watch; they came to witness. They came to confront grief, anger, confusion, compassion — sometimes all at once. The theatre became not a courtroom and not a pulpit, but a gathering place.

That experience changed me. It revealed that theatre can hold complexity without sacrificing community.

In our time, public discourse often demands that we choose sides quickly. It rewards outrage and punishes nuance. Yet theatre insists on something different. It asks us to dwell in ambiguity. It reminds us that a single story rarely contains the whole truth. It invites us to encounter the humanity of those we might otherwise reduce to categories.

This is not a passive act. It is a courageous one.

To sit in the dark beside strangers and listen deeply is a form of resistance. It resists isolation. It resists dehumanization. It resists the temptation to turn away.

In a world mediated by screens and algorithms, this shared tribal experience is radical. It cannot be paused, scrolled, or muted. It unfolds in real time, and we are accountable to one another within it.

I have often reflected on the word “tectonic.” It refers to the forces beneath the earth’s surface — slow, invisible pressures that eventually reshape landscapes. Theatre works in a similar way. It may not create immediate transformation, but it exerts pressure. It shifts perception. It unsettles assumptions. It opens cracks through which empathy can enter.

And empathy is not a sentimental concept. It is an ethical practice.

When actors embody other people — when they carry their words, their cadences, their hesitations — they ask us to imagine what it feels like to inhabit another life. That imaginative act is foundational to democracy. A democratic society depends upon our capacity to see beyond ourselves.

Peace, too, depends on that capacity.

Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is the presence of understanding. It is the willingness to engage difference without erasure. It is the courage to hear a story that challenges our own.

Theatre does not provide solutions to global crises. It does something both more modest and more profound: it creates the conditions for intimate encounters.

Within the space of a stage, we practice holding multiple truths. And we train in empathy. 

These practices are not separate from civic life; they are essential to it.

On this World Theatre Day, I think of theatre-makers across the globe — in grand institutions and in makeshift spaces, in cities and in villages, in times of stability and in times of conflict. I think of artists who rehearse under threat, who speak when silence would be safer, who gather communities even when resources are scarce. Their work affirms something fundamental: the human need to tell stories and to hear them is irrepressible.

Today, let us honor the rehearsal rooms where questions are asked with rigor and humility. Let us honor the actors who risk vulnerability. Let us honor the designers who shape worlds from light and shadow. Let us honor the crews and theater staffs that make the work possible.

And let us recommit ourselves to the slow, tectonic work of listening.

If the forces beneath the surface are powerful enough, landscapes shift.

May our stages continue to shift the landscape of the human heart.

Let us keep asking questions.
Let us keep listening.
Let us keep gathering in the dark — believing that when the lights rise, we may see one another more clearly.
Thank you.

*  *  *  *
U.S. EMERGENT ARTIST MESSAGE
by Banna Desta

[Banna Desta (she/they; late 20’s-early 30’s) is an Eritrean- and Ethiopian-American writer for the screen and stage who crafts stories about and for the African diaspora.  She is the author of The Abyssinians (Audible, 2024); Midnight in Abyssinia (La MaMa’s CultureHub, 2024); Red Taxi (2025); Bygone Fruit which premiered at the 2024 Women in Theater Festival (6-24 June 2024 in Greenwich Village, New York City) and Pining which premiered at Rattlestick Theater (New York City) and was published by Samuel French in 2019.  

[Desta’s work for the stage has been supported and workshopped by Atlantic Theater Company, The Apollo Theater, National Black Theatre, The New Group, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation.  She has held residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Art Omi, Marble House Project, and Tofte Lake Center.  She was a staff writer for the BET+ series First Wives Club (Netflix Top Ten, 2019-22).  

[Desta has assisted multiple television series in both the writers’ room and on set, including FOX/NBC’s This Is Us (2016-22), and Amazon Prime’s Harlem (2021-25).  She’s held fellowships with Sun Valley Writers Conference, Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film, and The Gotham Film and Media Institute.  She is a writing professor and arts educator at New York University, Rehabilitation through the Arts and Harlem Children's Zone.]

My name is Banna, and I am the emergent author for the International Theater Institute in the United States. Happy World Theater Day to theater makers across the country and around the world. It is my belief that storytelling is the bloodline of humanity, pumping empathy and understanding, reinforcing purpose and preserving culture and legacy in our hearts. Many of us have been shaped and inspired by the stories we’ve heard, whether they’re passed down from previous generations or absorbed through other mediums. Most forms of storytelling share theater’s DNA. They’re fleshed out through performance with tones of drama, comedy or both.

Coming from an Eritrean and Ethiopian household, storytelling was one of the ways I was able to hold on to my ancestral lineage being born and raised in the United States. Whether they were stories that illustrated the natural beauty and simplicity of African life or the tragedies of the civil war that delivered my parents to the U.S.[1974-91] , tales of the past were embedded in me and undoubtedly inspired me to indulge my own imagination and nurture my own creative inventions. They inspired me to explore my own history, sourcing facts to support the fiction in my plays The Abyssinians and Red Taxi, and influencing my love of realist fiction to write contemporary Black narratives in my new play, Nightlife. Like so many people in America, my life has been global and so, my stories reflect that.

Becoming a theatermaker wasn’t a straightforward journey, as the conventions of modern life felt like they required a more traditional vocation. I ignored the call to be an artist. However, in college, theater was my very first class, Monday mornings at 9am, my freshman year. It was there that I discovered Paula Vogel [b. 1951], re-explored Shakespeare, Moisés Kaufman and a number of other classic and contemporary artists and their work. No matter when their plays were published and how many years had passed since, their work felt urgent, and as a result so did my need to tell stories. I could no longer ignore the call. I took my writing more seriously, using it as a means of connecting with myself and sharing my work in the hopes of connecting with others.

Discovering theater was where my life felt most romantic, where I felt most comfortable to wrestle with the world’s competing contradictions. When I moved to New York to pursue storytelling more seriously, I was astonished by the depth of artistry, the grit and grace of theater’s artisans and the immense compassion theater inspired in me. I sat in the audience of plays like Is God Is at Soho Rep [by Aleshea Harris, 2018], In the Blood at Signature Theater [2017] and Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse [2020], awestruck at the blend of rigor, chemistry and collaboration that made these experiences possible. I felt eager to create, to experiment, to court risk.

Most important of all, theater taught me that we must lean on each other. The life of theatermakers, theaters and their audiences depends on us working collaboratively towards our united future. We must protect each other’s dignity. One does not have to look too far to witness the theatrics of daily life, whether that be in our politics, our communities or even on our phones. Today, as I address you in 2026, the dominant narrative from the highest seat in office, as well as our national leaders, is encouraging us to be cruel to each other. Their intent to erase history, misinform us and keep us at odds with one another is more clear than ever before. Their messaging is sinister, divisive and harmful. It is an assault on our collective dignity.

Despite the fearmongering, despite their deepest wish to separate ourselves from each other, it is our responsibility as theatermakers to have the courage to rewrite this narrative. In order to reclaim the narrative, we must turn to our foundation. Theater is foundational to many, if not all, of the ways we exchange stories in the world today. It is where we can seek more thoughtful provocations about our times, it is where our heartbeats synchronize, it is where we enter the dark to feel the light. We must be fearless and relentless in protecting this sacred space and to attempt at making the connection.

On this World Theater Day, may we recommit to the truth, may we guard our foundation, and may we keep humanity's bloodline alive, in and outside the theater.

[I don’t repost the World Theatre Day messages each year, but I have done so for several of the recent ones.  You can check back on these sets of messages: “World Theatre Day 2012” (24 April 2012), “World Theatre Day: 27 March 2022” (4 April 2022), “World Theatre Day 2023” (27 March 2023), and “World Theatre Day 2024” (28 March 2024).

[In addition, I’ve posted a version of a report on another ITI event, the 1986 Theatre of Nations festival in Baltimore, Maryland, the first and so far only appearance of TON in North America.  “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” which was originally written for The Drama Review in 1987, was republished on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014.

[ITI, the International Theatre Institute, is an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).]

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

*  *  *  *
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 

*  *  *  *
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.]

World Theatre Day: 27 March 2022

 

[From the World Theatre Day website: “Since 1962 World Theatre Day has been celebrated by ITI Centres, ITI Cooperating Members, theatre professionals, theatre organizations, theatre universities and theatre lovers all over the world on the 27th of March.  This day is a celebration for those who can see the value and importance of the art form “theatre”, and acts as a wake-up-call for governments, politicians and institutions which have not yet recognised its value to the people and to the individual and have not yet realised its potential for economic growth.” 

[Below are a collection of statements about World Theatre Day, which is observed annually, downloaded from American Theatre, the monthly magazine published by the Theatre Communications Group.  (I previously blogged on World Theatre Day on 24 April 2012.)]

“We gather to weep and to remember; to laugh and to contemplate; to learn and to affirm and to imagine”

—Brett Bailey, Stage Director from South Africa, World Theatre Day Message Author 2014

CELEBRATE WORLD THEATRE DAY 2022
by Teresa Eyring
Executive Director/CEO, Theatre Communications Group

“The theater of epic vision, purpose, recovery, repair, and care needs new rituals. We don’t need to be entertained. We need to gather. We need to share space, and we need to cultivate shared space. We need protected spaces of deep listening and equality.”
—Peter Sellars, International Message Author

“There is a beauty about us . . . those of us who have committed ourselves to this… this global family who uses theatre to unearth the best and worst of ourselves; the tragedy of our deepest fears and the comedy of our truest joy. “
—Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp, U.S. Message Co-Authors

“Theater allows us to see each other, to hear each other….and by listening and witnessing each other, we can finally see ourselves.”
—Jasmin Cardenas, U.S. Emergent Artist Author

New York, NY – The Global Theater Initiative (GTI), a partnership between Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics (The Lab) at Georgetown University, invites all theatres, individual artists, institutions, and audiences to celebrate the 61st annual World Theatre Day on March 27, 2022. Each year, a renowned theatre artist of world stature is invited by the International Theatre Institute (ITI) Worldwide to craft an international message to mark the global occasion. This year the International message has been written by U.S. director Peter Sellars. The U.S. World Theatre Day message has been given by Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp, co-founders and core members of UNIVERSES, and a video of their address can be found here. The messages have been translated into multiple languages, and all of the messages can be found here.

For the first time ever, World Theatre Day will also feature more than 40 short videos of early-career artists from 30 countries, including the U.S. Emergent Artist message, which will be given by actress and activist Jasmin Cardenas. The videos will play through the day, beginning at 9:00am ET/14:00 Paris, and Cardenas’s video will be available here. Learn more about the Emergent Artists here. 

“Amid the horrors of war, the role of artists in peace-building and cultural exchange has become even more urgent,” said Teresa Eyring, executive director of TCG. “As we take inspiration from the messages of Peter Sellars and Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp, we must also pay special attention to the voices of artists in their early career. I encourage all theatre people to witness the visions of Jasmin Cardenas and more than 40 of her emergent artist peers from across the world.”

Since 1962, World Theatre Day has been celebrated by the circulation of the World Theatre Day Message. The first World Theatre Day international message was written by Jean Cocteau [(1889 1963), French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist, and critic]. Succeeding honorees have included Arthur Miller (1963), Ellen Stewart (1975), Vaclav Havel (1994), Ariane Mnouchkine (2005), Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi (2007), Augusto Boal (2009), Dame Judi Dench (2010), Jessica A. Kaahwa (2011), and Anatoli Vassiliev (2016). In 2021, the International World Theatre Message was given by Helen Mirren, and the U.S. World Theatre Message by Olga Garay-English.

To celebrate World Theatre Day 2022, GTI recommends sharing the international and U.S. messages on or around March 27 through online media; tweet about World Theatre Day using the hashtag #WorldTheatreDay; following TCG, The Lab, The Global Theatre Initiative, and ITI on social media platforms for updates and sharing World Theatre Day-related posts; and posting your own message to your network about World Theatre Day, championing the power of theatre to strengthen cultural exchange and mutual understanding across borders. Social handles for GTI: Facebook; for TCG: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn; for The  Lab: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

*  *  *  *
ABOUT WORLD THEATRE DAY

World Theatre Day was created in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), and is celebrated annually on March 27 by global ITI centers and the international theatre community. Various national and international theatre events are organized to celebrate an international message and remarks from national cultural leaders. The Global Theater Initiative (GTI), a partnership between Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics (the Lab), encourages U.S. theatres, individual artists, institutions and audiences to celebrate the occasion annually on the 27th of March.

Since 1962, World Theatre Day has been celebrated by the circulation of the World Theatre Day Message through which, at the invitation of ITI, a figure of world stature shares their reflections on the theme of Theatre and a Culture of Peace. The first World Theatre Day international message was written by Jean Cocteau in 1962. Succeeding honorees have included Arthur Miller (1963), Ellen Stewart (1975), Vaclav Havel (1994), Ariane Mnouchkine (2005), Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi (2007), Augusto Boal (2009), Dame Judi Dench (2010), Jessica A. Kaahwa (2011) and Heather Raffo (2018).

In GTI’s role as the U.S. center of ITI, a U.S.-based author is chosen to circulate a national message for World Theatre Day in addition to the international message. Past U.S. honorees have included Indigenous Direction (2019), Kwame Kwei-Armah (2017), Ping Chong (2016), Diane Rodriguez (2014), Jeffrey Wright (2011) and Lynn Nottage (2010). 

To learn more about World Theatre Day, visit the official website at www.world-theatre-day.org.

*  *  *  *
INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE 2022: PETER SELLARS

Dear Friends,

As the world hangs by the hour and by the minute on a daily drip feed of news reportage, may I invite all of us, as creators, to enter our proper scope and sphere and perspective of epic time, epic change, epic awareness, epic reflection, and epic vision? We are living in an epic period in human history and the deep and consequential changes we are experiencing in human beings’ relations to themselves, to each other, and to nonhuman worlds are nearly beyond our abilities to grasp, to articulate, to speak of, and to express.

We are not living in the 24-hour news cycle, we are living at the edge of time. Newspapers and media are completely unequipped and unable to deal with what we are experiencing.

Where is the language, what are the moves, and what are the images that might allow us to comprehend the deep shifts and ruptures that we are experiencing? And how can we convey the content of our lives right now not as reportage but experience?

Theater is the artform of experience.

In a world overwhelmed by vast press campaigns, simulated experiences, ghastly prognostications, how can we reach beyond the endless repeating of numbers to experience the sanctity and infinity of a single life, a single ecosystem, a friendship, or the quality of light in a strange sky? Two years of COVID-19 have dimmed people’s senses, narrowed people’s lives, broken connections, and put us at a strange ground zero of human habitation.

What seeds need to be planted and replanted in these years, and what are the overgrown, invasive species that need to be fully and finally removed? So many people are on edge. So much violence is flaring, irrationally or unexpectedly. So many established systems have been revealed as structures of ongoing cruelty.

Where are our ceremonies of remembrance? What do we need to remember? What are the rituals that allow us at last to reimagine and begin to rehearse steps that we have never taken before?

The theater of epic vision, purpose, recovery, repair, and care needs new rituals. We don’t need to be entertained. We need to gather. We need to share space, and we need to cultivate shared space. We need protected spaces of deep listening and equality.

Theater is the creation on earth of the space of equality between humans, gods, plants, animals, raindrops, tears, and regeneration. The space of equality and deep listening is illuminated by hidden beauty, kept alive in a deep interaction of danger, equanimity, wisdom, action, and patience.

In The Flower Ornament Sutra [a text designed to inspire luminous visions and exalted experiences of mind and reality through its use of lush, psychedelic, evocative imagery], Buddha lists ten kinds of great patience in human life. One of the most powerful is called Patience in Perceiving All as Mirages. Theater has always presented the life of this world as resembling a mirage, enabling us to see through human illusion, delusion, blindness, and denial with liberating clarity and force.

We are so certain of what we are looking at and the way we are looking at it that we are unable to see and feel alternative realities, new possibilities, different approaches, invisible relationships, and timeless connections.

This is a time for deep refreshment of our minds, of our senses, of our imaginations, of our histories, and of our futures. This work cannot be done by isolated people working alone. This is work that we need to do together. Theater is the invitation to do this work together.

Thank you deeply for your work.
Peter Sellars

[Peter Sellars, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) is an opera, theater and festival director who has gained international renown for his ground-breaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative and performing artists.  His work illuminates the power of art as a means of moral expression and social action.  

[Sellars has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, English National Opera, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opéra National de Paris and the Salzburg Festival, among others.  He’s collaborated on the creation of many works with composer John Adams, including Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and The Girls of the Golden West.  Inspired by the compositions of Kaija Saariaho, he has guided the creation of productions of her work (L’Amour de loin, Adriana Mater, Only the Sound Remains) that have expanded the repertoire of modern opera.  

[Recent (pre-pandemic) projects include a new production of Doctor Atomic at the Santa Fe Opera, a staging of Claude Vivier’s Kopernikus for Festival D’Automne (Paris), and a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo for the Salzburg Festival.  Late in 2020 he conceived and directed “this body is so impermanent . . .” a film created in response to the global pandemic inspired by text from the Vimalakirti Sutra.  Upcoming projects include a staging of the 14th-century Roman du Fauvel in collaboration with musicologist and founder of the Sequentia Ensemble, Benjamin Bagby; a revival of Sellars’ acclaimed production of Tristan und Isolde, its story illuminated and deepened by the transcendent videography created by artist Bill Viola; and Perle Noire, meditations for Josephine, with music by composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey performed by the incomparable vocalist Julia Bullock.  

[Sellars has led several major arts festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals and the 2002 Adelaide Arts Festival.  In 2006 he was Artistic Director of New Crowned Hope, a festival in Vienna for which he invited emerging and established artists from diverse cultural backgrounds to create new work in the fields of music, theater, dance, film, the visual arts and architecture for the celebration of Mozart’s 250th birth anniversary.  He served as the Music Director of the 2016 Ojai Music Festival.  

[Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, the founding director of the Boethius Institute at UCLA, a resident curator of the Telluride Film Festival, and was a Mentor for the Rolex Arts Initiative.  He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize for contributions to European culture, the Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He has been awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize and been named Artist of the Year by Musical America.]

*  *  *  *
U.S. WORLD THEATRE DAY MESSAGE 2022:
MILDRED RUIZ-SAPP AND STEVEN SAPP

Steven:  There is a beauty about us . . . those of us who have committed ourselves to this . . . this global family who uses theatre to unearth the best and worst of ourselves; the tragedy of our deepest fears and the comedy of our truest joy. 

Mildred:  Here, is where it happens, should happen; with folks that look like us, who don’t look like us, who believe what we believe, who oppose what we stand for; where we share the experience and the responsibility. We all have our own individual point of entry, we all accepted the call. 

Steven:  Point of entry: I was born of the Hip Hop Generation. A young street dancer, lit by the glowing lights of 42nd Street; and I wanted the world to see where I came from, witness the skills we had homegrown, challenge everyone to stop and witness us. An Usher, a black man, came out of the big Broadway theatre behind us one day and said, “yall wanna come in and see the show?” . . . He snuck us into the back row and told us to be quiet, and we were, because what do you do at that point of entry? I was a boy witnessing the beauty and power of my people on the grand stage. That black man whose name I’ll never know gave me the musical “Dreamgirls”. . . and I accepted the call.

Mildred:  Point of entry: Spanish Boleros and church choir were all I knew I loved. They said that my voice “tenía un gemir”, a sorrow about it, something guttural, tender and at the same time furious. But what to do with that? I was a girl from the project of New York City, possibilities were limited but every now and then, you get a teacher who braves her students on a school trip to a place unknown to them . . . a theatre. We didn’t know what would happen or if we even wanted to be there, but when the lights went out, we paused. The lights come up and we were no longer us, we were no longer together, yet we were. The musical was called “Mama I wanna Sing”. [Mama, I Want to Sing with music by Wesley Naylor, book and lyrics by Vy Higginsen and Ken Wydro; based on the life story of R&B singer-songwriter Doris Troy (1937-2004); premièred in 1983 in Harlem with many revivals nationwide.] And as the girl on stage sang, her voice cried and said everything I wanted to say. And it was guttural and tender and furious, there was deep sorrow, but there was joy in it all. I heard a call, and I accepted. 

Steven:  When we see ourselves, our communities on stage, we are unstoppable, the possibilities endless, there are no borders, ponds or boundaries we dare not cross. We come from The South Bronx and The Lower East Side’s Alphabet City, but theatre invited us to the World . . . and we accepted.

Mildred:  In Valparaiso, Chile . . . we performed in a recently closed prison that was being converted to a performance cultural space. The space still had sections that weren’t touched. Our guide in the facility was an ex-inmate who still slept in his old cell and in the evening had to maintain the site and be a tour guide there. 

Steven:  He took us to his cell to show us his view of the world. It was his safe space, the place he knew for most of his life. How he would look to the moon to quiet his spirit at night. How it kept him . . . human. And he wanted to share that with us. 

Mildred:  And how special and sacred the conversation felt. Later on that night, 10 minutes into our performance, the power went out in Valparaiso, as it often did in the projects of New York City, and we accepted the call to proceed in the dark. 

Steven:  And since we were unaware of the full extent of the blackout, we kept performing, until people began to bring candles to the front of the stage, a glow that helped enhance the mood, and we kept performing. And most of the audience, non-English speaking, took an artistic spiritual journey with us. We were all there alone and together . . .

Mildred:  having this moment that only the people in the room could explain. We were there, in a space that held pain and despair. In this makeshift theatre, we connected in our light, in that way that transcends, in the way that we as human beings, art practitioners look for. 

Steven:  We have had the privilege to teach and learn, give and receive from our theatre family across the world. And if and when we question the call, we look to those shared moments; from Poland to Chile, Colombia, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Romania, and the U.K., where we visited schools, where the eyes of the kids looked like eyes we have seen before.  

Mildred:  Where we sat with women and their children who hosted us in secret to share their writing, lest their husbands find them out.  Something as simple as sharing poetry and monologues and food and song, was dangerous but worth the risk. This is where theatre plays the part . . . it teaches us and continuously reminds us that we are as different as we are the same, and it’s as dangerous as it is simple. 

Steven:  In Khartoum, Sudan, during the Al-Bugga International Theatre Festival, after each performance, critics, artists, audience and community exit the theatre and enter a tent just outside the wall; where they come together to immediately discuss the work they just witnessed. An exciting exchange of ideas and investment to say the least. Imagine if after every American Theatre performance we all moved to the next room to discuss, debate, explain, challenge, provoke and uplift what we just saw, with the artist and the critic in the midst of it all. Wouldn’t that be something? There, in The Sudan, under a simple tent, it was. 

Mildred:  Our company, UNIVERSES, went there representing the United States, at the core . . . we went there representing the block. There, we dined with Egypt and Nigeria. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? But we were all from poor communities and moved in comfort. 

Steven:  We found a small quaint cafe by the side of The Nile River, and we sat and stumbled through words and laughed and danced and sang and shared stories the way people who feel comfortable with each other do; as if we’d know each other forever. We sat by the Nile River, simply counting to ten in native tongues from Nigeria, The Philippines, North Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.

Mildred:  And even the numbers sounded guttural and tender and furious, with moments of deep sorrow, but there was joy most of all. All of us theatre folks, and even the van drivers, brought together by theatre. And something so simple, so basic as counting from one to ten, this simple act, brought deep smiles and tears to folks who felt a kinship, an honor to share it with other like-minded folks. 

Steven:  We do this . . . because there is work to be done; because our worlds are threatened and in despair. 

Mildred:  Because time and time again, artists have stood and stand at the frontlines, fighting for truth and justice immovable by any threat of war.

Steven:  There are stories needing to be told, stories looking to be understood. They are as local as they are global . . .

Mildred:  as complicated and as simple as counting from one to ten in any language. 

Steven:  The revolution is Live and OnStage, 

Mildred:  and we answer the call.

[Mildred Ruiz-Sapp is a poet, playwright, actor, singer, songwriter, and co-founder/core member of UNIVERSES, a New York-based ensemble company of multi-disciplinary writers and performers who fuse poetry, theater, jazz, hip hop, politics, down home blues, and Spanish boleros.  Playwriting/Acting credits include: AmericUS (Directed/Developed by Joan Herrington); Unison (Directed/Developed by Robert O’Hara); Party People (Directed/Developed by Liesl Tommy); Ameriville (Directed/Developed by Chay Yew); The Denver Project (Director Dee Covington); One Shot in Lotus Position (Director Bonnie Metzger); Blue Suite (Directed/Developed by Chay Yew); Rhythmicity (Directed by Steven Sapp); Slanguage (Directed/Developed by Jo Bonney); The Ride (Directed by Steven Sapp).  

[Ruiz-Sapp‘s acting-only credits include: DJ Latinidad (Directed by Mark Valdez); The Comedy of Errors (Directed by Kent Gash); The Unfortunates (Directed by Shana Cooper); Alfred Jarry’s UBU: Enchained (Director Steven Sapp).  Awards/Affiliations: 2020 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program recipient; 2015 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award (Theatre); Oregon Shakespeare Festival Acting Company Member ( 2012-2017) and Ensemble in Residence; 2008 U.S. Cultural Ambassador w/ the U.S. State Dept./Jazz at Lincoln Center - Rhythm Road Tour; 2008 TCG Peter Zeisler Award; 2006 Career Advancement Fellowship from the Ford foundation through Pregones Theater; 2002-2004 and 1999-2001 TCG National Theater Artist Residency Program Award; BRIO Awards (Bronx Recognizes its own-Singing); Co-Founder of The Point CDC; Former Board Member (National Performance Network - NPN) and (Network of Ensemble Theaters-NET); New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect; BARD College, BA ‘92 (Literature/Language).  

[Publications: UNIVERSES’ The Revolution will be Live! (2021 release - TCG Books); SLANGUAGE in The Fire This Time (TCG Books); BLUE SUITE in The Goodman Theatre’s Festival Latino - Six Plays (Northwestern University Press); PARTY PEOPLE in The Manifesto Anthology (Rain City Projects - Fall 2014); Featured on the covers of American Theatre magazine 2004 and The Source magazine 2000.  Member: Actors Equity Association (AEA).

[Steven Sapp is a co-founder/core member of UNIVERSES.  Playwriting/Acting credits include: AmericUS (Directed/Developed by Joan Herrington); Unison (Directed/Developed by Robert O’Hara); Party People (Directed/Developed by Liesl Tommy); Ameriville (Directed/Developed by Chay Yew); The Denver Project (Director Dee Covington); One Shot in Lotus Position (Director Bonnie Metzger); Blue Suite (Directed/Developed by Chay Yew); Slanguage (Directed/Developed by Jo Bonney); Rhythmicity (Playwright/Actor/Director); The Ride (Playwright/Actor/Director).  

Sapp’s acting-only credits include: The Comedy of Errors (Directed by Kent Gash).  Directing only credits include: Passover by Antoinette Nwandu (Director); Swopera by Carpetbag Theatre (Director); Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman (Director); The Architecture of Loss (Assistant Director to Chay Yew); Will Powers’s The Seven (Director - The Univ. of Iowa); Alfred Jarry’s UBU: Enchained (Director - Teatre Polski, Poland).  

[Awards/Affiliations: 2020 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program recipient; 2015 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award (Theatre); Oregon Shakespeare Festival Acting Company Member (3 Seasons:’12-’14); 2008 U.S. Cultural Ambassador w/ the U.S. State Dept./Jazz at Lincoln Center - Rhythm Road Tour; 2008 TCG Peter Zeisler Award; 2002 TCG National Directors Award; 2002-2004 and 1999-2001 TCG National Theater Artist Residency Program Award; 1998 and 2002 BRIO Awards (Bronx Recognizes its own-Performance); Van Lier Fellowship with New Dramatists; Co-Founder of The Point CDC; New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect; BARD College, BA ‘89 - Theater.  

[Publications: UNIVERSES’ The Revolution will be Live! (2021 release - TCG Books); Slanguage in The Fire This Time (TCG Books); Blue Suite in The Goodman Theatre’s Festival Latino - Six Plays (Northwestern University Press); Party People in The Manifesto Anthology (Rain City Projects- Fall 2014); Featured on the covers of American Theater magazine 2004 and The Source magazine 2000.  Member: Actors Equity Association (AEA)]

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U.S. EMERGENT ARTIST MESSAGE 2022: JASMIN CARDENAS 

“Hola!” My name is Jasmin Cardenas, I’m a 1st generation North American and proud daughter of Colombian immigrants. I live and work as a theater deviser, director, storyteller and actor in Chicago, IL, in the United States of America.

Theater allows us to see each other, to hear each other . . . . and by listening and witnessing each other, we can finally see ourselves. For several years I’ve been working with regular working class people, non-professional artists who go from feeling silenced to finding their voice.

In this country, working people are treated as disposable and are especially vulnerable if undocumented or they’ve spent time in prison. That invisibility shuts you down, but when we play together . . . it’s like life is sparked again. And they are no longer invisible and we see ourselves (nos vemos), we find our power (nuestro poder).

I studied with Augusto Boal [(1931 2009), Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist] so we use the technique called Theater of the Oppressed to fight for workers rights. Our collective, WorkersTEATRO amplifies worker’s stories. We perform in public places so that other workers learn about their rights, see that they aren’t alone – experiencing abuse. This is systemic.  Also, we want professional Chicagoans to see that wage theft and exploitation is happening right here in Chicago – not somewhere else in the world, it’s our problem to deal with. No one is disposable and our voices matter. 

Being awarded a LAB FELLOWSHIP with The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics connected me with deep thinking international artists, and together we are raising collective consciousness all over the world.

I know that the power of theater is that we can tap into compassion and empathy and ideally move towards action, locally and globally. Thank You.

[Jasmin Cardenas is a theater-maker who uses teatro and play to create spaces where people can connect, tell their story, and spark change.  A proud daughter of Colombian immigrants, Cardenas was inspired by El Teatro Campesino when she began using Theater of the Oppressed to devise original scenes with working people in the fight for workers’ rights.  Together they co-founded WorkersTEATRO in Chicago, Illinois, to amplify wage worker stories by engaging the public.  

[Recognized for her arts and civic engagement work she was awarded a 2020-2022 international LAB Fellowship by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University.  In 2020 she added filmmaker to her skills when she produced her first short documentary film about essential workers, Essential?. . . Tengo que Trabajar/ I have to Work.  Screened at Collaboraction’s 2020 PeaceBOOK Festival and 2021 Screening Scholarship Media Festival CAMRA.  

[Recently commissioned by 1st Stage Theater in Tysons, Virginia, Cardenas is currently writing her newest solo play Disposable, a documentary-style theater piece.  Her first one woman show ¿Niña Buena?. . . the joys and challenges of being Latina y Americana, was produced by Links Hall and toured regionally and internationally to Susana Alexander International Theater Festival in Puebla, Mexico.  

[A proud member of Dramatists Guild of America, Cardenas just performed her first bilingual adaptation of a children’s book, Maybe Something Beautiful with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the puppet film version with the Chicago Children’s Theater.  A professional bilingual storyteller, Cardenas has performed at The National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and tours as a featured teller around the country.  Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Storyteller ALTA Award, Cardenas was recognized by the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists of Chicago.  

[A proud SAG-AFTRA actress, she has guest starred on The CHI (Showtime) and Chicago Fire (NBC) in addition to acting on many Chicago theater stages including Steppenwolf (The Compass), Goodman (The Fair, Electricidad), UrbanTheater (Devil Land, Beauty of the Father), Adventure Stage Chicago (Blue House) and Teatro Luna (Maria Chronicles, Generic Latina, Kita y Fernanda).  www.JasminCardenas.com or Insta @1JasminCardenas.]

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[International Theatre Institute (ITI) was formed in 1948, when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) joined with world-renowned theater experts to form an international non-governmental organization in the field of the performing arts.  The mission of ITI is to “promote international exchange of knowledge and practice in theater arts in order to consolidate peace and friendship between peoples, to deepen mutual understanding and to increase creative cooperation between all people in the theatre arts.”

[Today, ITI consists of approximately 90 Centers worldwide.  An ITI Center is made up of professionals active in the theater life of a country and representative of all branches of the performing arts.  For more information, visit www.iti-worldwide.org.

[The Global Theater Initiative (GTI) was launched in February 2016 by Theatre Communications Group and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics (the Lab), based in Washington, D.C., at Georgetown University.  

[By combining the unique reach of TCG’s international programming with the Lab’s distinctive experience in humanizing global politics through the power of performance, GTI strengthens, nurtures, and promotes global citizenship and international collaboration in the U.S. professional and educational theater field.  It also honors and intersects with the work so many theater colleagues have invested in cross-cultural exchange and understanding.

[Through the alignment of programming and resources, the GTI partners serve as a hub of global exchange with three core areas of focus: connecting practitioners with resources, knowledge, and partnerships to strengthen their work; promoting cultural collaboration as essential for international peace and mutual understanding; and innovating new strategies to maximize the global theater field’s opportunities and impact.  GTI also serves as the collaborative leadership of the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute (ITI/U.S.).

[In addition to TCG’s work with GTI, TCG’s Global Initiatives include: publishing extensive coverage of international work in American Theatre; issuing peer consultation letters for international visa petitions; and advocating for cultural exchange and artists’ rights worldwide.  For decades, TCG has also supported cultural exchange through grantmaking, and by leading delegations of U.S. theater practitioners to festivals worldwide.  

[The Dr. Kerry English Global Connectivity Manager and International Cultural Exchange Grants will help advance TCG’s global initiatives over the next ten years.  To further support this initiative and work of TCG, please contact LaTeshia Ellerson, director of institutional philanthropy, at lellerson@tcg.org.

[The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics harnesses the power of performance to humanize global politics.  Since 2012, we have created and presented innovative, high-quality work from around the world that is at the intersection of politics and performance.  The Lab’s signature approach raises voices rarely heard in Washington, D.C., through compelling, authentic narratives, and engages policymakers, artists, and wider audiences in forums that cast critical issues in a new light.  

[As a signature joint-initiative between the School of Foreign Service and the Georgetown College, The Lab is passionate about helping to train the next generation of innovators to use their artistry and voices to shape new understandings and to humanize others in pursuit of a better, more just world.  

[In Spring 2019, The Lab launched CrossCurrents, a D.C.-wide biennial festival, that will feature dynamic, socially-engaged performances from around the world and will catalyze conversations around critical topics like the global refugee crisis, climate change, and the rise of hate and polarization.  For more information, please visit: GlobalLab.Georgetown.edu or @TheLabGU.

[Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for theater, leads for a just and thriving theater ecology.  Since its founding in 1961, TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theaters to over 700 Member Theatres and affiliate organizations and over 7,000 Individual Members.  Through its programs and services, TCG reaches over one million students, audience members, and theater professionals each year.  

[TCG offers networking and knowledge-building opportunities through research, communications, and events, including the annual TCG National Conference, one of the largest nationwide gatherings of theater people; awards grants and scholarships to theater companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG’s partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theater Institute.  

[TCG is North America’s largest independent trade publisher of dramatic literature, with 18 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama on the TCG booklist.  It also publishes the award-winning American Theater magazine and ARTSEARCH, the essential source for a career in the arts.  

[TCG believes its vision of “a better world for theater, and a better world because of theater” can be achieved through individual and collective action, adaptive and responsive leadership, and equitable representation in all areas of practice.  TCG is led by executive director and CEO Teresa Eyring and deputy director and COO Adrian Budhu.  www.tcg.org.]