Theatre Olympics

I’m a little embarrassed.  I’d never heard of the Theatre Olympics, an international theater festival, until the end of last year.  Since the first festival was held 25 years ago, I’m very late to the party—and I don’t know how I missed the memo. 

I first learned about the Theatre Olympics when I spotted an article in the New York Times on Sunday, 15 December 2019, in the “Arts & Leisure” section entitled “No Torch Needed Here: The Theatre Olympics bring the drama world together” by Roslyn Sulcas, a dance reviewer and culture writer for the Times. 

I didn’t read the article right then, but I put it aside to read later.  Then, the next morning, my friend Kirk Woodward e-mailed me about the Times report, asking me if I saw it.  That’s when I read it and decided to look into what this event was all about.

I looked into the Theatre Olympics to see what I’d missed and what follows is what I learned.  Maybe I’m not the only one who’s out of the loop: the New York Times only covered the festival a few times (it got passing mention in a couple more articles).  In the article on the last festival, author Sulcas specifically remarks that “remarkably few people from the Western  theater world seem to have heard of the Theatre Olympics.”

Even one 2019 participant, Stefan Kaegi, a founder of the Berlin-based theater collective Rimini Protokoll, acknowledged in an interview, “I knew nothing about it before they invited us.”   Like some others who heard the name for the first time, he thought it “might be one of those pre-Olympic Games cultural festivals.”

Other U.S. publications I found in a database search also had sparser coverage.  (The foreign press was more generous, but even that was parsimonious, reporting mostly on artists and productions from the publication’s home territory.)  “Perhaps,” offers Sulcas, “that’s because, so far, the festival has been in countries (China, Greece, Japan, South Korea and Turkey, among others) that are not international theatrical hubs.”

I thought at first the Theatre Olympics was descended from the Theatre of Nations, the international theater festival organized since 1957 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  (See my post “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” 10 November 2014.)  The Theatre of Nations has been dormant since 2008, and I wondered if the Theatre Olympics was a rebirth of the Theatre of Nations under a new name. 

I quickly learned that this wasn’t so; not only are the Theatre of Nations and the Theatre Olympics not related, but the Theatre of Nations is still alive on paper and ITI is working to revive it as a regular event again.  The Theatre Olympics is a completely independent operation, albeit with similar goals.

Theatre Olympics, a non-profit organization, fosters exchanges between diverse theater-makers, irrespective of ideological, cultural, or language differences.  Theatre Olympics’ primary project is an international multicultural, multidisciplinary theater festival (also called the Theatre Olympics), which embraces diverse theater traditions from many cultures and encourages intercultural exchanges among theater artists from around the world.  The Theatre Olympics festivals are held irregularly and in various locations around the globe; the last Theatre Olympics, the ninth in 2019, was the first festival held in two cities, Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Toga, Japan.  

(A brief note about terminology and nomenclature.  The parent organization that conducts the programs, including the festival, is called Theatre Olympics, without a definite article: ‘the.’  The festival is customarily called the Theatre Olympics, with a definite article.  Both, incidentally, are spelled in the British manner: ‘Theatre.’  For the most part, I’ll be looking at the theater festival—and, except in a proper name or a quotation, I spell ‘theater’ the American way.)

Theodoros Terzopoulos (b. 1945), a Greek theater director, asserts that the origins of the present organization stems from a series of talks and seminars for theater directors and academics that he hosted in 1989 in Delphi, Greece, the city of the oracle.  “We had all these great names—Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, Tadashi Suzuki . . .,” said Terzopoulos in an interview.  “They were talking and exchanging ideas, philosophies and theatrical traditions.  We thought, how can we create an international version of this, which will travel around the world?”

Out of this grew the Theatre Olympics organization, formally established in 1994 by an international committee led by Terzopoulos, who continues to serve as chairman.  The original committee members were the other participants in the 1989 discussion: Nuria Espert (b. 1935), Spanish theater and television actress, and theater and opera director; Antunes Filho (1929-2019), Brazilian stage director; Tony Harrison (b.1937), English poet, translator, and playwright; Yuri Lyubimov (1917-2014), Russian stage actor and director who founded the internationally renowned Taganka Theater; Heiner Müller (1929-95), German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist, and theater director; Tadashi Suzuki (b. 1939), Japanese theater director, writer, and philosopher who is the founder and director of the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT); and Robert Wilson (b. 1941), American experimental theater director and playwright.  

Except for the deceased members of the founding committee, all others still serve on the current International Committee of Theatre Olympics along with nine new members.  The committee meets once a year; Theatre Olympics’ administrative headquarters are in Athens, Greece, for its European operations and Toga, Toyama, Japan, for Asian operations.

Theatre Olympics originally had the subtitle “Crossing Millennia” to reflect the importance the organization placed on connecting the past, present, and future of cultural endeavors and to reflect the festival’s aim to re-establish the importance of theater in the cultural life of the 21st century.  Despite the name, there are no prizes, awards, or medals bestowed at the Theatre Olympics; it’s not a competition like the athletic Olympics or even many film festivals and the Edinburgh International Festival of theater.

Each festival is organized around a broad theme, such as Greek tragedy for the first Theatre Olympics in Delphi in 1995 or theater’s role in and contribution to globalization at the fifth Theatre Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, in 2010.  The number of participating countries has ranged from seven in Delphi to 35 at the eighth festival in New Delhi, India, while the number of productions staged has been between nine at the first Theatre Olympics and 465 in New Delhi.  (New Delhi was clearly an outlier; the next greatest number of participating productions was 97 presentations at the third Theatre Olympics in Moscow in 2001.)

Each host country selects its own artistic director, so far usually a member of the Theatre Olympics organization’s International Committee.  The national organizing committee is invariably comprised of prominent members of the host country’s cultural scene and the festival often reflects the host country’s theater heritage. 

Funding for the festival depends largely on the host country, which arranges a combination of state funds through its culture ministry or similar agency plus contributions from non-governmental arts organizations and private and corporate donations.  (The budget for the Russian portion of the 2019 festival alone was around $10 million, according to reports.)  Participating theater companies must, as is customary for theater festivals, both regional and international, raise their own funds to pay the expenses of their presentation. 

As the most recent festival, let’s have a look at the ninth Theatre Olympics this past year, the 25th anniversary of the first festival.

By design—it’s written in the Theatre Olympics charter—the first several festivals have been in the home countries of International Committee members—and the artistic director has been the committee member from the host country or, as in this instance, countries.  So in 2019, the Toga portion of the festival was directed by Tadashi Suzuki and the Saint Petersburg event by Valery Fokin (b. 1946), a Russian theatrical director and writer, who’s artistic director of the Aleksandrinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg and president of the Meyerhold Center in Moscow.

The statistics: between the two venues, Theatre Olympics 9 hosted 50 presentations from 20 countries.  The Russian half of the festival ran from 15 June to 15 December 2019 and the festival in Japan went from 23 August to 23 September.  In Russia, the main venues were the Aleksandrinsky Theater’s Main and New Stages, but Saint Petersburg, the former imperial capital of tsarist Russia, used more than 50 locations all around the city involving some 300 participants. 

In Toyama Prefecture, Japan, performances took place at the Toga Art Park (which contains seven theaters) and in Kurobe, a little under 30 miles north, at the Unazuki International Conference Center “Selene” and the Maezawa Garden Open Air Stage.  Toga is the home of Suzuki’s theater company, SCOT, and site of the school where he teaches his renowned Suzuki Method of Actor Training.  (The village is also the administrative headquarters of Theatre Olympics for Asian operations.)

The theme of the ninth edition of the Theatre Olympics was “Creating Bridges,” which appears to have been simply a reiteration of the initial Theatre Olympics mission statement, “the cross-fertilization of the past with the future.”  Though “Creating Bridges” “appeared in [the] management framework of the festival,” noted Emiliia Dementsova, a creative writer, theater critic, editor and lecturer from Russia, in her post in The Theatre Times, an online global theater portal, “there is no single core and distinct message that always distinguished the previous Theatre Olympics.” 

In an interview on the website Performing Arts Network Japan, Suzuki commented:

Despite the fact that we have the word globalization today, the direction or orientation to create that kind of shared heritage anew has been lost in politics and economics today.  That kind of orientation toward creating new rules of coexistence that can bridge this type of contemporary division is the theme of the Theatre Olympics this time, which is “Creating Bridges.”  I want us to think about the need for this kind of value, this kind of spirit for people to share; to think about the rules for coexistence.

Here’s a snapshot of some of what was on offer at the two Theatre Olympics 2019 venues:

In Toga, Suzuki presented Greetings from the Edge of the Earth, a play that looks at images of Japanese ethnicity and how this shifting identity has been shaped by key historical figures.  (The director brought two productions to Saint Petersburg as well, just as the Aleksandrinsky Theater sent productions to Japan.) 

SCOT’s production of Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade (Act II) featured a female cast fighting over the infamous Marquis de Sade, and brought to life some of the social shifts during Japan’s Showa Era (1926-89).  Suzuki also presented Dionysus (adapted from Euripides’ The Bacchae), a production that has toured worldwide and includes a cast of Indonesian, Chinese, and Japanese actors.

The Russian director and host of the Saint Petersburg portion of Theatre Olympics 2019, Valery Fokin, brought to Toga Today, 2016, a play based on the sci-fi novel by Kirill Fokin (Valery Fokin’s son) about aliens who arrive on Earth and plead with world leaders to ban weapons for the survival of humankind.  (Sounds a little like the plot of 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, doesn’t it?)  

Greek director (and Theatre Olympics International Committee chairman) Theodoros Terzopoulos brought to the event a politically charged rendition of Euripides’ The Trojan Women with a cast of actors from Syria, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Robert Wilson, the U.S. director and Theatre Olympics founding member, presented a performance of John Cage’s composition Lecture on Nothing (1949), which mixes philosophy and poetry in a lecture performance that explores Cage’s complex time structure.  

Also from the United States, director Anne Bogart, who collaborated with Suzuki in 1992 to form the Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) in Saratoga Springs, New York, presented her production Radio Macbeth in Toga.  In the play, the actors rehearse Shakespeare’s Macbeth in an abandoned theater at midnight and are soon surrounded by ghosts of past works stirring ambition, violence, and madness.

By the time the Russian segment of the 2019 Theatre Olympics was over, it had racked up a truly Olympian record.  First of all. the Saint Petersburg program encompassed presentations by the national theaters of Yakutsk, Sakha Republic (Yakutia); Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan; Ulan-Ude, Republic of Buryatia; Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan; Elista, Republic of Kalmykia; Grozny, Chechnya; and Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia.  2019 was declared the Year of Theater in Russia by President Vladimir Putin and the Theatre Olympics overlapped with the 2019 Chekhov International Theatre Festival (May-July).

In addition, special programs and projects of the Theatre Olympics in Russia were held in 26 cities in eight federal districts: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Magadan, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Pskov, Velikiy Novgorod, Sochi, Volgograd, Vladikavkaz, Novosibirsk, Kaliningrad, Petrozavodsk, Izhevsk, Saratov, Ulyanovsk, Kerch (in Crimea), Sevastopol (Crimea), Simferopol (Crimea), and Yalta (Crimea).

In total, the 2019 Theatre Olympics in Russia comprised 82 theater groups from 22 countries, including 51 foreign and 31 Russian troupes.  In addition to Russia, companies participated from Japan, China, India, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Israel, Lithuania, and Austria.  

Among the participating artists in Saint Petersburg were Krystian Lupa (Poland), Theodoros Terzopoulos, Declan Donnellan (England), Robert Wilson, Samuel Tétreault (Quebec, Canada), Peeping Tom (Belgian dance theater company), and FC Bergman (Flemish theater company).

Khots Namsaraev Buryat State Academic Drama Theater of Ulan-Ude presented A Flight: A Story of Bilchir.  This work of the young director Soyzhin Zhambalova based on an artistic expedition is performed in Bulgat dialect of the Buryat language.  The play is based on the documentary story of Osinsky District residents in the Irkutsk Region, who watched the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station on the Angara River. Large tracts of land were later flooded. 

Olonkho Theater of Yakutsk presented Dzhyrybyna the Warrior Woman, which  immerses the viewer in the secrets of shamanistic rituals and ancient beliefs.  The production of the National Theater of Karelia, Bear the Son, based on Karelian folk tales, includes songs and ceremonies in the Finnish, Karelian, Vepsian, and Russian languages, is also a creation with a magic component.  Khodari, based on the works of Vasily Firsov, is another fable-based performance of this company, but it is a fairy tale for adults.  The traditions of folklore and the eternal themes of the fight against the dark forces assailing the human soul are combined here with folk humor and traditional anecdotes.

The Khanpasha Nuradilov Chechen State Drama Theater of Grozny brought two performances to Saint Petersburg: My Home – Red Home (or Going Home) and Higher than the Mountains.  The first performance tells a contemporary story about the difficult life of an émigré in Paris who does not want to lose his national identity.  The second is a story in which Chechen folk traditions and legends are woven into an eternal tale of love and mercy, forgiveness, and a sense of duty.

The Galiasgar Kamal Tatar State Academic Theater presented The Rooster Flies on the Wicker Fence, which is based on a comic tale of a silly argument between two neighbors in a Tatar village in the Soviet ’70s.  A distinctive feature of the performance is the development method of the director Farid Bikchantaev: the text of the performance was created in the process of rehearsals.

The Mazhit Gafuri Bashkir Academic Drama Theater performed Zuleykha Opens Her Eyes, based on the bestselling novel by Guzel Yakhina.  This story begins in the winter of 1930 in a remote Tatar village.  Zuleykha is sent into exile to a remote region on the Angara River in Siberia.  Peasants, intellectuals, criminals, Muslims and Christians, agnostics and atheists, Russians, Tatars, Germans, Chuvash people—all will meet on the banks of the Angara, fighting for their lives and future.

One of Suzuki’s two contributions to the Saint Petersburg portion of the 2019 Theatre Olympics was his renowned adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, performed in Japanese.  Suzuki doesn’t try to decode the text of the play; rather he explores the complex relationships of men and women, East and West, past and present, and the idiosyncrasies of both traditional Japanese music and Italian opera.  The performance itself abounds with strong Japanese characters and, though minimalist, manages to capture the attention of the audience and tug at their heartstrings.

Susuki’s protagonist, Kyozo, is a former samurai who became a writer, and who, before dying, writes an autobiographical play.  Thus, Cyrano and Kyozo, character and creator, are the same person, and Roxane and Christian de Neuvillette are both portrayed by the same actress.  (This sounds like an interesting reversal of the Kabuki onnagata tradition of male actors playing female roles.  I wonder if that was Suzuki’s intention.  None of the accounts I read mentions this.  See my Rick On Theater post “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010.) 

The director tries to combine elements of the Noh and Kabuki theaters with those of modern-day European theater.  kimonos, tatami mats, paper umbrellas, sakura (Japanese cherry trees), Japanese tea rooms, and paper screens are in abundance here and Cyrano de Bergerac becomes a play about suppressed desires and unfulfilled dreams. 

After disparaging in another article the application of the 2019 theme in the realization of the Theatre Olympics, Emiliia Dementsova asserted, “The artistry of Suzuki really contributes to building bridges between the cultures of East and West . . . .”

Between the cities of Delphi, Greece, in 1995 and Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Toga, Japan, last year, the Theatre Olympics festival has been hosted in Shizuoka, Japan, in 1999 with the theme of “Creating Hope”; Moscow, Russia, in 2001 with the theme “Theatre for the People”; Istanbul, Turkey, in 2006 with the theme “Beyond Borders”; Seoul, South Korea, in 2010 with the theme of “Sarang: Love and Humanity”; Beijing, China, in 2014 with the theme “Dream”; Wrocław, Poland, with the theme of “The World as a Place of Truth”; and New Delhi, India, with the theme “The Flag of Friendship.”

Reports are that the next Theatre Olympics may be held in Hungary in 2023. Hungary’s interest in hosting the Theatre Olympics in 2023 was declared by the Hungarian Minister of Culture and the artistic director of the Hungarian National Theater at a press conference at the closing press conference of this year's event in Saint Petersburg.

They approached the International Committee of Theatre Olympics through its founder and president, Theodoros Terzopoulos, and committee member and artistic director of the Aleksandrinsky Theater, Valery Fokin.  The cultural minister came to the international cultural forum to emphasize the importance for the country of hosting the Theatre Olympics.  The International Committee plans to consider Hungary’s proposal, which the cultural minister feels has the support of Terzopoulos, Fokin, and Suzuki.