Every year on the 27th of March, The World Theatre day is celebrated with the theme “Theatre and a Culture of Peace” by the ITI in many and varied ways. It is celebrated as a goal as to promote the theatre in all it is forms across the world, to make people aware of the theatre value, to enable theatrical communities to promote their work on a large scale and to share the joy of theatre with the others.
Each year, an exceptional personality of the theater or a person exceptional heart and mind of another field is invited to share its reflections on theatre and international harmony.
This year, the message’s author is named Jon Fosse. As the World Theatre Day explain it on their website, 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.
For this World Theatre Day 2024, Jon Fosse wanted to show and express the uniqueness of a person and people. He expresses in his message the exceptional difference between humans, it therefore highlights art in the union and comprehension of humans, it states the gifts of art on the understanding of the unknown and the union of opposites.
“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.”
“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.”
I invite you, for those who will be interested, to visit the site world-theatre-day.org and read the whole message of Jon Fosse for this World Theatre Day 2024.
https://www.world-theatre-day.org/