Celebrating World Theatre Day.
Remembering that theatre is so much bigger than Broadway. I am at once humbled and proud to belong to a community of collaborative artists in every nation. Most of whom don't have the budgets, resources or wages of Broadway but tell their stories anyway. I believe story telling in community matters.
Here is the WTD 2024 Message by Jon Fosse of Norway which really resonated with me. Like the author, I believe that art should not erase differences but bring them into light so we can learn to empathize with what is alien to us. That is how we transcend and transform.
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.