Happy International Theater Day

Happy International Theater Day!

While Greek writer and theatre director Theodoros Terzopoulos raises questions about the role of theatre in today's society, our Zrinka Cvitešić, in her Croatian message, put the importance of theatre in today's times at the forefront:

To all of us, guardians of theatre, of all forms of culture, guardians of life...

In the times we live in, it is increasingly difficult to be human.

In this ocean of filters, censorship and deception, in which we have built our own rafts, it is increasingly difficult to reach the truth. It is difficult to think for ourselves, it is dangerous to feel. Because to feel means to be weak, and our children are already taught that only the most beautiful, strongest and most resilient will survive…

At the same time, so many things remind us of how vulnerable and fragile we are… Pandemics, earthquakes, inflation, threats of a third world war and some smaller, incidental ones…

And artificial intelligence, which, as they say, will replace humans. Isn’t being human enough anymore?

But there, still, on solid foundations, protected by all of us in whom there is still a need to be everything that makes us human, stands our theater.

Because we need it.

We need it like a raft whose path is determined by only one compass - the heart.

We need it like a raft on which, still safe, the soul sails.

Than which nothing is more important. Or it shouldn’t be…

Today we celebrate a pact signed long ago, not with a pen but with our hearts and minds.

A pact between us on the stage and around it and you in front of it.

We celebrate the tacit agreement that at least here, in the theater, we will always seek the truth, ask and communicate.

And to remind ourselves again and again what it means to love, to cry, to laugh - to feel. What it means to live, what it means to be human. Where we will teach the heart anew about the heart itself, as Laurence Olivier said.

We celebrate the trust between us who have committed ourselves to be ambassadors of human spirituality and a mirror of all that makes up society, and you, who still have the need to hear, see, think and feel.

Bukowski wrote that the deaths of most people are a mere illusion because there was nothing to die for in them, and Oscar Wilde that living is "the rarest thing in life. Most people exist, that's all."

Thank you for not wanting to just exist. Thank you for wanting to feel each other and ourselves, for wanting to remain human, for wanting to live...

Thank you for preserving what has reminded us of all this most for centuries - culture...