The Theatre Will Remain Forever

“The theatre has always been and it will remain forever. And now, in those last fifty or seventy years, it is particularly necessary. Because if you take a look at all the public arts, you can immediately see that only theatre is giving us – a word from mouth to mouth, a glance from eye to eye, a gesture from hand to hand, and from body to body. It does not need any intermediary to work among human beings – it constitutes the most transparent side of light, it does not belong to either south, or north, or east, or west – oh no, it is the essence of light itself, shining from all four corners of the world, immediately recognizable by any person, whether hostile or friendly towards it.” ^[*] This is a description of the theatre by Anatoly Vasiliev, a Russian director who is much more than merely a director, he is also a philosopher and a teacher in the most profound sense of the word, a man who always reminds me of the painting Teacher from Morocco by Hungarian painter Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka. Vasiliev was present for the first two MITEM, where he shared his marvelous knowledge and vision with us. At his theatre in Moscow I experienced firsthand something that I had always sensed was true, namely that the theatre is a metaphysical space in which anything can happen: sound can be transformed into light, the body can become transparent, the voice of an actor “can open one-thousand words in the flesh,” as Valère Novarina writes, the other great visionary of the theatre, who will also be one of our guests at MITEM.

In our era, a moment of history beleaguered with dramatic changes, we have particularly strong need of the theatre, for we must arrive at an understanding of what is happening to us, why we are colliding with one another like water molecules, and how our fellow human beings are being destroyed in the space of a second, like grass trampled underfoot. The theatre can provide a mapping, in a small space, of the processes taking place in the world, and even if we fail to understand these processes fully, we can still live through them again and again, enabling us, perhaps, better to orient ourselves in our everyday lives. There are ancient forms of theatre that have survived the centuries unchanged, forms which pass on spiritual messages that are life-sustaining and regenerating. It is particularly important that we recognize these forms and their messages today. And there are classics, like The Iliad, Titus Andronicus and Macbeth, which in more peaceful times we would not have regarded as so close, even imminent. Today we sense with particularly keen insight that the classics are indeed contemporary in their meanings. They bring us together, artists and creators from the most varied and distant points of the globe, and prompt us again and again to interact, converse, and genuinely to pay attention to one another.

(15 April 2016)