Message for World Theatre Day

World Theatre Day has been celebrated annually on March 27 since 1962. It is preceded by World Theatre Day for Children and Youth, for which March 20 was chosen, and World Puppetry Day, which falls on March 21. The initiators of the celebrations are international non-governmental theatre organizations affiliated with UNESCO, which prepare messages for these theatre holidays every year.

Every year, the message is formulated by prominent figures from the world's theater community.

Dear friends,

While the whole world hangs on an infusion of news reports and demands a regular dose of new information every hour, every minute, I would like to challenge us creators to step into our own sphere, perspective and framework of epic time, epic awareness, epic reflection and epic vision. For we live in an epic period of human history and the profound and significant changes that are taking place in man's relationships with himself, with people and with things beyond him are almost impossible to understand, formulate or express verbally or otherwise.

We no longer live in a 24-hour news cycle – we live on the edge of time. Newspapers and other media outlets are completely unequipped and inadequate to capture what we are experiencing.

So where do we find the language, the movements, and the images that would help us understand the profound changes and upheavals we are going through? And how can we immediately convey what we are experiencing, if we do not want a reportage, but an expression of experience?

Theater is an art form of experience.

In a world consumed by media campaigns, simulated experiences, and dire prognoses, how can we transcend the endlessly repeated numbers and feel the sacredness and infinity of a single life, a single ecosystem, a friendship, or a shade of a strangely colored sky? Two years of the SARS-CoV-19 epidemic have dulled human senses, limited human lives, severed bonds, and left humanity with only a strange scorched earth to continue its existence.

What seeds must we plant repeatedly in these years, and what overgrown invasive species must be completely and utterly eradicated? So many people are feeling the tension. So much irrational, unexpected violence is erupting. So many long-established systems are now manifesting themselves as machines of cruelty.

Where should we go to remember and how? What do we need to remember? What rituals will finally allow us to imagine better alternatives and start taking steps we have never tried before?

The theater of epic vision, epic mission, recovery, healing, and care needs new rituals. We don't need to entertain. We need to gather. We need to share space with each other, and we need to cultivate that shared space. We need a safe place where equality reigns and where we listen deeply to each other.

Theatre is the earthly embodiment of equality between humans, gods, plants, animals, raindrops, tears and regeneration. This space, where equality reigns and everything listens deeply, is illuminated by hidden beauty and survives amidst the profound interaction of danger, equanimity, wisdom, action and patience.

The Buddha describes in the Avatansaka Sutra ten types of great patience in human life. One of the most powerful types of patience he calls the Patience of perceiving everything as an illusion. The theater showed us life in this world as a bit of an illusion

It has always allowed us to see the world through human desires, disappointments, blindness, and rejection, and it has done so with liberating clarity and power.

We are so certain of what we look at and how we look at it that we fail to see alternative realities, new possibilities, different approaches, invisible relationships, and eternal bonds.

Now is the time to deeply refresh our minds, our senses, our imagination, our past and our future. This is a task that cannot be undertaken by isolated people working alone. We must do this work together. Theatre is an invitation to work together.

I thank you with all my heart for your work.

Peter Sellars

Peter Sellars was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. As an opera and theatre director, he has gained international acclaim for his pioneering and innovative interpretations of classical works, his outspoken support for 20th and 21st century music, and his collaborative projects with an unprecedentedly diverse range of theatre and non-theatre artists. His work highlights the fact that theatre is a powerful tool for expressing moral positions and for social action.

He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, the English National Opera, the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Paris National Opera, and the Salzburg Festival, among others.

Sellars collaborated on many works with composer John Adams. These include Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, El Niño, Doctor Atomic, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, and The Girls of the Golden West. He was also inspired by the works of Kaija Saariah, which he adapted into operas—L'Amour de loin, Adriana Materci's Only the Sound Remains—and thus expanded the contemporary operatic repertoire.

His recent (pre-pandemic) projects include a new production of Doctor Atomic at the Santa Fe Opera, a production of Claude Vivier's Copernicus for the Paris Festival D'Automne, and a production of Mozart's Idomeneo at the Salzburg Festival.

In late 2020, he created and directed the film This Body is So Impermanent…, inspired by a text from the Vimalakirti Sutra. He is currently preparing a production of the medieval work Roman de Fauvel in collaboration with Benjamin Bagby, musicologist and founder of the group Sequentia. He is also preparing a re-perform of the opera Tristan und Isolde, the story of which will be accompanied and deepened by Bill Viola's transcendental videos.

Last but not least, he is working on the production of Perle Noire, Meditations for Joséphine, composed by composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey and featuring the incomparable Julia Bullock.

Sellars has directed several famous festivals, including the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festival and the 2002 Adelaide Arts Festival. In 2006, he was artistic director of New Crowned Hope, a Vienna festival organized to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, where he invited new and established artists from various cultures to create new works of music, theater, dance, art and architecture. In 2016, he was also musical director of the Ojai Music Festival in California.

Sellars is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the founding director of the Boëthius Institute at UCLA, and a permanent curator of the Telluride Film Festival. He has also been a mentor to the Rolex Arts Initiative. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, an Erasmus Prize for Contributions to European Culture, and a Gish Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also won the prestigious Polar Music Prize and was named Artist of the Year by Musical America magazine.

Translation by Anna Štádlerová