Message from Theodor Terzopulos on International Theatre Day 2025

International Theatre Day is celebrated annually on March 27. Its purpose is to encourage theatre professionals on stage and audiences in the halls to reflect on the mission of theatre, to express solidarity with theatre professionals around the world and to support their efforts to promote fundamental moral and social values ​​through artistic means. It has been celebrated in various ways since 1962 in more than 100 countries around the world.

The author of this year's message is Theodor Terzopoulos, Greek director, teacher, writer, founder and artistic director of the Attis Theatre, founder of the Theatre Olympics and chairman of the international commission of the Theatre Olympics.
Terzopoulos asks himself whether theatre can listen to the SOS call sent by our time, in a world of impoverished citizens, locked in virtual reality cells and under siege of their suffocating privacy. And also in a world of robotic existences, in a totalitarian system of control and repression throughout life. The Greek director continues:
Is theatre concerned about ecological catastrophe, global warming, huge losses of species diversity, ocean pollution, melting glaciers, increasingly frequent forest fires and extreme weather? Can theatre become an active part of the ecosystem? Theatre has been monitoring the phenomena of human influence on the planet for many years, but it has difficulty dealing with these problems. Is theatre troubled by the state of human affairs in which we find ourselves today in the 21st century, when the citizen is dragged along by political and economic interests, information networks and societies shaping public opinion? When social media, however facilitating communication, also provide a great alibi, because they necessarily maintain our safe distance from one another? When the omnipresent feeling of fear of another person, different, foreign, controls our thoughts and actions.
Can theatre function as a laboratory for the coexistence of all kinds of differences, without looking back at the traumas soaked in blood? The wound is bleeding and calls us to reconstruct the myth. And as Heiner Müller says, "Myth is an aggregate, a machine to which new and other machines can always be attached. It transmits energy until the increasing speed shatters the cultural circuit." And I would add, the circuit of barbarity. Can the theatre spotlight illuminate social trauma and stop deceptively illuminating itself? Questions that cannot be definitively answered, because theatre exists and survives thanks to unanswered questions.
Burning questions that Dionysus asked on the altar of the ancient theatre, as he walked through the places of his birthplace and then silently continued on his journey as a refugee to war-torn lands, questions that we ask ourselves today, as we commemorate World Theatre Day.
Let us look into the eyes of Dionysus, into the eyes of the ecstatic god of theatre and myth, who connects the past, present and future, into the eyes of the child of double birth, the offspring of Zeus and Semele expressing merging identities, woman and man, Dionysus angry and gentle, god and beast, on the border of madness and reason, order and chaos, an acrobat walking on the border of life and death.
Dionysus asks himself the fundamental ontological question "what is going on here", which leads the creator towards an ever deeper exploration of the roots of myth and the many dimensions of the human puzzle. We need new ways of storytelling aimed at cultivating memory and forming a new moral and political responsibility in order to break free from the multifaceted dictatorship of today's Middle Ages."