World Theatre Day International Message 2025

Can theatre hear the SOS call that our times are sending out, in a world of impoverished

citizens, locked in cells of virtual reality, entrenched in their suffocating privacy? In a world of

robotized existences within a totalitarian system of control and repression across the

spectrum of life?

Is theatre concerned about ecological destruction, global warming, massive biodiversity loss,

ocean pollution, melting ice caps, increasing forest fires and extreme weather events? Can

theatre become an active part of the ecosystem? Theatre has been watching human impact

on the planet for many years, but it is finding it difficult to deal with this problem.

Is theatre worried about the human condition as it is being shaped in the 21st century, where

the citizen is manipulated by political and economic interests, media networks and opinion-

forming companies? Where social media, as much as they facilitate it, are the great alibi for

communication, because they provide the necessary safe distance from the Other? A

pervasive sense of fear of the Other, the different, the Stranger, dominates our thoughts and

actions.

Can theatre function as a workshop for the coexistence of differences without taking into

account the bleeding trauma?

The bleeding trauma invites us to reconstruct the Myth. And in the words of Heiner Müller

“Myth is an aggregate, a machine to which always new and different machines can be

connected. It transports the energy until the growing velocity will explode the cultural field”

and I would add the field of barbarity.

Can theatre spotlights shed light on social trauma and stop misleadingly shedding light on

itself?

Questions that do not allow definitive answers, because theatre exists and endures thanks

to unanswered questions.

Questions triggered by Dionysus, passing through his birthplace, the orchestra of the ancient

theatre, and continuing his silent refugee journey through landscapes of war, today, on World

Theatre Day.

Let us look into the eyes of Dionysus, the ecstatic god of theatre and Myth who unites the

past, the present and the future, the child of two births, by Zeus and Semele, expresser of

fluid identities, female and male, angry and kind, divine and animal, on the verge between

madness and reason, order and chaos, an acrobat on the borderline between life and death.

Dionysus poses a fundamental ontological question “what is it all about?” a question that

drives the creator towards an ever-deeper investigation into the root of myth and the multiple

dimensions of the human enigma.

We need new narrative ways aimed at cultivating memory and shaping a new moral and

political responsibility to emerge from the multiform dictatorship of the present-day Middle

Ages.

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Theodoros Terzopoulos, Greece

Theatre Director, Educator, Author, Founder and Artistic Director of the Attis Theatre Company, Inspirator of Theatre Olympics and Chairman of the International Committee of Theatre Olympics

The internationally acclaimed theatre director, was born in 1945, in Makrygialos village, in the Pieria area of Northern Greece. He was trained at Kostis Michailidis School of Dramatic Art (Athens, 1965-1967) and completed his studies at the Berliner Ensemble (Berlin, 1973-1976), while he worked as assistant director, close to Heiner Müller, who was his mentor, Manfred Wekwerth, Ruth Berghaus and Ekkehart Schall. He served as the Director of the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece (1981–1983) and as the Artistic Director of the International Meetings of Ancient Drama in Delphi (since 1985 for about 15 years), inviting many leading figures of the international theatre scene. He has been the founder and artistic director of the International Meetings of Ancient Drama in Sikyon (2005 – 2011) and a founding member of the International Institute of Mediterranean Theatre (comprising 18 Mediterranean countries) since 1990.

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