Writer Jon Fosse launches the message for World Theater Day: “Art is peace”
Euskaraz irakurri: Jon Fosse idazleak idatzi du Antzerkiaren Nazioarteko Eguneko mezua: “Artea bakea da”
He World Theater Daywhich is celebrated this Wednesday, March 27, wants to raise awareness about the value of theater in all its forms and demand that it be recognized as an essential element in culture because “art is peace”, according to the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Jon Fosse, author of this year’s message.
Designated by the International Theater Institute (ITI), dependent on UNESCO, for the transmission this 2024 of the special message that is launched each year for World Theater Day, Fosse wanted to reflect on art, and not on dramaturgy in particular, because “all good art, deep down, revolves around the same axis.”
It’s about, he says, “taking the completely unique, the totally specific and making it universal.” “Uniting the particular with the universal, expressing it artistically: not eliminating its particularity but emphasizing its particularity, allowing what is strange and unknown to shine clearly,” adds the Norwegian writer and playwright (Hausgesund, 1959).
“War and art are opposites, just as war and peace are opposites – it’s that simple. Art is peace,” summarizes Fosse in a message celebrating World Theater Day, which was created in 1961.
For the author, “art, good art, manages in its own way and in a fabulous way to bring together the absolutely unique with the universal. It allows us to understand the difference between the strange and the universal.”
Furthermore, Fosse points out, “all good art contains precisely that: something strange, something that we cannot fully understand and yet we understand in a certain way. It contains the enigmatic, something that fascinates us and therefore takes us beyond our limits and thus creates the transcendence that all art must contain and lead us to.
“It is exactly the opposite approach to the violent conflicts that we often see in the world, which feed the destructive temptation to annihilate everything strange, everything unique and different,” claims Fosse.
“War is the battle against what lies deep within each of us: the only thing. And it is a battle against all art, against the most intimate essence of all art,” proclaims the Norwegian writer in a text translated into Castilian by the Mexican Raúl Alonso Díaz.
Art “articulates in its artistic expression that which is unique with the universal: not eliminating the singular, but emphasizing it; letting the strange and the unknown shine clearly,” concludes Fosse, for whom theater is “a great act of listening.”
“The value of theater”
The message for World Theater Day is written each year by a world-class figure, and was first released in 1962, by none other than Jean Cocteau. Since then, names such as Arthur Miller, Laurence Olivier, Pablo Neruda, Richard Burton, Antonio Gala, Dario Fo, Isabelle Huppert and Helen Mirren have written it.
“The objective of the celebration is to raise awareness about the value of theater in all its forms and to share its joy with others,” says the ITI on its website.
Source: Eitb
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
