Theatre Olympics starts today!

The 2016 Theatre Olympics will open with Tadashi Suzuki’s The Trojan Women, a 1974 production that has been revived for the Wrocław edition of the festival. In the director’s view, The Trojan Women reveals to those who experienced the defeat of World War II and to their descendants ‘how our common human suffering transcends time and space, both in Japan and the Occident’. According to New York Times, ‘Suzuki has crossbred Greek tragedy with the classical Japanese forms of Kabuki and Noh and transmogrified Euripides into a contemporary Japanese author’. The Trojan Women will be performed on 14–16 October.

The first weekend of the festival will also feature two Main Section shows, Krystian Lupa’s The Temptation of Quiet Veronica and Liu Libin’s Life between Heaven and Earth, in addition to Happy Days with Maja Komorowska and Adam Ferency, a piece presented as part of the Grotowski Institute’s Programme. Tadashi Suzuki, Maja Komorowska and Liu Libin (Artistic Director of the Beijing Theatre Olympics, 2014), will be guests of honour at the opening ceremony of the Theatre Olympics in Wrocław.

The Lower Silesian Theatre Platform begins on Saturday, 15 October. It includes 37 shows by local companies representing diverse genres, including dramatic theatre, musical, children’s theatre, movement and mime, classical forms and experimental theatre. The artistic director of the Wrocław Olympics, Jarosław Fret, believes that the Lower Silesian Theatre Platform is ‘the best programme with which to launch the Theatre Olympics, the great celebration of theatre in Wrocław, one that also says a great deal about the city itself’.

To find out more about the performances, go to the Calendar or Sections pages.