The Theatre Olympics The World as a Place of Truth

We live in a network society where the concept of human contact and communication has undergone a radical change as telecommunications and the internet enjoy absolute primacy. National cultures are getting wired and risk losing their identity. One would expect that the closer contact and better communication between nations would create greater harmony and foster a spirit of co-existence, but the polar opposite happens: suspicion and doubt are on the rise. Globalisation undermines, or even destroys the local. Theatre tends to have no fixed points of reference, roots or national attributes. It seems to be dislocated and the boundaries between national cultures become fluid. Many questions are asked about the nature of today’s theatre, about its changing function and objectives and about its future. In the context of the dead-end that globalisation has forced upon us and of the pogroms and destruction, whether deliberate or unpredictable, it has wrought, the 7th Theatre Olympics encourages free expression and defends the importance of tradition but at the same time supports the demand for theatre research and experimentation conducted within the framework of contemporary dynamics, constructive multi-centralism and polymorphism. The 7th Theatre Olympics is hosted in Wrocław, a city set in the heart of Europe, the crucible and crossroads of cultures. The motto of this meeting, The World as a Place of Truth, invites us to recall the previous questions asked about theatre and to pose new ones.
Theodoros Terzopoulos
Chairman of the International Committee of Theatre Olympics

‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged’, writes Peter Brook in The Empty Space, published in 1968. That same year, Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski prepared Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre. 
The theatre becomes a meeting place, forever. 
Today, such a description of theatre seems obvious, even trivial. But for me, it remains basic, fundamental. It is a dogma, a profession of faith: 
in theatre as a medium and in the mediation of theatre; 
in theatre as a place of human, and thus social, transformation; 
in theatre as a liturgy of memory;
in theatre that provides a stage for human experience. 
This stage begins beneath my feet and is perhaps no bigger than the patch of ground I’m standing on. On this stage, which is condensed into a rhythm of speech, a harmony of tones, a pulse of dance, I express myself before myself and before all those who surround me: the partners, actors, viewers, witnesses. This stage, which begins inside my body, runs through the buildings called theatres, corridors and streets, train stations and fields. Before it comes back, it sometimes (very rarely) manages to touch the horizon. 
I believe in a theatre that is a shared space where individual citizens of a polis are fused into a single gaze. Theatron (Greek theaomai = ‘I watch’, ‘I look’) – the phenomenon of a shared gaze/perspective – re-creates the assembled community, as it did when the theatre was born and helped build democracy in Athens. 
I believe that from theatre stages we still hear the most emphatically stated questions about a multicultural European identity, tolerance and a shared vision of a sustainable open society. That today, as when it was being born, the theatre becomes a space for a dynamic description of the equally dynamic changes in the modus of our lives. And that in this description, which involves the entire human being, the theatre errs far less than other media. I believe in a theatre that, by describing humankind in action, continually re-creates humankind. In this sense, it remains the foundation for our self-understanding and the cornerstone of democracy. 
This is why the motto for the theatre programme of the European Capital of Culture, and of the Theatre Olympics, are Jerzy Grotowski’s words: ‘The world should be a place of truth’. 
I believe the world should be a place of truth – the theatre already is.
Jarosław Fret
Artistic director of the Theatre Olympics, Wrocław 2016