March 27 has been celebrated as World Theatre Day since 1962. The year before, it was initiated by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), which promotes the exchange of knowledge and practices in the field of performing arts, ensures connections between artists of all nations and nationalities, and, among other things, draws attention to the importance of respecting human rights and cultural diversity.
In Slovenia, this day traditionally begins Week of Slovenian drama, and the Association of Dramatic Artists of Slovenia (ZDUS) awards.
On World Theatre Day, an international message is sent around the world, written by a selected theatre artist at the invitation of the ITI. The first message was sent to the world in 1962, and its author was Jean Cocteau. The author of this year's international message is the Greek theatre director, pedagogue, author, founder and artistic director of the Attis Theatre and president of the International Committee of the Theatre Olympiad, Theodoros Terzopoulos.
In addition to the international message, which is read around the world (including here) at special theatre events or before performances, many countries also celebrate World Theatre Day with national messages. This year, the Slovenian Dramatic Artists' Association has asked a playwright and dramaturge Simona Semenicto write a Slovenian message.
Slovenian message on World Theatre Day 2025
Dear theatergoers.
I took a lot of time to write the letter. It seemed to me that on this occasion it was absolutely necessary to draw attention to everything that is wrong in the theater and the world. Which arouses such anger in me that I would grab a bludgeon and wave it at the heads of those who care about nothing but their own importance and earnings. There is no shortage of these heads, and they are not going to run out. You could go from bludgeon to bludgeon and so on, but there would be no end to them. You smash one and three new ones will sprout from its neck. It's like living in a fairy tale. The important ones are playing with human lives, with living and so-called inanimate nature, with the intangible realities of individuals and communities. The city I come from and the city I live in are turning into a parking lot. The foundation of our relationship to the world is – if our family has one car, we can have or urgently need four, or to put it in theatrical language – if our theater has five premieres per season, we can have or urgently need twenty. Holy anger, because it is precisely this mentality that is destroying the world of which I am a part, this living and non-living nature and the incomprehensible reality that are part of me, with which I am and we are an indivisible whole, and yet we perversely cut into them ever deeper. It seemed necessary to me, with all this, to specifically highlight the slaughter in various parts of the world. I would say war to please the sensitive, but the word war describes much less thoroughly that at this moment, somewhere, a child is dying because some fiasco of people who circle on the forms that they are men decided to play with toy soldiers for a bit. And we are all blowing the same trumpet. More, more, more.
I wrote all this and much more in a letter that took me a long time to write. When I last read it, I was really proud of my word skills. Then I saved the thing, or at least I thought I did, and then it was nowhere to be found. I spent hours and hours trying to get it back from some dark corner of my computer, but no. The letter burned in its own holy rage. I tried to reconstruct it from memory, but my memory is no longer what it was. There was no going back. I had to write it again. Then it dawned on me that maybe this was the point. Anew. Can I start over after I've hit rock bottom? I have to, is the answer. Can we start over at the moment when everything seems to be rock bottom? Can we stop destroying and start nurturing? Can we stop breaking and start healing? Can we stop? Can we look around us while there's still something alive to see? We must, is the answer.
And what about the epistle? Maybe I should start it anew by not just weaving my holy anger around the epistle, but something else. With what? Maybe by asking myself why I persist in the theater at all. I've found that this is not a difficult question. I persist because theater is alive. Because the possibilities it offers excite me and I feel alive too. I persist because I know that theater will persist. That it will be here long after the parking lots are overgrown with grass and when the current apparatchiks have long since been replaced by others and thirds, just as trying to take the theater's power away. But theater will continue to pulse despite them. Together with intangible realities, with inanimate and living nature. And when the last person has left for the eternal parking lots, theater buildings will still bear witness to the life that we theatergoers have breathed into them.
This life, this perseverance, and this love will keep this building standing for a long time to come.
On Theatre Day, I congratulate all theatre professionals – those of today, those before us, and those to come. Now let's celebrate!
Simona Semenič, playwright and dramaturg
International Message for World Theatre Day 2025
In a world of impoverished citizens, locked in virtual reality cells and trapped in suffocating privacy, can theatre hear the cry for help sent by the present? In a world of robotized lives and totalitarian systems, where control and oppression permeate all segments of existence?
Is theatre concerned about ecological destruction, global warming, the loss of biodiversity, ocean pollution, melting glaciers, the proliferation of forest fires and extreme weather events? Can theatre become an active part of the ecosystem?
The theater has been observing human impact on the planet for many years, but has difficulty dealing with this issue.
Is theatre concerned about the state of humanity in the 21st century, about the manipulative nature of politics and the economic appetites of media networks and companies that shape public opinion? At a time when social media, while enabling communication, also destroys essential connections by ensuring and encouraging distance from others?
Fear of the other, the different, the stranger dominates us and directs our thoughts and actions.
Can theater be a workshop in which a space is created for the coexistence of differences without ignoring the bleeding trauma?
The bleeding trauma invites us to reconstruct myth. And as Heiner Müller said: “Myth is an aggregate, a machine to which ever new and different machines are attached; it transmits energy until the increasing acceleration blows up the kingdom of culture,” – and, I might add, the kingdom of the barbarians as well.
Can theater lights illuminate social trauma and stop misleadingly illuminating only theater?
These questions do not offer final answers. Theatre exists and persists precisely because of unanswered questions.
Those questions that Dionysus asked as he walked through his birthplace, as he crossed the orchestra of the ancient theater, and as he continued his silent refugee journey through wartime landscapes; those questions that we also ask ourselves today, on World Theater Day.
Let us look into his eyes, let us look into the eyes of this ecstatic god of theater and myth, who unites the past, the present and the future. Let us look into the eyes of the twice-born child of Zeus and Semele, let us look into the eyes of the bearer of fluid identities, female and male, angry and kind, divine and animal, let us look into the eyes of a being on the border between madness and reason, order and chaos, let us look into the eyes of an acrobat on the border between life and death. Dionysus asked the fundamental ontological question: “What does it all mean?” A question that drives the creator into an ever deeper search for mythical roots and into exploring the multiplicity of meanings in the riddle of humanity.
In order to free ourselves from the multifaceted dictatorship of the modern Middle Ages, we need new narrative approaches, ones that honor memory while simultaneously shaping new moral and political responsibility.
Theodoros Terzopoulos
Translation: Tatjana Ažman (SC ITI Slovenia)
More about World Theatre Day (AN)
