Salutation of the President of the Hellenic Centre of the ITI

Among those of us who have found ourselves outside the borders of this country, many couldn’t help but notice that in Greece, the place that gave birth to theatre, there exists the paradox of an excessive earnestness towards It.

By regarding the stage as a sacred place (maybe precisely because we reside in the place that gave birth to theatre) and by placing in our minds the Actor on some “higher sphere”, sometimes we pull the creator further apart from his/her audience.
Street Theatre is exactly the opposite.

And that, not because what an actor does on a sidewalk does not merit the same respect from us – on the contrary, it deserves even greater! – but because it abolishes that sense of distance which sometimes creates insubstantiated myths.

Our admiration for the Street Theatre Performer could never be too great.  I imagine (since I would never have the courage to do it myself) that the mental strength required  to go out and expose oneself away from the safety of a proscenium, the proximity of a backstage or the warmth of spotlights, must be enormous.

As enormous, of course, is the energy emitted during that uniquely intimate moment when an unsuspecting passer-by may smile, even for an instant, because he is touched by that “play” in which he himself becomes the protagonist, before he goes on to become lost in the crowd.

Speaking of the need for art to meet life…

In an era when all of us in this country have the immediate sense of an all-surrounding absurdity…  And want to go out on the streets – even if we don’t know exactly what we would be doing there…

The 2nd International Theatre Festival is a formidable reason.

Konstantinos Arvanitakis
President
Hellenic Centre of the International Theatre Institute

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