DUNYA TIYATRO GUNU BILDIRISI
ULUSLARARASI TIYATRO ENSTITUSU (ITI)
DUNYA TIYATRO GUNU 27 MART, 2002
ULUSLARARASI BILDIRI
DUNYA TIYATRO GUNU 1961 yilinda Uluslararasi Tiyatro Enstitusu (ITI) tarafindan hayata gecirilmistir. Dunya Tiyatro Gunu her yil 27 Mart'ta ITI merkezlerinde ve uluslararasi tiyatro topluluklarinda kutlanir, bu onemli gunu belirtmek icin cesitli ulusal ve uluslararasi tiyatro etkinlikleri duzenlenir. En onemli etkinliklerden biri de uluslararasi tiyatro bildirisinin Uluslararasi Tiyatro Enstitusu'nun davetiyle geleneksel olarak dunya capinda onemli bir tiyatro insani tarafindan kaleme alinmasidir.
ULUSLARARASI TIYATRO ENSITUSU (ITI)
DUNYA TIYATRO GUNU 27 MART, 2003
ULUSLARARASI BILDIRISI
Tankred DORST
Oyun Yazari
A Message on World Theatre Day 2003
We keep asking the question: Is the theatre still relevant to the times? For two thousand years the theatre has held a mirror up to the world and explained our place in it. Tragedy has portrayed life as being subject to Fate – Comedy has done this often enough as well. Human beings are flawed, we make fatal mistakes, rail against our circumstances, clutch at power, are weak. Deceitful and naïve, we are happy in our ignorance and sickened by God. I hear people say that life today is beyond the grasp of the traditional instruments of the theatre and that it is consequently no longer possible to tell stories. Instead, different sorts of texts, no dialogues, but rather statements. No drama. A new kind of human being is beginning to appear on our horizon: Beings that can be cloned and genetically manipulated according whim and plan. These new, flawless beings, insofar as they are possible, would have no need for the theatre as we understand it. They would be unable to comprehend the conflicts that drive it. But we don't know the future. I think it is up to us to devote all of the energies and the talents that have been given to us – by whom we do not know – to protect from this uncertain future our wicked, beautiful and imperfect present, our irrational dreams and fruitless exertions. The means at our disposal are rich. Theatre is an impure art and therein lies its vital power. Unscrupulously, it uses everything that stands in its way. It is forever betraying its own principles. It is, of course, not immune to the fashions of the times, it avails itself of images from other media, sometimes speaking slowly, sometimes quickly. It stammers and falls silent. It is extravagant and banal, evasive, destroys stories while creating new ones all the same. I am confident that the theatre will always be able to fill itself with life – as long as we feel the need to show each other what we are and what we are not and what we should be. Long live the theatre! The theatre is one of humanity's great inventions, equal to the discovery of the wheel and the taming of fire.
Tankred Dorst
Tankred DORST
Playwright
Author of the 2003 World Theatre Day Message – 27th March
Biographical Data
Playwright, storyteller, film-maker, author of radio plays, translator
Tankred Dorst was born on December 12, 1925 in the Thuringian town of Oberlind. His father, an engineer and factory owner, died when he was six. Conscripted into the German army as a 17-year-old still at school, he was taken prisoner and remained in British and American hands until 1947. He completed his schooling in 1950, going on to study German literature, art history and theatre in Bamberg and Munich. In 1953, together with composer Wilhelm Killmayer, he founded Das kleine Spiel, a student marionette theatre for which he wrote his first plays. After breaking off his studies, he worked in various capacities in film, radio and publishing houses. His first plays were performed in 1960, among them "Die Kurve" (Lübeck), "Gesellschaft im Herbst" (Nationaltheater Mannheim) and "La Buffonata" (Heidelberg).
Since the early 1970s he has collaborated in his writing with Ursula Ehler. His many plays, which have been performed all over Germany and Europe, include "Toller" (1968), "Eiszeit" (1973), "Die Villa" (1976), "Merlin oder Das wüste Land" (1981), "Parzival" (1987), "Korbes" (1988), "Karlos" (1990), "Herr Paul" (1994) and "Die Legende vom armen Heinrich" (1997). "Die Kurve" (1960, in collaboration with Peter Zadek) and "Rotmord" (1969, adaptation of "Toller" directed by Peter Zadek) have been produced for television. The television film "Sand" (directed by Peter Palitzsch) aired in 1971. Dorst himself directed the film adaptations of "Klaras Mutter" (1978), "Mosch" (1980) and "Eisenhans" (1982).
Tankred Dorst has translated and adapted for the stage a number of works by Diderot, Moliere and O'Casey.
He received a fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1962 and held visiting professorships at universities in Australia and New Zealand in 1973. Dorst's work has been recognized with many prizes and distinctions, including the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize (1964), Prize of the City of Florence (1970), Literature Prize of the Bayerische Akademie der Künste (1983), Mülheim Playwright's Prize (1989), Georg Büchner Prize (1990), ETA Hoffmann Prize (1996) and the city of Zurich's Max Frisch Prize (1998).
Tankred Dorst lives and works in Munich. His farces, parables, one-act-plays and adaptations of the 1960s were inspired by the theatre of the absurd and the works of Ionesco, Giraudoux and Beckett. His monumental drama, "Merlin oder das wüste Land," which premiered in 1981 at the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf, relates from the perspective of those born after the war, according to Dorst, "a story of our times: the failure of the utopias." The work has been compared to Goethe's "Faust," with some critics seeing in it the first major drama of the 1980s. In his tribute to Dorst on the occasion of the conferment of the Georg Büchner Prize in 1990, Georg Hensel remarked, "Dorst's plays all have a direct connection to the present - from Toller to Hamsum, "Lehrstück" to myth and postmodern explosion. For 30 years Dorst's plays have responded to the great transformations. He has always been a companion to the times."
