Today is the World Theatre Day, a day of celebrating not only the birth of theatre, which is in fact lost in immemorial times, but rather the perpetual rebirth of this art that, through its own existence, is meant to celebrate the human being: the eternal Man, always identical to himself, but also the Man in his permanent historical mobility; man as an indivisible whole, but also the halved, multiple, multiform man; the singular man, whose complex identity takes an unrepeatable shape, but also the histrionic man, who plays with identities, in order to know them and himself better. The theatre art celebrates the man who reflects upon the world and reflects upon himself through the world.
Derived from the Greek theatron, theatre is the place where you can see and hear. But as an old saying goes, many can see, but few can understand; likewise, many can hear, but few can listen, many can walk, but few can stop. Our world would definitely look better if things were the other way around, if we were all able to stop and see better the life around us, hear the sounds of the world, understand what is happening with us, in us and beyond us. But in order to achieve that we need openness... a great openness of all the doors of our soul, a clear and mindful receptivity, sometimes frightening amounts of disponibility and generosity. We become afraid because in order to understand the world we live in, we need to get out of our comfort zones, we're forced to act, to change, to constantly reassess the things around us. To understand means to stay awake, and theatre wakens you. Theatre art celebrates the man that thinks and acts in a positive manner.
Today is the Gates Open Day at the National Theatre of Cluj-Napoca, because theatre cannot be celebrated properly by the people who bring it to life every day, unless it is together with the people for whom it exists. Today we break barriers between stage and hall, today the civil and the artistic world intertwine and come into fusion. Both general history and everyone of us' individual experience prove that no union can be achieved without openness, generosity, resistance, without sacrificing even the slightest part of what we own, without constant fight with ourselves, and with the evil and hardships around us. And when there is no union, there is no fulfillment. Authentic theatre brings people together, authentic theatre braves historical hardships because it transforms profoundly the people it reaches to, teaching them how to love, how to share deeply human values, how to take a stand, how to resist through culture.
Today, when the World Theatre Day is celebrated in the hundredth year from the Union of all Romanian people in a modern, conscious and responsible nation, what can be more wonderful than to share altogether, we, the theatre people and you, the theatre-lovers, the feelings of fulfillment through art, the union of minds and souls, within the living spaces of our Cluj Theatre?!
Ștefana Pop-Curșeu
