| Czym jest teatr? |
Author: Tadashi Suzuki Title: Czym jest teatr? Translated by: Anna Sambierska Preface, edited by: Henryk Lipszyc Date: March 2012 ISBN: 978-83-61835-76-9 Format: 143x205 mm Paperback: 142 Price: 7 Euro Selected pages  If someone asked me, ‘What is theatre?’, and I had to give an immediate, off-the-cuff answer, I think ... I’d say that theatre is what happens in a place where there is an actor and a spectator present at the same time. The two meet through the agency of a specific place, and it is not just an abstract meeting of two kinds of people – those called actors and those called spectators. I believe that a place significantly affects the content of such a meeting and the nature of mutual relations. Anyway, there is no doubt that what constitutes the content and meaning of a social activity called ‘theatre’ is created not only by theatre practitioners, but also by spectators. Theatre won’t exist without an audience. (extract from the book) Tadashi Suzuki was born in 1939 in Japan. In 1966, in Tokyo, Suzuki formed Waseda-shōgekijō (Waseda Little Theatre), a leading company of Japanese avant-garde theatre in the 1960s. In 1976 he moved to the mountain village of Toga (Toyama on Honsiu Island), where in 1984 his company evolved into the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT). Since 1982 he has been organizing an annual international theatre festival in Toga. Suzuki has created an original method of actor training and taught it throughout the world. Between 1995 and 2007 he was the General Artistic Director at Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre. He is a member of the International Theatre Olympics Committee and co-founder of BeSeTo, a festival jointly organized by Japan, China and Korea. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Japan Performing Arts Foundation. Suzuki’s works include On the Dramatic Passions (1969, 1973), The Trojan Women (1974), Dionysus (1990), King Lear (1997), Cyrano de Bergerac (1999, 2006) and many others. In addition to mounting productions with his company, he has worked as a director in international collaborative projects in Germany (Oedipus, 2002), Russia (King Lear, 2004; Electra, 2007) and the United States (The Tale of Lear). Suzuki has twice presented his work in Poland – in 1975 he showed Dramatic Passions as part of the National Theatres’ Season, and in 2009 (Year of Grotowski) he brought his Electra to The World as a Place of Truth International Theatre Festival. |
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