During the presentation of the 2015-2016 theater season, Irina Brook, the director of the National Theater of Nice, graced us with a speech where wisdom, her wisdom, was widely shared with the many journalists present in the rehearsal room of this theater.
Theater-making is above all an act of exchange in the service of humanity. The stage, perhaps the only tool left to convey a touch of humanism, of humanity in society. Her speech continued, demonstrating a cyclical situation like at the beginning of the ’60s.
We are all connected, something is happening in the world, and theater must restore humans to their place in a dehumanized society. Without being idealistic, or even utopian, theater should have the leading role in political life and society.
After this introduction full of common sense and wisdom, Irina presented the program whose title: DREAM THEATER AWAKENING, is in itself a perfect summary of this season, one committed to saving the planet. Let us awaken, nothing to do with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s a theater festival with plays and conferences revolving around climate change and the necessary awareness regarding the future of our planet.
Then in 2016, there will be creations with the common thread being a call to be aware of another drama of our time. Black Earth, globalization, our roots, and the migrant catastrophe with shipwrecks, Lampedusa Beach, can we explain this tragedy?… Esperanza and these men, women, and children washing up on Italian shores, the gateway to Europe and a hope for a better life.
In addition to these two parts where the theater will raise awareness of the imbalance between the West and the Third World, the program will offer, as we say every year, productions and co-productions where Shakespeare will have the stage from January 7 to 14, 2016, to show us Twelfth Night. Realizing one’s dreams? Quite a program and this journey, already in itself a dream, takes us from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Trans-Siberian I am.
Other works are on the program, which we leave to the public to discover the secret of, an opportunity to visit the National Theater of Nice, and why not, which we invite you to do, enter and discover the magic of the stage, the boards, and the artists sharing their passion with the public, that of making you dream and awakening consciences to the dramas of the earth.
A slogan tells us: to love life is to go to the cinema, one could say of the theater: to love humans is to go to the theater; life is in itself a play of which we are the author and the performer. A season placed under this double choice: the dream or the utopia and the awakening in the face of this world heading towards its destruction. Neither ecologist nor political,
Irina evokes a certain spirituality, which reminds us of Malraux’s phrase about the 21st century, and we are right in the middle of it!
Thierry Jan
