25th Edition

New Dionysia

It is almost unbelievable how much the ancient Dionysian festival had in common with our SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER festival – a festival of theatre and the joy of life in its purest form, a carnival with cultural crossover, friendly encounters and exchange of opinions.

That ancient festival show was attended by whole villages and guests from the entire world known to them, and they all sat together in the theatre for several days.

A human society in those days needed to establish its primary ethical and moral rules, and that need was reflected in their myths and theatre. Theatre was supposed to communicate these thoughts to less educated people as well, which is a funny idea nowadays. Theatre had the power to start discussion and directly confront an audience with its themes.

The theatre, connected with spiritual life, was based on religious rituals, which probably came out of a long-term observation of the surrounding world. A brutal separation of cultural, spiritual and scientific spheres is most likely necessary at an individual level, but it is unacceptable for the basic human experience.

We want the topic for the 25^th International theatre schools´ festival SETKÁNÍ/ENCOUNTER to reflect the important things which enable the theatre to survive - its roots, firmly embedded in our culture, resisting the poisonous philistinism of the everyday.  So we have here hundreds of forms and genres which we can sample, but if we wanted to try all of them, that would be similar to Greek orgiastic form of dining.

We would not like to go back to this kind of antiquity, unless...