Art is Peace - John Fosse :: World Theatre Day 2024 Message

This podcast is a message from John Foss for World Theatre Day 2024. He emphasizes that while everyone is unique, we are fundamentally similar regardless of language, skin color, or hair color. Good art combines the unique with the universal, bridging the boundaries between people and cultures. It shows us what is different and foreign, creating a sense of fascination and transcendence. In contrast, war and violent conflicts seek to eliminate anything different or foreign. Art is peace and brings opposites together. Let peace prevail worldwide. Namaskar, this is special podcast from Breathing India is a readout of the word theatre day message for the year 2024 by John Foss. 27th of March is commemorated as the word theatre day all over the world and there has been a tradition whereby one eminent personality from the world of theatre and art he authors a message to the whole world. Art is peace. Every person is unique and yes also like every other person. Our visible external appearance is different from everyone else's. Of course there is all well and good but there is also something inside each and every one of us which belongs to that person alone which is that person alone. We might call this their spirit or their soul or else we can decide not to label it at all in words just leave it alone. But while we are all unlike one another we are alike too. People from every part of the world are fundamentally similar no matter what language we speak, what skin colour we have, what hair colour we have. This may be something of a paradox that we are completely alike and utterly dissimilar at the same time. Maybe a person is intrinsically paradoxical. In our bridging of body and soul we encompass both the most earthbound tangible existence and something that transcends these material earthbound limits. Art, good art manages in its wonderful way to combine the utterly unique with the universal. It lets us understand what is different, what is foreign you might say as being universal. By doing so art breaks through the boundaries between languages, geographical regions, countries. It brings together not just everyone's individual qualities but also in another sense the individual characteristics of every group of people, for example of every nation. Art does this not by levelling differences and making everything the same but on the contrary by showing us what is different from us, what is alien or foreign. All good art contains precisely that, something alien, something we cannot completely understand and yet at the same time do understand in a way. It contains a mystery so to speak, something that fascinates us and thus pushes us beyond our limits and in so doing creates the transcendence that all art must both contain in itself and lead us to. I know of no better way of bringing opposites together. This is the exact reverse approach from that of the violent conflicts we see all too often in the world which indulge the destructive temptation to annihilate anything foreign, anything unique and different often by using the most inhuman inventions technology has put at our disposal. There is terrorism in the world, there is war for people have animalistic side too driven by the instinct to experience the other, the foreign as a threat to one's own existence rather than as a fascinating mystery. This is how uniqueness, the differences we all can see disappear leaving behind a collective sameness where anything different is a threat that needs to be eradicated. What is seen from without as a difference for example in religion or political ideology becomes something that needs to be defeated and destroyed. War is the battle against what lies deep inside all of us, something unique and it is also a battle against art, against what lies deep inside all art. I have been speaking here about art in general not about theatre or playwriting in particular but that is because as I have said all good art deep down revolves around the same thing taking the utterly unique, the utterly specific and making it universal, uniting the particular with the universal by means of expressing it artistically not eliminating its specificity but emphasizing this specificity letting what is foreign and unfamiliar shine clearly through. War in art are opposites just as war and peace are opposites it is as simple as that. Art is peace ladies and gentlemen so this is the International Theatre Day message from John Faust. I hope it would leave some prints in all our hearts and soul and may the peace prevail all over the world. Namaskar