Dame Judi Dench – Message 2010
World Theatre Day is an opportunity to celebrate Theatre in all its myriad forms. Theatre is a source of entertainment and inspiration and has the ability to unify the many diverse cultures and peoples that exist throughout the world. But theatre is more than that and also provides opportunities to educate and inform.
Theatre is performed throughout the world and not always in a traditional theatre setting. Performances can occur in a small village in Africa, next to a mountain in Armenia, on a tiny island in the Pacific. All it needs is a space and an audience. Theatre has the ability to make us smile, to make us cry, but should also make us think and reflect.
Theatre comes about through team work. Actors are the people who are seen, but there is an amazing set of people who are not seen. They are equally as important as the actors and their differing and specialist skills make it possible for a production to take place. They too must share in any triumphs and successes that may hopefully occur.
March 27 is always the official World Theatre Day. In many ways every day should be considered a theatre day, as we have a responsibility to continue the tradition to entertain, to educate and to enlighten our audiences, without whom we couldn’t exist.
Years ago I saw Judy Dench playing a young Queen Victoria.She was as extraordinary then as she is now.
[...] let it inspire you and your tribe. The 2010 World Theatre Day address is from Dame Judi Dench. Here it is for [...]
this is the most boring theatre day message ever. Good actress, bad message writer.
[...] Day – March 27 Posted on March 8, 2010 by woollywotnots Saturday 27th March is World Theatre Day. What will you be doing to celebrate the [...]
I agree with beliz : she could have been talking about ice cream for all the passion she put into it. Theatre is great – for those who can afford a ticket…
“Actors are the people who are seen, but there is an amazing set of people who are not seen”
At PAL Vancouver we support both the “seen” and the “not seen” through subsidized housing for performing arts and allied professions.
This reads like a D- paper written by a seventh grader, who cribbed the wikipedia entry on theatre the night before.
“So you want me to write a speech about theatre?”
“If you wouldn’t mind Dame Judi”
“How many words it gotta’ be?”
“As many words as you like.”
“No… what I mean is, how many words I gotta’ write?”
“Um… a page or two would be fine.”
“TWO PAGES!!”
“… or one… ”
“awh man… Awh man, this is going to take forever”
“… Dame Judi… if you feel, like you can express yourself in less words, that will be fine.
“Awh man… Okay… darn… Fine. Fine”
[...] legtekintélyesebb színésznője, Judi Dench mondott érdekeset, amikor a felelősséget emlegette üzenetében. Az idei színházi világnapon csakúgy, mint más években, a színházak némelyike [...]
Sorry, but I can’t read this out to general public from the stage: the audience would think I was a fool for wasting their time .
Inviting comments from the floor might be better.
Inviting audience members to write a note on the value of theatre and stick it on the wall etc.
We are now contemplating whether to make our own statement – especially coming theatre students. All our students can articulate the purpose of theatre far better then this.
My question is not of Dame Judi – who clearly is a busy lady, amazingly and courageously now playing Titania on stage at her age – but of the World Theatre Day organizers who could have written something much better for her to approve or amend. They should also have received this weeks ago so that a fall-back speech could be used. Indeed they should have protected Dame Judi from industry disappointment and possible public mockery – as i am doing by not reading this ‘address’ to the public.
Theatre has the immense pwer to change the world. Lets salute this finest human activity on this great dat
what a beautiful occasion! We all need to embrace it and encourage people, young and old, colored and white, to embrace theatre. Go out, see a new play, read a play, support a playwright’s works!
[...] 2010 World Theatre Day Message: Dame Judi Dench Von Der Doppelgänger Hinterlasse einen Kommentar Kategorien: present 2010 World Theatre Day Message: Dame Judi Dench [...]
A few people have expressed that they are somewhat underwhelmed by this year’s WTD message by Dame Dench. Please feel free to read the alternative (American) message, written by Lynn Nottage:
http://worldtheatreday.org/us-message-by-lynn-nottage/
[...] out the World Theatre Day blog with a ton of cool stuff on it, including this year’s addresses from actor Judi Dench and playwright Lynn [...]
Best wishes for all theatre lovers and theatre personalities on this happy occassion of World Theatre Day. We at Bangalore INDIA celeberated by honourinf an eminent theatre persobnality and also by reading the World Theatre Day message to the audience assembled.Our troupe ANTHARANGA ALONG WITH OTHER THEATRE GROUPS have been celeberating the World Theatre Day from past eight years.
For further details you can contace me on my mail:
arpadaki@gmail.com.
ACHUTHA RAO PADAKI
MY YR WORLD THEATRE FANTASY DAY OF A LIFETIME
It all takes place, of course, in the smoldering ruins of The Globe – restored once more to the archeologists of the future in an all-too-historically-faithful revival of HENRY VIII, ALL IS TRUE.
The rivers of the world have been dredged, Kurt Schwitters has been exhumed for one last merzbau, Sir Nicholas Serota is pasting the walls with luggage labels and cigarette cartons and free newspapers. Shocked dolphins, the figureheads of shipwrecks, decommissioned nuclear warheads and rare whales all orbit in a cosmological mechanic aquarium, and it drips brine on your sister’s hair.
The audience are all suspended from the ceiling on swings of blue and orange rope and driftwood, which rise and fall and catapault someone into the nightsky: you hear them enter the Thames, and you see their occasional beaming betowelled reentrances, waving to you, waving to their family and friends.
It’s all in a language you cannot speak but do understand: it is spoken in phrases repeated in refrains, and written in the movements of one hundred bodies: the actors are all dancers and the musicians are all dancers and the dancers are all your past lovers and you find it is the story of your life you’ve always lived in your head, heard and seen for the first time.
Scarab beetles crawl in the embers, owls are nesting in the balconies, and the chef from an Ethiopian restaurant throws spices into the fire, spices which send your mother to sleep, and bring her long-forgotten bittersweet dreams until she falls off her swing and Kevin Spacey kindly leads her out of the auditorium.
The South Bank’s human statues have quietly followed you in and now run along the charred roofs their naked bodies daubed in thick paint all the colours of the world flags, juggling candles, scattering coppers, handfuls of almonds, raining playing cards flutter past your head.
The girls who followed you along the riverside and disappeared when you gave them coins now parade through the ashes, their ashen skin, the dots incised in their high cheeks, their wrackish rhythms, their infant rhythms, their shrieking gypsy song.
Some hungry Community Support have followed the girls in, but they have laid down their batons, and are being taught to dance, their radios echo angrily unanswered across the arena.
A tribe of children from the local school ride in on animals liberated from the local zoo, dismount and execute a dozen proud foxtrots on the splintered stage.
A troupe of deaf choreographers carry placards which say THUS I PARTICIPATE IN LIFE and other, cleverer things and someone has told them to scream, in beautiful disunion: I love you, I love you, you can never disappoint me.
A thousand men and women are queueing up outside with TVs under their arms – it has been bring your TV to work day but they are all redundant – and break ranks to surge inside and haul their TVs onto the dying fire and the mutinying crew of Doctor Who have dragged a stolen Tardis from the BBC studios, strip it to kindling and feed the fire, which now grows greedy with renewed intent.
Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen perform an increasingly frantic fire safety drill, piggybacking thrilled air stewardesses whose hopping scalded feet scratch their august autographs into the glowing cinders.
Someone from the BBC crew is giving the schoolchildren a lesson in elementary electronics dissecting the Community Support radios.
A sewage pipe bursts beneath the stage and riverwater is sucked back and sent high into the air, dousing your feet, fish falling flipping on the embers. Seagulls circle. The fire seethes.
The girls and the Community Support, the chef and the statues and the children and the BBC crew, Sir Nicholas Serta and Kurt Schwitters and Kevin Spacey, the actors and dancers and musicians gather and reach out their arms to receive the water, wash themselves and each other.
You don’t know any of your neighbors, infact you’ve never seen anyone like them, but in the constant intervals you just get chatting, you love the way they’ve dyed their hair, the pieces of jewellery they wear, and when dawn breaks you go for dinner in a little place nearby that makes faraway food taste homemade and someone plays the accordion improbably well and you’re all like What a fantastic day it’s been and We should do this again and though you don’t live anywhere near one another you share a cab home and the driver discourses prettily on the national deficit and the fare comes to less than you thought because you realise you share an childhood obsession in John Hughes movies and one of you invites the other on some unrehearsed pretext back to a small but welcoming flat, with posters of great art works on the wall, and you fall exhausted onto a single bed where one of you cries and is held in the other’s arms. You promise you’ll see each other soon, though you both know that you won’t, and you promise never, ever to forget.