Theatre Returns to Sibiu

Starting on Friday, Sibiu will be hosting a new edition of the International Theatre Festival, the largest performing arts event in Romania and one of the most important in the world.

Roxana Vasile, 09.06.2017, 12:57

Starting on Friday, for ten days, Sibiu will be the country’s largest international theatre stage. Nearly 70,000 Romanians and foreigners are expected to make up the audience of the over 500 shows and other cultural events included in this year’s edition of one of the most important events of its kind in the world, the Sibiu International Theatre Festival. The entire city, as well as a good part of Sibiu County, will turn into performing spaces hosting 3,300 artists and guests from more than 70 countries.

The theme of this 24th edition of the Festival is love, as the director of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Constantin Chiriac, tells us: “We pay tribute to the most complex and strongest feeling on earth. The International Theatre Festival is a way to showcase love and also a measure of love as we can see in few other communities. I don’t think there are many communities in the world where all forces of those communities can join hands and make beauty triumph.”

The organisers have decided to turn the start of this year’s Festival into a statement in itself: as many as 35 events were included in the first day’s agenda, including theatre workshops and exhibitions, a performance of the well-known Romanian-born French playwright Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bold Soprano” by a French company, a “lecture on nothing” by the American stage director Robert Wilson and a tango performance. Adding to these are a parade of water creatures brought to Sibiu by a French street art company, a high wire show by a German circus troupe, a fado concert and fireworks.

Almost 80 performances in the current edition of the Festival have already been sold out. On the other hand, however, more than 60% of the events in the Festival are free for the public, which makes the miracle of performing arts accessible for the entire local community. Apart from indoor events, the Sibiu Festival is well-known for its emphasis on street arts events, which have grown into one of the strengths of the Festival not only in terms of their quality, but also of the emotion that they spark.

Another novelty this year is a series of organ concerts in several Saxon fortified churches, and a special programme of 5 shows in English, to be performed at the Sibiu Academy of Land Forces for the Romanian and foreign troops taking part in a joint NATO exercise. Also on Friday, a four-day book fair begins, as part of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, called “Sibiu Book Festival — the Book Street.”