Why Theatre?
"Why Theatre?". No question more fundamental, no question more difficult to answer. Why do we make theatre? What purpose does it have, and does it even needs a purpose?
Usually, the answers are provided by the making of theatre itself - until the pandemic shook up our 'normal' search for answers. In March 2020, the NTGent was closed for an indefinite period, like most theatres. So we asked the question to artists and intellectuals from all over the world: "Why Theatre?"
We received 106 answers in short essays, memories, manifestos, drawings, poems, letters, .... and collected them in our Golden Book V, "a compendium of progressive contemporary theatre", as Deutschlandfunk put it. The answers live on at whytheatre.eu, an ever-growing encyclopaedia of why we make our art.
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