SITF 2019
The Sibiu International Theatre Festival has come to an end
Bogdan Matei, 24.06.2019, 13:55
In 29 nine years
of post-Communist freedom, the city of Sibiu, in central Romania, has been the
host of the most important performing arts festival in Romania 26 times. The Sibiu International Theatre Festival was designed as a multi-functional body and a creative space, allowing
for the manifestation of new theatre techniques. Every time, the cultural offer
has been extremely rich, including productions by the
most representative theatres in Romania, plays staged by prestigious foreign
theatre companies, urban events held every day in the old city’s squares and
streets and in the medieval fortified cities and churches around Sibiu. Part of
the performances held during the festival were also brought to theatres in
Bucharest, Cluj and Medias.
The International Theatre Festival was also the key
factor in the designation of Sibiu ‘European Capital of Culture’ in 2007.
Thanks to the market created by the festival through the Performance Exchange,
the ‘Radu Stanca’ National Theatre in Sbiu has participated in some of the most
prestigious such festivals in the world: Edinburgh, Avignon, Naples, Brussels,
Seoul, Tokyo, Porto and Frankfurt.
This year’s edition
of the festival, held between the 14th and the 23rd of
June, gathered 3,300 artists from 73 countries, who performed in 540 events in
75 different locations, with some 70,000 spectators every day. The audience
record – 123,000 – was reached on Sunday, the last day of the festival. Here is
the founder and president of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival, the
actor Constatin Chiriac:
I
would like to first bow before the citizens of this city, who have acknowledged
the fact that they have one of the greatest festivals in the world and that
they are worthy of it, they take responsibility for it and carry on its
tradition with pride. Our greatest accomplishment in the past 26 years is the
fact that we’ve managed to create an audience, and extraordinary audience, who
knows how to receive its guests, and which is now extending all across the
country.
Given the
figures mentioned earlier, Constantin Chirac says that the Sibiu Festival could
be described as a unique festival. This year, its partners have been the
embassies of France, Japan, Germany, Israel, China and Great Britain. The
festival is a strategic objective for the Romanian Culture Ministry, which,
together with the local administration, is the main founder of the event, which
is also supported by the European Commission, the foreign cultural centers in
Romania and private sponsors. Last year, for the first time, the festival had
two honorary patrons: Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis, who was Sibiu’s mayor
for 14 years, and the heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, whose passion
for Transylvania, where he has several properties, has become a well-known
fact.
