“Art is peace” he notes in his message about her World Theater Day the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse (Jon Fosse), winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Fosse was this year chosen by the Executive Board of the International Theater Institute to write the message for World Theater Day 2024, which has been celebrated internationally every March 27 since 1962.

In the past, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Laurence Olivier, Jean-Louis Barot, Peter Brook, Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Ionesco, Luchino Visconti, Martin Eslin, Iakovos Campanelli, Ariane Mnuskin, Robert Lepage, Augusto Boal, Judi Dench and many others have submit their thoughts to this end.

Here is Jon Fosse’s message for World Theater Day:

“Each person is unique and at the same time similar to all other people. Our visible, outward appearance is different from everyone else’s of course, but there is also something inside each of us that belongs only to that person – that is only that person. We could call it his spirit or his soul. Or else, we can decide not to put it into words at all, just leave it alone.

But while we are all different from each other, we are also the same. People from every part of the world are fundamentally similar, regardless of the language we speak, the color of our skin, the color of our hair.

This can be somewhat paradoxical: that we are completely alike and at the same time completely dissimilar. Perhaps the human being is inherently paradoxical, in bridging our body and soul we encompass both our more earthly, tangible existence and something that transcends these material, earthly boundaries.

Art, good art, manages in its wonderful way to combine the completely unique with the universal. It allows us to understand the different – the foreign, we might say – as universal. In this way, art breaks the boundaries between languages, geographical areas, countries. It gathers together not only the individual qualities of everyone, but also in another sense, the individual characteristics of every group of people, for example every nation.

Art does this not by flattening differences and making everything the same, but instead by showing us what is different from us, other or foreign. All great art contains just that: something foreign, something we cannot fully understand and yet at the same time somehow understand. It contains a mystery, so to speak. Something that fascinates us and thus pushes us beyond our limits and in this way creates the transcendence that every art must both contain within it and lead us to it.

I know of no better way to bring opposites together. This is the exact opposite approach to the violent conflicts we see so often in the world, which succumb to the destructive temptation to exterminate anything foreign, anything unique and different, often using the most inhumane inventions that technology has put at our disposal. There is terrorism in the world. There is a war. Because people also have an animal side that is driven by the instinct to experience the other, the foreign, as a threat to their own existence and not as a fascinating mystery.

This is how uniqueness—the differences we can all see—disappears, leaving behind a collective uniformity where anything different is a threat to be eliminated. What is outwardly seen as difference, for example in religion or political ideology, becomes something to be overcome and destroyed.

War is the battle against what lies deep within all of us: the unique. And it is also a battle against art, against what lies deep within all art.

I have spoken here of art in general, not of theater or playwriting in particular, but that is because, as I said, all good art, at heart, revolves around the same thing: it takes the utterly unique, the utterly concrete, and makes it universal. It unites the particular with the universal through its artistic expression: it does not eliminate its particularity, but accentuates it, letting the foreign and the unknown shine through clearly.

War and art are opposites, just as war and peace are opposites – it’s that simple. Art is peace”