06/11/2025
THIS is why we do what we do: thanks to LINKAGES: Poland cohort member Michael Moran for putting into such eloquent language the moment we are all facing.
Below is but a small excerpt of Michael's extraordinary reflection on the Kontakt Festival; click in the link the comments to read the whole piece!
"Theater can give you a pulse of a culture, not just through content, but through form, through the force of expression on stage and the energy it carries. That force reveals much about a society’s vitality. And perhaps vitality is the visible expression of a culture’s freedom.
[...]
A society hollowed out by distrust doesn’t collapse all at once. It devolves. The Roman Empire fell when commands from the center stopped being followed at the edges. When side deals replaced systems, the thread of trust snapped. And once broken, trust is almost impossible to reweave.
Trust is built on faith. And trust is the foundation of freedom.
If freedom’s highest expression is play, then theater, as pure play, becomes its most potent form. And for play to thrive, trust must be present.
It makes sense, then, that theater so often takes freedom as its subject.
[...]
Polish theater may be wrestling with the same dilemma that American theater faces: how do we stay alive to the unimaginable?"
