AICT-IATC President Jenkins and Willem Dafoe offer thoughts on World Theatre Day 2026

World Theatre Day (WTD) has been celebrated around the world since 1962 on the 27th of March as both a party and a commitment. The organization’s website notes (using British spellings) that the day “is a celebration for those who can see the value and importance of the art form ‘theatre’, and acts as a wake-up-call for governments, politicians and institutions which have not yet recognised its value to the people and to the individual and have not yet realised its potential for economic growth.”

U.S. actor and theater maker Willem Dafoe authored the 2026 international message coordinated by the International Theatre Institute, available in many languages on the WTD website. A selection from that statement:

“Like the sign in the gambling hall says “YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN.” Shared experience in real time of an act of creation, that may be scored and designed but is always different, is certainly the obvious strength of the theatre. Socially, politically, theatre has never been so important and vital to our understanding of ourselves and the world.

The “elephant in the room” is new technologies and social networking. which promises connection but seemingly has fragmented and isolated people from each other. I use my computer daily even if I have no social media, I have even googled myself as an actor, and have also consulted AI for information. But you have to be blind not to recognize that human contact risks being replaced by relationships with devices. While some technology can serve us well the problem of not knowing who’s on the other end of the circle of communication runs deep and contributes to a crisis of truth and reality. While the internet can raise questions, it very seldom captures a sense of wonder that theatre creates. A wonder based in attention, engagement and a spontaneous community of those present in a circle of action and response.”

Willem Dafoe, United States, International Message for World Theater Day 2026

International Association of Theatre Critics (AICT-IATC) President Jeffrey Eric Jenkins posted his 2026 WTD statement “World Theater Day in an Age of Contraction” on the AICT-IATC website. Selections from that statement follow:

“Critics, often cast as peripheral or adversarial figures, are in fact central to the ecology of theatrical life. We document, interpret, historicize, and challenge. We sustain a record of artistic endeavor that resists erasure, simplification, and the decline of institutional memory. At a moment when journalism itself is under siege—financially, politically, ideologically—the role of criticism becomes even more vital. Without it, theater risks becoming ephemeral in the most impoverished sense: not a living art sustained by discourse and debate, but a vanishing one, deprived of memory, context, and public accountability.

The pressures shaping this moment are both external and self-imposed. In the United States, as in parts of Europe, arts organizations and academic institutions increasingly engage in anticipatory compliance, shrinking their ambitions so as not to attract scrutiny from those who control funding streams or regulatory frameworks. This is especially visible in the non-profit sector, where survival often depends on maintaining the appearance of “neutrality” in an environment where neutrality itself has become unstable.

….

World Theater Day, in 2026, is less a celebration than a call to attention. It reminds us that the freedoms upon which theater depends—expression, inquiry, assembly—are neither guaranteed nor evenly distributed. They must be continually asserted and defended in practice.

To celebrate theater today is to insist on its necessity. It is to affirm that, even in times of constraint, the human impulse to gather, to witness, and to tell stories cannot be extinguished.

In that insistence lies not only the survival of the art form, but the possibility of a more open and connected world—where performance remains a vital space of shared meaning.”

Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, President AICT-IATC, “World Theater Day in an Age of Contraction”

Celebrating theater in all forms serves as an antidote to violence and war, as a means to preserve cultural heritage and stimulate dialogue, and to celebrate the artform. And the best way to celebrate World Theatre Day may well be to attend a live performance. Hie thee to a theater.

— Assembled, edited, annotated by Martha Wade Steketee