The Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich Theatre Spectacle) is an international theatre and performing arts festival, held annually each summer in Zürich, Switzerland. First held in 1980, [1] the festival invites 20-25 different performing arts groups and artists from around the world to take part each year. [2] The event began in a much smaller form as an annual international meeting of independent theatre groups, before emerging as a much larger cultural event in Switzerland. [3] Currently, five separate locations are used as venues for the festival, [4] of which the largest is the Landiwiese venue. [5] The Landiwiese venue and the so-called Saffa-Insel are located by Lake Zurich in the Wollishofen quarter, District 2, and features numerous open-air shows. [1] [5]
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers, typically actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
Performing arts are a form of art in which artists use their voices, bodies or inanimate objects to convey artistic expression. It is different from visual arts, which is when artists use paint, canvas or various materials to create physical or static art objects. Performing arts include a range of disciplines which are performed in front of a live audience.
A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. Next to religion and folklore, a significant origin is agricultural. Food is such a vital resource that many festivals are associated with harvest time. Religious commemoration and thanksgiving for good harvests are blended in events that take place in autumn, such as Halloween in the northern hemisphere and Easter in the southern.
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The most recent event was held from the 6th to 23 August 2015, [6] The next festival was scheduled to be held between 19 August to 5 September 2010, [7] and will have a special focus on Asia. [8]
Asia is Earth's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the Eastern and Northern Hemispheres. It shares the continental landmass of Eurasia with the continent of Europe and the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with both Europe and Africa. Asia covers an area of 44,579,000 square kilometres (17,212,000 sq mi), about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the human population, was the site of many of the first civilizations. Asia is notable for not only its overall large size and population, but also dense and large settlements, as well as vast barely populated regions. Its 4.5 billion people constitute roughly 60% of the world's population.
