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We remember her today with the World Day Message she made for ASSITEJ in 2010.

Message from Orna Porat

DREAMS OF THE HUMAN FAMILY

The things that shape us, our character, are the ones that are locked in our memory – endeavors and events we have experienced and which have become memories. The things we remember sometimes originate in our fellows’ desire to remember. Even events at whose center we ourselves stood reach our memory through the memory of others. We gathered them to ourselves from the memory of others, from stories they related to us.

Those with a rich imagination are even likely to remember things they have not experienced at all, but which through the power of that same imaginative memory became a real and well-remembered personal experience. In the theatre we find all of those memories of ours anew, the real ones and the ones that are figments of personal and collective memory.

That is the power of the theatre – the power to raise consciousness, associations, emotions, blocks of memory. The theatre is one of the most important art forms in the cultural life of human society, for it is engaged in all the spheres of human life. In children’s theatre, the young audience encounters not only a familiar reality, but also a new and still unfamiliar one. They absorb refreshing impressions and discover new possibilities – the formation of a new life experience.

The theatre deepens and enriches the child’s sensitivity by means of the renewed encounter with a familiar, close world that is known to him.
The theatre broadens the child’s horizons by helping him to soar on the wings of imagination to unknown, distant, strange and enchanted worlds. A visit to the theatre creates in the young audience an emotional and intellectual collective memory – vestiges of linguistic, visual and ideological associations.

In the theatre, the child relives not only his memories and personal dreams, but also memories and dreams of the human family, of his ancestors, of his nation, of the entire human race! Children’s theatre in our multicultural world has a special role to play in laying common cultural foundations that will bring the other closer: through its universal values it can convey a message of the beauty in human beings, and through acting express the secret of joy, childhood, longing and hope.

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