The Shakespeare Festival is the largest, cyclical, international theatre event, organised each year in the first week of August in Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia. Its history begins in 1993, with the first Gdańsk Shakespeare Days, which evolved in 1997 into an international festival for the celebration of the Gdańsk Millennium. Since 2008 the event has been co-organised by the Gdańsk Shakespearean Theatre and Theatrum Gedanense Foundation. We present the most interesting Shakespearean theatrical productions from Poland and abroad. By 2010, there had been 14 editions of the festival, during which around 150 theatre companies from over 40 countries, including such exotic and faraway places as South Korea, Israel, Japan and Cuba, performed on the stages of the TriCity. The works of great masters of the theatre were staged, among them those of: Peter Brook, Elizabeth LeCompte, Luk Perceval, Lew Dodin, Eimuntas Nekrošius, Oskaras Koršunovas, Roberto Ciulli, Robert Sturua and many others. Performances are accompanied by meetings with their creators: directors, actors, playwrights. The festival becomes a natural platform to for meetings and intellectual exchanges between artists and people of cultures from around the globe. The event is accompanied by a contest for Best Polish Staging of Shakespeare's Work of the Season with theatres from around the country competing for the award – the Golden Yorrick. A number of former winners have gone on to perform at other Shakespeare festivals in Europe and the United States.
For years the festival has also included an extensive educational program, "The Shakespeare Summer Academy", aimed at young people from Poland and abroad, an educational event "Closer to Theatre" for secondary school children from the Pomerania region, and "Dolne Miasto Talent Factory", for residents of a neglected district of Gdańsk. Our educational activities are meant to reach young people who don't have access to high culture and arts students in Poland and abroad. We would like to put them in touch with world-class theatre.
The festival is exceptional in that it attracts great numbers of young people: volunteers who wish to help in its organisation, drama workshop participants, Shakespeare mural painters, creators of subsequent editions of the Shakespeare Daily newsletter. They have the opportunity to experience something very unique and to meet artists from around the world, observing them not only on the stage but during rehearsals or at post-performance in the Festival Club. We are convinced that such activities have helped develop a community of people deeply devoted to Shakespeare and, in the future, intensely involved in the activity of the Gdansk Shakespearean Theatre, which will soon have its very own headquarters.
