Gift

The GIFT Festival was found in 1997 right after the death of Michael Tumanishvili. One of the biggest names in Georgian theater industry in 20th century. In 2009 the Georgian government stopped financing the festival due for political reasons for 3 years. But it was continuing it's life in Edinburgh International Festival thanks to the board of directors. In 2013 the GIFT was back. The strands that weave the Georgia International Festival of Theater together are big, bright and uncomfortable. They put theater and dance firmly in a zone of argument that says an artistic question is always a political question, and one which will never be answered in platitudes. Over at the Tumanishvili Theater, though, Dolidze and the GIFT festival are rising to the challenge of these latest troubled times with their usual flair, helping to put Georgian theater on the international map, and introducing Georgian audiences to an impressive range of international work. The starting point was a sense in the international theater community that Georgia needed to free itself from the mess that the breakup of the Soviet Union and the ensuing civil conflict had left. GIFT was not only an acronym of the festival's name, it represented the gift of artistic solidarity from the theatrical world. Much of the impetus came from William Burdett-Coutts, the founder of Assembly (one of the main production companies of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe) and later the Director of London's Riverside Studios. He garnered the support of many of the great names of British theater, including Peter Brook, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Attenborough and Anthony Hopkins, and Burdett-Coutts was a major force in shaping the blueprint for the programming. "It was a gift to humanity," said one Italian company member, after the show. And like all great festivals -including Edinburgh, at its magnificent best - GIFT is about these mutual acts of giving; allowing the great tradition of Georgian theater to give itself to the world, and demonstrating to this great and beautiful city that the world does not always arrive to invade and conquer, but sometimes comes to sing, laugh, weep and celebrate, to heal the wounds of history, and to face the future together.