The Tampere Theatre Festival, or Tampereen Teatterikesä, takes place in

Tampere Tampere ( , , ; sv, Tammerfors, ) is a city in the Pirkanmaa region, located in the western part of Finland. Tampere is the most populous inland city in the Nordic countries. It has a population of 244,029; the urban area has a population o ...

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

, at the beginning of August and is the oldest annual

theatre festival Theatre festivals are amongst the earliest types of festival. Classical Greek theatre was associated with religious festivals dedicated to Dionysus, called the City Dionysia. The medieval mystery plays were presented at the major Christian feasts ...

in the Nordic countries. The festival was founded in 1968 and the first festival was held in 1969 with support from Tampereen Teatterikerho ( Tampere Theatre Club). Today the festival features a couple of hundred theatre performances and hundreds of other events each year. The total number of visitors in 2005 was 92,000. In 2015 the Tampere Theatre Festival was the ninth largest festival in Finland in terms of tickets sold and the fourth largest in terms of visitors. The content of the Tampere Theatre Festival consists of six programs: the main program, the program tent, the restaurant festival Encorebaana, OFF Tampere, the night of the events and other programs. The main program of the Tampere Theatre Festival consists of performances by international guests and professional Finnish theatres. It consists of about 20 groups in average, of which about a third comes from abroad. Additionally, both professional and amateur theatres can be seen in the OFF series. The program contains drama, dance theatre, street performances and club and restaurant shows. Workshops, seminars, exhibitions and meetings for professionals and amateurs are also organised in connection to the Theatre Festival. The Encorebaana is a free-of-charge restaurant festival held in restaurants, with performances ranging from stand-up comedy to monologues and from

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

circus A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclis ...

. A related event that takes place during Tampere Theatre Festival is the cross-artistic Tapahtumien Yö, The Great Nocturnal Happening, which features a wide variety of arts and culture and is co-produced by the festival.

External links

The official website of Tampere Theatre Festival

Festivals.fi
Theatre festivals in Finland Festivals established in 1969 Tourist attractions in Tampere Summer events in Finland 1969 establishments in Finland {{Theat-festival-stub