The story
Tampere Theatre Festival in Tampere
Tampere Theatre Festival, founded in 1968 by Tampere City Council alongside local theatre companies and actors unions, is the oldest continuously running annual theatre festival in the Nordic countries, held each August. It now programs around two hundred theatre performances plus hundreds of associated events across the city each edition.
Tampere City Council became the founding member of what would become the Tampere Theatre Festival in the autumn of 1968, joined by the Theatre Club of Tampere, the TTT Theatre, Tampere Theatre, and two actors unions, with the idea itself credited to Olavi Veistaja, who pitched a theatre festival to the city's mayor Erkki Lindfors amid the broader cultural ferment of the late 1960s that produced numerous new European arts festivals during the same period.