The annual Festival Mundial du Théâtre (World Theater Festival) in Nancy was founded by Jack Lang (1939) and his colleagues, with the first festival taking place in 1963. This festival, like those that followed, was usually held at the end of April and beginning of May.

Initially, until 1967-68, the aim of the festival was to bring together non-professional theater groups, mainly organized at universities. In its early years, the festival already extended beyond the borders of Western Europe, and the organizers quickly welcomed various companies and their performances from the Eastern Bloc (Central and Eastern Europe), America, Asia, and Africa. By the end of the 1960s, in connection with the French university movements, the festival changed its image. It retained its goal of accepting applications from non-state-funded, non-professional companies, but political commitment and political themes were given priority.

By the early 1970s, the Festival Mundial du Théâtre had become the defining theatrical event of the era, where influential artists and companies became known worldwide (Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Pina Bausch and her company from Wuppertal, Augusto Boal, Bread and Puppet Theatre, etc.). Thanks in part to the Nancy meetings, companies from the non-professional scene became mainstream Western theater companies by the second half of the 1970s. With this, the world theater festival also changed its image and, in the first half of the 1980s, began to host performances by state-run and/or permanent theaters, maintaining the importance of political themes and, where possible, incorporating the theatrical aesthetics that had become fashionable at the time, until its demise in the mid-1980s.

Jack Lang remained the face and main organizer of the festival for two and a half decades. In addition to his organizational work, he entered politics and became a leading cultural politician in France in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, as the festival expanded, more and more staff were needed. From the late 1960s onwards, participation in the festival was no longer possible through individual applications, but only through invitations based on preliminary assessments by staff members sent to various countries. To illustrate this, Jean-Paul Brodier, one of the Eastern European selectors, published the following report in the April 20, 1973 issue of Le Monde: “In Hungary, I was impressed by the general goodwill towards theater and the aesthetic richness of Hungarian theater. As his report says: >Theater performances are held everywhere in Budapest, even in private homes.<“.

Below is a list of festivals in which Hungarian companies participated during the period covered by the research (1961–1974). Based on the available and accessible materials from Hungary, we were able to reconstruct the program of the first festival with Hungarian participation (1965), while for the other festivals, the various performances and companies were organized by continent and then by country.