The musical performance Nephelococcygiae and Chirping by Michalis and Pantelis Kalogerakis and Tonia Tzirita Zacharatou explores the relationship between humans and birds. In this stage production, poetic language that has been set to music intertwines with fragments of scientific facts, ornithological findings, and stories about birds.
Original musical compositions inspired by poems penned by Miltos Sachtouris, Napoleon Lapathiotis, Jacques Prévert and others, are presented live by a group of musicians and two performers, as they struggle to investigate the possibility of coexistence between humans and birds in a present that is marked by continuous conflicts. What does survive today from the utopian city of Aristophanes’ Nephelococcygia? What stories are hidden behind seabirds flying to the land in search of food, migratory birds colliding with airplanes, or pigeons in city centers? What songs lie within their flying lives?
Conflict, whether destructive, life-bearing, or both, is a fundamental state where different energies, forces, materials, humans, views, and cultures meet – an encounter that radically transforms all the involved parts.
Ergon ensemble presents three fascinating, modern musical pieces treating the theme of conflict, in a single narrative for piano, clarinet, cello, violin, and narrator.
The programme will feature the pieces Shattila (2004-05) by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, composed after the Sabra and Shatila massacre on 16 September 1982, Stalag VIIIA (2018) by Tristan Murail, referring to the Nazi concentration camp Stalag VIII-A, and Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940) by Olivier Messiaen, a quartet written by the composer while he was held captive at the Stalag VIII-A concentration camp. These pieces will be combined with scientific and literary excerpts, poems, and original texts discussing conflict in the past and present, (and potentially for eternity), all curated, compiled, and presented by Paris Mexis.
A popular 16th-century Cretan poem featuring a wolf, a fox, and a donkey has been adapted into a modern musical fairy tale with visual elements titled The Donkey’s Tale. It is a piece that satirizes various types of human individuals across different times and places.
Animals play the role of humans. They speak, imagine, dream, conspire, and make jokes. With folk humour, rhyming verses, and an idiomatic language, the performance “covertly and painlessly” criticizes the Western European social classes and the oppression of the weak by the powerful.
Natalia Kotsani and Tasos Kofodimos set the poem to music and perform it, maintaining its plot and units. Visual artist Natalia Manta tells the story using both analogue and digital means and highlighting its modern allegorical aspects, while four musicians on stage engage with the heroes and their tales through music, crafting a parallel narrative of their own.
I fylláda toy gadárou or Gadárou, lykou, kai alepous diigisis hairei is one of the most well-known folk books among the modern Greek people, with numerous reprints up to the 19th century. It is a work by an anonymous poet, written from a humorous and satirical perspective and published in Venice in 1539, twenty years after Bergadis’ poem Apókopos .
Phygital is an immersive event showcasing live audiovisual performances that blend digital and physical-analog musical instruments, complemented by digital projections.
The Phygital event is structured into three distinct live music performances of contemporary electronic music artists George Apergis and Alex Retsis, alongside simultaneous digital artwork projections by the artistic group DEN. This includes visual haikus, a collage of brief micro-compositions combining instrumental and synthetic forms, connected by a deconstructive and unpredictable storytelling.
In the first hour, the audience will experience a digital live music performance by Qebo (Alex Retsis), featuring a blend of electroacoustic and ambient music inspired by the architecture of the castle.
The second hour highlights the EMEX project by George Apergis and Alex Retsis, blending physical-analog instruments with digital technology to offer a dynamic interplay between digital and analog sounds.
The final hour is dedicated to an analog live performance where George Apergis will exclusively use vinyl records.
The music theatre performance In the Labyrinth: Accounts and Poems by Incarcerated Women brings to life poems, thoughts, and accounts of women who have been imprisoned, as well as those who have been released from prison.
The emotional fluctuations, internal conflicts, and mental struggle of these women are brought to the foreground through the performance of traditional songs from various parts of Greece and Southern Italy. Seven female artists – five musicians, an actress, and a dancer –join forces on stage to create a poetic, musical, and visual representation of the Labyrinth.
A contemporary ritual that blends storytelling with live music and dance, creating a performance that is both dynamic and ardent, while also embracing a more traditional (“doric”) approach to presenting various stage expressions, with the goal of vividly portraying on stage the Labyrinth found within the minds and souls of incarcerated women. A hymn to every individual’s personal journey towards the much-desired freedom.
The new piece by Yannis Belonis Journey Across the Balkans for Symphony Orchestra, Mixed Choir, and Narrator focuses on the conflict that influenced the cultural dynamics among the Balkan peoples: while chauvinism of nation-states “enforced” the enhancement of national identities, the frequent mixing of populations along with numerous, consecutive border shifts often led to a fusion of traditions and deep intercultural interactions. Therefore, musical cultures that developed in Southeastern Europe, with their distinct differences and similarities, have created a particularly interesting and colourful musical mosaic that keeps evolving through modern sounds, illuminating the complex and often unexplored aspects of the cultural fermentations that have occurred within the Balkan peninsula throughout the centuries.
The music of all the Balkan peoples was processed uniformly to create a performance involving a symphony orchestra, mixed choir, and a narrator. The latter, through the reading of Harris Sarris’ well-documented texts, will shed light on the conflicting and interconnected cultural identities of the people in the region. The performance’s musical journey begins in Greece and returns to its starting point, after traveling through all the states of the Balkan Peninsula – Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Serbia, North Macedonia, Romania, Montenegro, Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The musical piece SOMNIA PACIS: Dreaming Of Peace is a collective platform, where music and speech come together to expressively interact. Starting from war conflict and moving towards its gradual impact on individuals, communities, and eventually the world, the piece is an artistic search for peaceful coexistence. It combines both classical and traditional timbres, sometimes using complex and other times simple expressive forms. The narration sometimes complements and other times enhances the themes evoked by the music, maintaining a balance between the horror of war and the dream of peace. The collective vocal and rhythmic interplay with the percussion, accompanied by the narration, and complemented by the orchestral ensemble, which both follows the score and improvises, creates a cross-artistic tapestry. This tapestry not only aims to evoke emotions but also to stimulate the audience’s senses, and provoke them by introducing them to an unprecedented musical experience.
Two leading pieces from the literary heritage. Two iconic female characters from Greek literature, Georgios Chortatzis’ Erophile and Kostis Palamas’ Trisevegni, come together on stage.
Trisevgeni is “a person who doesn’t reflect and can’t be subdued, a person of her own mind, and a daredevil”. She doesn’t fit in with the suffocating social environment around her. She is a creature stubbornly defending her own nature – which means, a tragic heroine. Erophile watches her as she tells her story and tenderly accompanies her. She comments, interprets, and feels for her. She is the fairy of the cistern, her dead mother. Until her singing becomes one and the same as Trisevgeni’s, as she says: “My own song always, which is sung by my whole life. To my own tune”. A story tightly interwoven with a singing tune.
The multi-level musical performance The Language of Sea Shells, featuring Thodoris Voutsikakis, a prominent singer from the younger generation, and Marina Kalogirou reciting, presents the musical idioms of Mediterranean cultures along with excerpts from their written works, evoking emotions. Alongside them performing will be the Municipality of Patras Plucked Strings Orchestra “Thanasis Tsipinakis”, conducted by Anastasios Symeonidis.
The performance focuses on the contemporary Mediterranean Individual, who longs to move beyond historical divisions and find the shared inner ground that unites them with their neighbouring peoples, providing them with a strong sense of hope for the future. Morocco, Egypt, Spain, Tunisia, France, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Greece, Algeria, Turkey… The Mediterranean, this known yet unknown region, a palimpsest, a mosaic of people, cultures, religions, languages, customs, habits…The sea that gave birth to civilizations, embraced differences, the sea with the many faces that both connected and separated lives, has always been a cornerstone for its inhabitants, their struggles and dreams, as well as a source of inspiration and tranquility.
In the end, does the Mediterranean serve as a line that divides or unites the countries watered by it and their peoples? And what would happen if this sea didn’t exist – would these nations remain separate or would they potentially never come together? The people have often managed to heal their wounds and bridge the gaps dividing them through common ground or simply by accepting the cultural elements of those “opposite” them.
Three mahallahs (Turkish word for districts) are situated in the three corners of a village, each one far from the others. Each one has their own square, stores, tombs, and festivals. And each of them naturally believes their own are the best, ensuring that the rest of the world is aware of this… In a dystopian village, a female singer accompanied by video projections and otherworldly or completely tangible sounds, is called to explore three communities, inside a mosque. Songs and images come together to clash, fight, and leave their pieces behind. The singer collects all that is left to create a new, harmonized, modern space, that nobody knows whether it will stand the test of time or not. In the end, are these mahallahs as different as they thought they were?