A musical performance inspired by Menander’s famous saying, “How charming is a human being when he is truly human,” reimagined here as: “How admirable is a human being when they remain human while everyone around them has become beast or demon.” The performance explores how, under conditions of extreme violence and brutality, the courage required for an act of solidarity, tenderness, or self-sacrifice can become an island of survival. Its dramaturgy is woven from excerpts of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness, Anna Seghers’ The Seventh Cross, and poems by Paul Celan.
At the heart of the work stands the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, presented as a symbol of musical humanism. Bach’s music embraces the full spectrum of human emotional experience while continually reminding us of our longing for transcendence. Hidden pearls of humanity, drawn from the writings of these authors and illuminated by Bach’s music—which points simultaneously toward earth and sky, toward dance and prayer—invite us to reflect upon the grace of being human as Menander might have understood it. In a world overshadowed by hatred, this performance seeks moments of compassion, resilience, and dignity, revealing the enduring possibility of humanity even in the darkest of times.
Common Breath is a contemporary music-theatre composition for ten brass instruments, percussion, and narrator, featuring original music by Orestis Papaioannou. At the heart of the work lies the concept of breath as a shared denominator of human experience: life, speech, memory, and collectivity. Through a series of interconnected sections, the performance develops a dialogue between contemporary artistic creation and cultural heritage, incorporating subtle references to the classical repertoire.
The narrator serves as a connective thread, weaving a poetic flow of words that activates music as an act of collective presence. Conceived specifically for archaeological sites, the performance draws upon the natural acoustics and symbolic resonance of the location, offering audiences a ritualistic listening experience. Common Breath highlights the need to redefine the meaning of the “human” through coexistence, mutual presence, and a shared rhythm that binds individuals into a collective whole.
Ancient epigrams represent poetry of exceptional refinement. Like diamond fragments carved into marble, they travel across eras and centuries. The mantinades—the celebrated Cretan rhyming couplets—constitute their living continuation. Their creators, often unconsciously, carry forward the work of the ancient epigrammatists. They share the same philosophy: the condensation of profound meanings into only a few lines, centered on the fundamental themes of human existence, love, and death.
This performance is built upon a series of open dialogues. Ancient epigrams and mantinades face one another in conversation, drifting through the sonic universe created by Stelios Petrakis’s original compositions and the improvisations of his ensemble. The transition from the Cretan lyra to other musical landscapes becomes a metaphor for human experience itself—fluid, unpredictable, and deeply recognizable. Unexpected encounters unfold within a unique musical realm.
War, 1914 and 1939 dare to fall in love.
“How dare you?”
Peace dares.
A precious good, yet never a given.
Outside the camp, the father(?) of 1939 dares to reject any reunion with shadows. He will not cross the barbed wire for a handful of hallucinatory moments of peace. His interest lies instead in the action of war rather than the counter-action of peace.
“Who are you, sir?”
“War.”
“How dare you?”
“Easily. I am taken for granted, though I am no blessing.”
A poor counsellor both inside and outside the camp, sound itself becomes distorted as it passes through ruins and fear, transforming silences, words of love, and bullets alike. The courage required for love is different from the courage demanded by battle. For those who fear, another enemy always emerges. It is a bad time for peace if one wishes to become human. It is a bad time for war if one wishes to remain human. Drawing inspiration from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the performance explores the fragile boundary between destruction and compassion, questioning whether humanity can survive amid violence and whether love remains the ultimate act of resistance.
“Love prevents death. Love is life.”
“…Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow.”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The Ascent Within is a stage poem that illuminates the evolution of human nature through the prism of love—an indestructible love understood not as an emotion, but as an ontological state of being. It traces a cyclical journey in which human beings do not evolve in a linear progression but continually return to their origins, fall back, recover, and attempt once more the ascent. The fossilized human skull discovered in the Petralona Cave serves not as a historical artifact but as a poetic catalyst: a trace of existence that initiates a reflection on humanity’s passage through time.
Music, body, voice, and image coexist as carriers of memory and meaning, creating a polyphonic scenic landscape. Rather than narrating the history of human evolution, The Ascent Within contemplates it through music and performance. It offers a poetic experience that places humanity simultaneously at the center, in the background, and at the forefront of its own existence, seeking that point where knowledge encounters love and consciousness becomes an act of humanization.
The project “When One Is Human” highlights the learned musical tradition of Constantinople (15th–19th centuries) as a living expression of a multicultural and human-centered world. Within an environment where cultures and religions coexisted, music served as a common ground for experience and communication. Inspired by the reflection of Menander, the performance sheds light on the timeless value of human relationships, love, family, and peaceful coexistence. Classical Eastern music profoundly influenced modern Greek musical creation through the convergence of ecclesiastical and secular traditions. The program culminates with Tsatsaronis’ Oratorio for Peace, conveying a message of remembrance and hope.
Memory is not merely a repository of events; it is the mechanism through which human beings construct their identity. In the Odyssey, Ithaca constitutes the very condition of human existence—it is both a responsibility and a choice. But what happens when one disavows them?
Composer Lina Zachari collaborates with Elli Paspala, the resident creators of the Kournos Music Festival in Lemnos, as well as local amateur ensembles, for the music-visual performance “Lotus-Eaters or Responsibility”. An audio and visual gesture that traces the paths of collective memory on our own island of the lotus-eaters, of burden and duty, presented at the seaside settlement of prehistoric Myrina, forty years after it was brought to light.
A key point of reference for the project remains the landmark work The Island of the Lotus-Eaters (1990) by Stamos Semsis, based on poetry by Vasilis Nikolaidis, a work indelibly associated with Elli Paspala’s celebrated interpretation. Thirty-five years later, as the urban landscape transforms into an island of disconnection and the island itself increasingly assumes the characteristics of an urban environment, does there still remain space for the transcendent dimension of art as a catalyst for change and transformation?
In this music-theatre performance, virtuosic piano playing enters into dialogue with theatrical play, highlighting humanity’s creative potential. Drawing from an extensive musical anthology ranging from Bach and Mozart to André Jolivet, Friedrich Gulda, Philip Glass, Ernest Bloch, and the Beatles, Alexandra Papastefanou navigates with remarkable artistry through diverse styles and rhythms, moving seamlessly between classical, contemporary, and jazz idioms.
Through this musical journey, she invites the actor Konstantinos Georgopoulos, on stage, into an ongoing dialogue—to improvise, respond, and embody a variety of characters. In turn, he develops a repertoire of texts, constructing a self that acts according to the principles of humanism and the spirit of a universal cultural play shared across humanity.
The performance draws upon texts by William Shakespeare, Sue Jennings, Johan Huizinga, Donald Winnicott, and Albert Camus, alongside myths and folktales, weaving them into a theatrical and musical exploration of play as a fundamental expression of human existence.
Drawing inspiration from Georges Perec’s Things, this music and visual art performance creates a hybrid environment in which sound, objects, and storytelling come together to explore desire, consumption, and contemporary everyday life. At the center of the installation are elements of an imaginary apartment, unfolding through repeated objects, vivid colors, posters, sculptural forms, and projections, evoking the aesthetics of pop culture and the logic of consumerism. The music, structured in three parts, follows the temporal and emotional journey of the characters, employing electroacoustic media and hybrid compositional practices that reshape the perception of time. The performer acts as a live guide within the space, activating personal stories and testimonies connected to cherished objects, transforming the installation into a reflective and deeply human environment of shared experience. At the same time, repetition and excess function as a commentary on contemporary consumer habits. The work seeks to create a space of identification, memory, and collective reflection.
Presented at the historic Arkadi Monastery in Rethymno, Anthropoleipos: From the Ascent upon Stone to the Opening of the Horizon is a two-day musical, narrative, and immersive artistic project exploring the relationship between humanity and stone as an expression of a forgotten bond between nature and creation. Drawing inspiration from the mountains, the memory of place, and the spirit of rebellion—as embodied in figures ranging from Prometheus and Sisyphus to Albert Camus—the production unfolds within the emblematic setting of Arkadi and is dedicated to the revolution of the human spirit, consciousness, and transcendence. It focuses on the individual who, in order to remain truly human, journeys through the inner stages of Search, Illumination, and Transformation, continually redefining their place in history.
The work begins with dialogue, develops into a narrative performance, and culminates in a musical concert by the ensemble of Thodoris Kotonias. Through this progression, the audience is gradually guided from contemplation and inner confrontation toward collective experience and musical expression. Throughout this journey, the profound connection with Arkadi is brought into focus. The monastery remains embedded in the collective memory as a place of sanctity, self-sacrifice, and resistance, reviving a timeless question that has echoed throughout human history: Civilization or Barbarism?