Event Category: Music

Female Refugee

Island of Kos, the journey begins in 1890, in the homeland of the great Greek singer, Marika Papagika.

In 1913 she follows her parents who migrate to Egypt and two years later to the USA, where she settles and lives to the end of her life, in 1943. New York is the starting point of the great career of this special singer, who recorded more than 200 light music, Smyrnaean, folk and rebetiko songs. Her reputation spreads and her songs are loved through her records that reach every corner of the earth.

A music-theatre benchmark performance in honour of the legendary Marika, the first among all other important Greek female singers in the USA, whose life and creative trajectory have acquired the dimensions of a true legend.

Kythera – Australia

A musical documentary – a farewell ceremony of people leaving their homelands to unknown destinations.

Kythera is a special place, whose modern history has been defined by migration and refugee flights. The performance is a compilation of stories, songs, photographs and other material from the island’s local population. It was on this material that the musical documentary – a “farewell” ceremony was based.

Kythera – Australia is a dirge-like original musical work centered around the human voice that offers the redemptive recollection of the relationship of people with their land, and the separation from it. A belated ceremony of relief and memory. A big timeworn Goodbye.

The Sounds of the Land of Aeolia

Internationally acclaimed performer Erini presents an original music-theatre performance inspired by Ilias Venezis’ emblematic literary work, The Land of Aeolia.

Actor Ektoras Gasparatos in the role of young Petros, performs excerpts from the book, conveying images and situations of that era. Erini, accompanied by a classical string quartet with the participation of the permanent Concertmaster of the Thessaloniki State Orchestra, Simos Papanas, enrich the novel with much-loved melodies from Asia Minor, arranged by Grammy Award Nominee Gonzalo Grau.

The performance conveys the happy life of the Greeks of Asia Minor before the Catastrophe, but also the tragedy of the uprooting that still lives in the hearts of contemporary Greeks.

NEMESIS

NEMESIS, the new production conceived and directed by Giorgos Christakis, founder of Dagipoli Dance Co, explores the relationship between the human body and the environment, the ecosystem and climate change, and points out the key role played in maintaining the balance among them by the human factor, that is, human behaviour.

If one projects the role of the climate change-burdened ecosystem onto the human body, one notices that the degeneration of both of them is mainly due to human behaviour. Taking into account the social, economic, class, national, and psychological considerations and effects of climate change, NEMESIS explores the spectrum and the processes of effectively addressing it in relation to man and his body and, more specifically, the disabled body. That is why the work proposes ways to address the effects of climate change and the issue of human behaviour in association with these two vital notions (body/disabled body) by drawing connections, pinpointing identifications and developing interactions between them.

Seeds in Danger or The Sound of the White-Eyed Beans, Afkos and Barley

The musical ensemble Oros Ensemble joins forces with the Environmental Protection and Architectural Heritage Club of Lemnos “Anemoessa”, as part of a special initiative. Using art, environmental protection and primary production as goals and as a creative core, a site-specific lyrical performance is created. At its centre lies Lemnos, the “Volcanic Island”, the “granary of the Aegean”, the flattest island of Greece, with its unending wheatfields that has brought forth unique native varieties.

For the project Seeds in Danger or The Sound of the White-Eyed Beans, Afkos and Barley Oros Ensemble and Anemoessa collaborate with baritone Tassis Christoyannis and the local Kournos Music Festival, which aims at organising site-specific music-centered events both in the island’s natural environment and in selected buildings of historical or architectural importance. The production will be supported by Danai Sfakianou, an agronomist whose goal is to support traditional practices of the primary sector, so as to help preserve biodiversity and the special landscape of Lemnos.

Bees – The wondrous miracle of the microcosm and its haughty leaders

An allegorical and poetic description of the ideal state, modelled after the world of bees. Bees, that during antiquity were associated with the divine element (nowadays an endangered species), are described by Virgil as a fully developed society, with its own kingdoms, cities, work distribution system and work ethics. They are concerned with the continuation of their species in a unique way that exceeds the instinct of their individual survival. Through the fourth book of Georgics we follow the society of bees at times from the inside and at times from the beekeeper’s angle. Reading Virgil’s text one cannot but ponder on the self-centered course of the human civilization and man’s arrogant and destructive estrangement from nature. Α “musical reading” of this great poetic text. At its roots, music weaves a hymn to nature, which brings out man’s always topical and life-giving love for it.

The text of the performance is based on Konstantinos Theotokis’ translation of Virgil’s Georgics (Βεργίλιος, Τα Γεωργικά, Dromon publishing, Athens 1909).

About the Nature of Things

The combination of Epimenidis, a figure between legend and history, and Lucretius’ philosophical poetic work About the Nature of Things has been the inspiration for this year’s artistic meeting at the timeless cultural magnet of Ideon Andron. This year’s cultural meeting revolves around a composition of multidimensional art forms inspired by the philosophy of reapproaching Nature and man’s relationship with the environment. Using as tools different art forms and techniques or handcrafts that have been historically developed in the Cretan Culture, such as weaving, pottery and woodworking, along with visual arts, theatre and the dominant musical production, Epimenidis II treats the concept of man’s offering to the environment in which he lives, creates and evolves.

The event About the Nature of Things will be structured in three thematic units starting in the afternoon (18:30-19:00) and ending in the evening by 22:00. More specifically:

Presenter: Mirka Skoula (Cultural administrator, UCL)

• Part Α: The beginning of creation, from Nature to Use (18:00-19:30)

Open exhibition of craftworks: pottery, woodcarving and weaving

Featuring: Giorgos Dalambelas (pottery, Keramion, Margarites, Rethymnon), Manolis Xylouris, Aristea Xylouri (weaving, Traditional looms, Anogia), Stefanos Plousis (woodcarving, Anogia)

• Part B: Theatrical and Visual Design (19:35-20:00)

PandemonCracy – The Panic of the Days at Nature’s Pan-daemonium

Visual art event by artist Georgios Bounias and actor Giannis Athitakis, inspired by the Homeric hymn to god Pan. A visual art and theatre composition.

• Part C: Music event (20:10-22:00)

An original musical tribute inspired by nature and the environment in its many manifestations.

With the participation of: Kostas Fasoulas (lyricist), Giannis Kalomiris (musical creator, lute), Ioanna Kalogeraki-Kalomiri (mezzo soprano), Erini Tornesaki (musician, performer, assistant professor at Boston’s Berklee College of Music,), Ilias Zoutsos (classical violin soloist, lyrist, Doctor of Music Studies of the Faculty of

Philosophy), Bernardo Isola (musical creator, lute, Phd candidate in environmental protection issues)

Selva Oscura

An unexpected musical conversation, Alexandros Drakos Ktistakis’ new music work Selva Oscura, attempts to musically capture the forces that make forests an inextricable structural element of our survival. Written for a chamber orchestra, the work is divided into instrumental parts, improvisation, and parts with set paralogés (narrative folk ballads) performed by Elli Paspala with an original text by Alexandra K*.

The fragile rhythmic and melodic balance among the members of the orchestra, where each musician focuses both on their individual duty and on the orchestra’s goal as a group, reminds us of the balance and organisation of a precious ecosystem. At the same time the work musically captures destruction and rebirth. Its rhythmic contrasts outline the alternations of the life cycle and the destruction of forests. The realisat destruction, the despair of “why” and the hope for rebirth are all aspects that emerge through its musical structure. “After a fire, forests are burnt but not dead”.

And His Voice Was Like the Roar of Many Waters / A Revelation

A concert that, through the creative use of multimedia, John’s Revelation and digitally altered Fayum mummy portraits, touches upon the mental trauma of the age-old, constantly lurking destruction that is nowadays called climate crisis. The production includes multiple projections and a surround sound system, audiovisual digits created in real time, an actress performing with live music, debates between scientific discourse and sacred texts, multilingual accounts of liturgical rituals from across the world, as well as heretical speech delivery by the actress, along with an unexpected use of soundscapes by the musician and Studio 19st. The performance is grounded on the standpoint that man is not the centre of this universe but just a guest in it, and that the climate crisis is a huge chance to establish a culture of a Sacred Indestructible for our common home in the present day.

The Bell of Water

1966: Twenty villages, field crops, trees, dozens of monasteries and churches, including the Temple of Episkopi that has been designated as a cultural monument, were sunk to build the hydroelectric dam in Kremasta. Two thousand local residents left the area between Evrytania and Aetolia-Acarnania, watching their villages being destroyed for the sake of upgrading Greece’s energy production.

Four musicians and singers, one actor and an emotionally charged text represent the multiple feelings associated with the uprooting, memories, nostalgia and tradition, in the face of the inevitable subversion of everyday life in the name of “growth” and “progress”. Traditional songs and tunes from Armenia, Cappadocia, the Arab world, Roumeli, Spain, Thrace, Cyprus, the islands and the rest of Greece coordinate, co-colour, and go hand in hand with the text, aiming at achieving communion with the audience.