In a directed performance of music and dance, the one hundred performers together with the orchestra and “Ionia” choir, the soloists, the dancers and the narrator meet the exceptional groups “Anatoliki Romilia”, “Horostates” and “Alismonites Patrides” Larissa, dressed in their authentic traditional costumes.
They take us a hundred years back to Smyrna with its sounds, colours, aura and culture. Smyrna was a multidimensional city that flourished but was finally destroyed and its residents give us a strong message of life and encouragement starting up new lives together in various places in Greece, such as Nea Ionia in Volos.
The great grandchildren of these refugees through performance of songs and dances, full of light and energy , bring us a message of hope, joy, life and promise for a better future.
The performance is set against the backdrop of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Choristers, as passengers of a boat sailing in the Eastern Aegean Sea and heading to the Greek coasts, narrate – each one in their own musical language – memories of their past and homelands.
Rich and poor, old and young, daughters and mothers, some from Constantinople and Smyrna, others from Cappadocia, Pontus and the coast, one by one they all share known and unknown aspects of the everyday life they’re leaving behind.
In an abstractly natural space and using bodies and voices as a vehicle, the boat turns into an “arc” saving diverse musical references associated with a powerful common experience: the painful migration, the uprooting, the journey in search of a better life. The anticipation for the new land, the new motherland, a second chance at life.
A musical journey on the occasion of the centenary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, featuring Glykeria, the most important singer of Smyrnaean and traditional songs.
Glykeria and her company on stage will take us on a journey to the musical paths of the East. From the sea of Smyrna to Constantinople and Bosporus, and from the Cappadocian market to the Greek ports and inland, where great composers from Asia Minor ended up as refugees, bringing along such songs as: “Apo xeno topo”, “Tzivaeri”, “Elli”, “Smyrnia”, “O emetic”, “Hariklaki”, “T’ apofasisa”, “Armenitsa”, “I Xaveriotisa”, “Karotseri trava”, “Xerizomos”, “Kapia mana anastenazi”, “I Smyrni mana kaigete” etc. Alongside her, singer Dimitris Kontogiannis and a multi-member orchestra.
With music supervision by composer and maestro Stelios Fotiadis
The three artists offer a musical and poetic presentation of the relationship between Kalomiris and Palamas, a rare phenomenon of osmosis between two leading exponents of the Greek letters.
In his autobiography, the great composer from Smyrna, Manolis Kalomiris, recalls his life against the backdrop of Asia Minor, and also how he had dreamt since childhood to become one day the shaper of Greece’s musical language – a “Palamas” of contemporary Greek music. This music-theatre rehearsed reading is based on Tina Malikouti’s idea to combine the composer’s piano works with K. Palamas’ poem “The Twelve Lays of the Gypsy”, which had left a defining mark on M. Kalomiris’ entire artistic career, capturing the nature of the modern Greek soul.
Smyrna, Constantinople, Vienna, Athens. Images from the life of a cosmopolitan Greece spread over the East and the West.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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).