Galatia Grigoriadou-Soureli’s awarded novel The Great Farewell is presented in its first staging for children aged 10 years and over and teenagers.
The 4PLAY theatre company tells the adventure of the novel’s heroes, who take part in the Asia Minor Expedition in the beginning of their adult life, through a theatre performance that combines contemporary dance techniques with contact improvisation and an original music score.
A journey from Athens to Smyrna, from youth to maturity, and from peace and love to war and loss. A story binding the old world today with today’s world, using Ionia as a connective link. A story of coming of age and humaneness.
The Girls in the Sailor Suits unfolds the thread of the true story of an urban family in Smyrna. It presents the drama and the greatness of Hellenism in Asia Minor through the eyes of two children born where “everything was soft and warm like a hug, where people enjoyed the blessings and the wealth of the East and the love of each other and were happy.”
As the events unfold, pushed forward by time, everything that marked the smiling and kind people of Ionia passes in front of the eyes of the central heroines, the twin girls Katinaki and Maritsa: from the happy days, the culture, and the beauty of life in Asia Minor to the obligatory settling down in refugee settlements and the contribution of refugees to modern Greece.
A theatrical performance about History that time fights to cover with its ashes. For a country that insists on declaring its presence in people’s eyes because, in the end, homeland is people themselves and everything that dwells in our soul. Like the wish the little girls in the sailor suits make: “Let tomorrow be a day of happiness…”
What a sweet summer evening… Everything you need for a soirée, a reception, a garden party at least. This is how paradise must be like, don’t you agree? A place of recreation perhaps. A heavenly city. And then nothing.
At the Eretria Museum refreshment room, four visitors drink soft drinks, eat chips, and through the museum’s audio tour of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, they become connected to history, memory, the meaning of the city, cosmopolitanism, extermination and destruction. As time goes by, the questions from the loudspeaker, the songs and the dances alternate with the historical information, the meaning of Hellenism, History, the mythical cities, the conditions that changed the world, the literary narratives and the image of Smyrna.
Finally, what should one remember from the world memory? And what should one erase?
A land of rebirth, a place of co-formation, an old café with contemporary music. Spectators, habitués, refugees, residents, leaving back their memories, keeping personal narratives as a legacy.
The performance crosses the historical paths with theatrical tools, but also with the use of our mobile phones, our smartphones, our modern technological need, which can finally allow us to create our own personal narrative with new media, to find our place in this world.
The story can be shaped, if we are a part of history.
Based on oral history and experiential-biographical material, The Memory of Water foregrounds the value of memory and the importance of its preservation for reasons of historical and cultural cohesion and continuity, bringing out traces of the refugee identity of the island of Lesvos through the eyes of the young generation.
The project consists of two creative parts. The first part is the planning and implementation of an experiential documentary-theatre workshop with the participation of adolescent students of Lesvos, in collaboration with the Model General High School of Mytilene of the University of the Aegean.
The second part includes the creation of a documentary-theatre performance, with the participation of the same teenagers as “experiential performers”, handing over the baton to them so that they can explore, own, and bring to life the stories of their ancestors through experiential research and performance art.
The work is a theatrical adaptation based on Stratis Doukas’ novel of the same title that incorporates participatory activities of an educational nature. The story of the original text is about the adventures of a Greek man who was arrested by the Turks during the Smyrna Catastrophe in 1922. It vividly describes his escape and his struggle to survive until he is rescued.
The novel is dedicated to “the common sufferings of nations” and has an internationalist character. The references and comparisons to the refugee waves shaking today’s world are obvious. The work’s main focus is human resourcefulness and the preservation of human dignity amidst the horrors of war and the bitterness of being uprooted.
The performance is enriched with interactive parts, which – using Educational Drama as a vehicle – aim at the further exploration of the work’s thematic core.
Camp 22 is a performance that focuses on the “Hi-story”: the Hi-story of our nation, the Hi-story of a show, our personal hi-story, a Hi-story from the human perspective.
Whether we actively participate in them or we are just a spectator, we, ourselves, create our Hi-stories. And in order to keep them in our memory we photograph every moment, to recall where we were, whom we were with, and how we were.
That’s why Camp 22 asks the right questions to start a dialogue. There where time does not exist, where everything is possible, where there are no borders. At Camp 22 they play “breaking” music. At Camp 22, the world, the stories and our lives belong to its people. At Camp 22 history is written by its protagonists.
A theatre performance based on the adaptation of Stella Michailidou’s fairy tale Stories from Gatouhan: We Have the Same Mom published by Kaleidoscope Publishing (2021).
The performance illuminates through the eyes of children, in a very meaningful, tender and at the same time playful way aspects of the refugee issue. There where adult cats see only problems, younger ones see riches and unique gifts. A story that unites yesterday with today, focusing on the issues of refugee reception, the real problems, the existing prejudices, but also on the value and preciousness of the unique Other.
Heroes from fairy tales of the East and the West run through the whole work like a luminous web, bringing everyone together, regardless of national, cultural, racial, religious or any other kind of differences.
In Andreas Flourakis’ new work today’s young people are linked to the Smyrna Catastrophe of 1922 through the love for animals, love, gastronomy and family memories. Even the animations bring to the surface aspects of History that have gone unnoticed, like the rescue of Greeks by the Japanese ship Tokei Maru.
While the ships of allies were watching Smyrna being destroyed and Greeks being drowned off the coast of Ionia from a distance, the captain of Tokei Maru threw its cargo into the sea to make room for as many people as possible, in order to transfer them safe and sound to the port of Piraeus.
In Little Asia Tokei Maru’s strange journey is turned into a story of mystery and Japanese beauty.
How important is it for a child to follow their dreams and not those of other people? How much courage does someone need to admit their resemblance to the “enemy”?
It is difficult for someone to discuss about politics with a child. It is hard to present them History and its curses in an objective way. Sometimes though, the infallible mirror of a myth, does not hide these issues – it reveals them, more clearly, in a more “digestible” form than ever before.
The work is inspired by the enchanting Asia Minor fairy tale “Machaira” (Knife). It tells the story of two friends, a prince and a poor child, who were violently separated but then found each other again, through a journey in search of the “Great Idea”.