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.
The performance directed by Dimitra Dermitzaki, focuses on the dreams of people who have experienced or are experiencing war conditions. Her dramaturgy develops as a synthesis of such dreams: the starting point is Emil Szittya’s short stories, “27 Dreams During the War 1939–1945.” They are interwoven with dream testimonies that emerged from contemporary conversations with people who have recently experienced the war, as well as dreams recorded by writers after World War II. Three performers move through successive, sculptural poses and traverse a path through the archaeological site of Heraion Perachora, narrating fragments of wounded dreams. Each dream is abandoned as a votive offering in a ritual procession towards the sanctuary of Hera Akrea. Ira Spagadorou’s exhibition consists of paper narratives, incomplete, elliptical in their genesis, like dreams, which struggle to reveal a solid image, a complete map of man.
On April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. The explosion released massive amounts of radioactive material across Europe, causing deaths, severe illnesses, and the mass evacuation of entire areas. Throughout human history, there has always been a duality: our ability to create wonders, while at the same time inflicting immeasurable devastation. Chernobyl stands as one of the most powerful symbols of this contradiction. And yet, within this catastrophe, another side of human nature emerged: the self-sacrifice of the workers, engineers, miners, firefighters, and scientists. Without them, Chernobyl could have turned into an uncontrollable nuclear hell.
It is precisely these people that the two actors bring to life on stage, tracing chronologically the events of one of the worst humanitarian and environmental disasters in human history. After all, this world is saved again and again by the people who continue to fight to save it.
The performance The Lysistratas approaches Aristophanes’ comedy as a deeply political and profoundly human-centered work, highlighting the power of collective speech, collaboration, and peaceful female resistance against a patriarchal world of violence. This research-based approach to ancient drama, centered on ritual and the circular orchestral spiral, is framed by musical percussion sculptures that function simultaneously as musical instruments and visual installations, serving the rhythm of the text. In this way, a shared pulse is created, within which speech, as music, activates the spatial memory of the ancient theatre as a place of communal attunement and collective experience. Within this framework, the body functions as an instrument of rhythm, memory, and shared lived experience, while the actors align themselves with the purpose of the work, serving a fundamental principle of the collective art of theatre and the legacy of ancient drama, as it resonates through the sites of the Asklepieia. The Ecclesiasterion of Ancient Messene (Odeion) constitutes the research site of this work: a living field of inquiry into the relationship between speech, rhythm, body, space, and collective memory.
In Ancient Olympia, the sacred ground of agonizesthai – the art of striving -the performance seeks to illuminate the timeless struggle of women to claim their own “place in the stadium.” Our point of departure is the story of Kallipateira: the woman who passed into history because she dared -defying the prohibitions of antiquity and risking death – to disguise herself as a man in order to enter the stadium and watch her son compete in the Olympic Games. Within the performance, her voice returns as the memory of a body that was put on trial for crossing the boundaries imposed on her gender. At the same time, three contemporary women appear before us: training, falling, rising again, measuring themselves against the limits of their own bodies. Rhythm, perseverance, repetition, and the ever-present risk of falling are transformed into a choreography that speaks of the balance women still struggle to claim – between the permitted and the desired, the invisible and the visible – in a struggle that is far from over.
Throughout humanity’s ongoing journey, people have ventured into territories entirely foreign to their own nature—and have often chosen to dominate them through the forceful imposition of their “civilization.” Yet the central character of The Tempest, Prospero, ultimately reaches a state of profound maturity through five decisive confrontations. He renounces all forms of violent power and turns instead toward forgiveness.
In Shakespeare’s final play, the wise Prospero—ruler of a domain through the power of his magic—is portrayed as an absolute authority. Like a stage director, he controls nature, human beings, time itself, and the unfolding of events. However, this very power has distanced him from the true nature of humanity, as his knowledge functions primarily as a mechanism of control.
Ιn the garden of the Byzantine Museum of Argos, where the soil remembers more than people do, a ceremony begins almost silently. Three actors and a chorus of elderly participants from Argolis, compose a stage experience as if they are following instructions they were never given, and yet execute them with precision. Inspired by the myth of Lynceus and Hypermnestra, the dramaturgy moves between memory, loss, and the uncertainty of the end. Two psychopomps converse with those transitioning from life to death. Bodies come to a halt, yet souls stubbornly continue. Some refuse to cross without their loved ones, and love renders death insignificant.
The passage: a process that has already begun—we simply have not been notified.
“I give you the time of silence.” A vigil, a quiet place by the sea, three people—friends and loved ones of a deceased person about whom we learn very little—speak about death in order to understand how to live, and how to love. They search for the sýssimon, the sign that “means the same to you and to me.” Throughout the night, music permeates the space: it watches over it and tends to it, becoming the only equal interlocutor of silence. In this suspended nocturnal landscape, speech, memory, and absence intertwine, forming a fragile space where meaning is not declared but shared—if it can be shared at all.
A grey-white metropolis: towering buildings, a diminished horizon. An anti-heroic age, much like our own. Obstacles, dilemmas, and traps demand both personal and collective feats in order to be overcome. Beneath the shadow of ignorance, exhaustion, and fear, five individuals manage to connect with one another, discovering new strengths within themselves. This original theatrical work is an ode to the unsung heroes of the world, inspired by the myth of the greatest of heroes, the demigod Heracles.
Torn between his divine origin and human vulnerability, Heracles confronts and tames untamed natural forces through strength, intellect, and guilt. Sometimes invincible, sometimes tragic, sometimes reduced to comic caricature, the heroes of this story grapple with questions of justice, solidarity, and ultimately transcendence—the essence of the Labour itself. Blending existential reflection with neo-noir aesthetics, the performance unfolds as a bittersweet journey filled with unexpected action, chance encounters, animal presences and absences, stories drawn from both Ancient Greece and Japan, conflicts, moral dilemmas, and surprising moments of hope.
Τhe performance Schora me (mean. “Forgive a body”) is a theatrical and musical composition based on short stories by Sotiris Dimitriou. Two women who share a deep bond meet again after many years in a place filled with memories. Amidst narratives, silences, songs, and small everyday stories, experiences of exile, loss, and separation unfold, while absent faces seem to return briefly through memory and speech. With minimalist set design and live music on stage, the performance creates an intimate and ritualistic atmosphere, drawing elements from the musical traditions of Epirus and the world of a rural home. The dialogue shifts between the immediacy of oral storytelling and more poetic moments, as the two women attempt to reconnect with one another and confront what remains unfinished.