This is a performance that combines excerpts from Aeschylus’ Iketides (The Suppliant Women), historical facts, testimonies, traditional sounds but also original texts and songs, in order to shed light on the saga of the relocation of the young women who constituted the vast majority of the refugee population.
Those young widows, single and orphaned women, in their attempt to claim their professional and personal “rehabilitation” in the patriarchal Greece of ’22, are exploited by men and subjected to racism by Greek women who see them as rivals.
They call them ‘pastrikes’ (the “clean ones”) but not in order to praise their love of grooming and cleaning: those times in Greece the only women who often washed themselves – because of their profession – were prostitutes. “Honest” women did not need to wash any “shame” off of them.
Elli Papadimitriou’s Anatoli (East) is a theatrical composition in poetic format that tells the story of the Asia Minor Expedition and Catastrophe of 1918-1922: victories and disasters, causes and consequences, with man and his passions always on the spotlight. Death and uprooting, lust for life and the struggle, mostly of women, to settle down in their new homeland, the pain that goes hand in hand with the faith in life.
The refugees who imbued Greece with their culture.
Elli Papadimitirou, known for her work Koinos Logos, which was first performed at the Neos Kosmos Theatre in 1997, had worked for many decades on Anatoli that is now presented for the first time, in celebration of the author who identified her life and oeuvre with the fate of Asia Minor.
A whale washes up on a city beach and starts decomposing. The locals are indifferent, yet two of them, Pierre and Odile, decide to watch this death up close. Their lonely walk along a vast sandy coast climaxing with their encounter with the dead animal is a journey of realisation and search for man’s responsibility towards animals and nature.
In the production The Whale theatre pairs up with the visual setting and Nalyssa Green’s ambient music to bring Paul Gadenne’s most representative work and one of the first books to have touched upon the issue of ecology onto the stage. As the writer himself notes: “It is true that we are very little. Very weak. However, no matter how little and helpless we might be, we can do this. Even the littlest people can do this – a little effort with ourselves, every one of us.”
What are the reminders of our civilisation? What kind of waste is there and in what forms? Is ancient heritage a waste of the past? Is the garbage of the present the cultural heritage of the future? What do we leave behind and what will we be remembered by? The production Sewage or What We Will Be Remembered By, in an active dialogue with contemporary visual arts, aims at creating a hybrid work of Art, an anti-legacy.
The basic dramaturgical starting point is the concept of sewage, both as a material imprint of human civilization’s destructive intervention in nature and as a metaphor for the things we leave behind to future civilizations. Materials that could constitute this future heritage are put on the stage. Objects, ideas, opinions, local factors and divine solutions enter into a dialogue, while visual arts help to materially capture that, which in theatre, unfortunately (or fortunately), dies after the end of the performance.
A woman decides to leave her abusive husband and migrate to the north, so as to reunite with her two braver friends. On her journey she is accompanied by her personal artificial intelligence assistant and the thought of the whale, whose long evolutionary path of fifty million years inspires the heroine to put herself together and continue on her way. The music also serves as her guide.
The production The Whale’s Song presents a world plagued by a distorted political system, social injustice and the effects of climate crisis. “We are fighting to reach a destination where the conditions will favour our survival. And if we do not reach it, then the next or one of the coming generations will.” The groundbreaking works of awarded writer Chantal Bilodeau revolve around climate crisis.
Two young men between two worlds, as another Pentheus and Dionysus. Using ancient texts and other documents, they will try to find the roots, to remember, to recall. Technology, progress, growth. What do ancient people call Need? Why are the four seasons of the year getting extinct? What is humanism? Is man the centre of our world? Is there an ecological conscience? Are the great civilizations disappearing?
A performance, with the Hill family at its core, in search of euphoria through co-existence. In this painful journey towards memory, they will be assisted by four musicians, composers, performers, and the actress and director of the performance Sofia Hill. Each one of them will compose their own original music, will set choral parts from ancient tragedies and other texts to music, and will perform pieces of classical and traditional music. The road against oblivion is painful and the catharsis inevitable. The epilogue, however, is a hymn to life.
A performance that serves as an architectural reconstruction of memory using experiences and scattered pieces of the habitat as structural materials. A story of return, to the childhood home, to the garden of an inner beauty and innocence, as the only way to draw hope and make “new cherry trees”. The last heirs will attempt to reconstruct a lost heaven on earth through the topography of memory. When the house will no longer be here. And when the garden will no longer be here… they will be forced to bloom themselves, the one for the other. A little ode to the lost paradise. The nostalgia of happiness. Life as a possibility, that – if it is sung, danced or confessed – can lead us to redemption. An anecdote, a funny story, a farce for God’s failure to give us a life that will last forever.
In its new production summertime, the bijoux de kant company uses poetic speech to talk about the issue of climate change and all those things that the senses of the body have long perceived while the mind has yet to fully grasp.
A young tourist guide. A radio producer at a provincial radio station. A strange encounter at the mercy of an unending, unyielding summer at the ruins of an archaeological site underneath a vicious sun. He’s waiting for winter to come to cool off. She anticipates November so as to live the love of her life under the rain. For as long as autumn becomes but a story and summer heats up, the return of the old succession of seasons, as we knew it, becomes the new utopia. A futile expectation. Lost in their conversations, Tereza and Chronis suspect that their need for coolness and rain will probably not be met and start taking their first timid steps towards awareness.
Alphabet, one of the most well-known poems of the groundbreaking Danish author and poet Inger Christensen, a modernistic poetic conception, at once prophetic, topical and timeless, with social and ecological concerns, is presented for the first time in Greece as a music theatre performance by Kentro company. Five performers – three actresses along with two onstage musicians – seek, through emblematic poetic compositions, a piece of the lost heaven, on a day, perhaps, after the end of the world. Their sharing of the stage will create a powerful audiovisual environment. The performance is targeted at our collective responsibility towards the environment and nature, sustainability and the continuation of life on the planet.
The production Cura, conceived and supervised by Vassilis Boutos and directed by Thodoris Gonis, is an allegory for nature, a cruel and tender ritual in a world that is thirsty and hungry for the Word. The Barber and the Supreme, the last couple on earth, will worship each other to be able to save their Mother Nature, everyone’s Ultimate Hairdresser.
The performance, set in an open air setting where the great celebration of cura is being prepared, includes original texts written by Glykeria Basdeki and Thodoris Gonis, as well as excerpts from works of ancient, medieval and modern Greek literature. The basis of the dramaturgical composition is the essay Aesthetics of Pindos (or The Delight of the Mountains), written in 1923 by Aeakos Pyrridis. Nymphs, mountains, and rivers are intertwined in a peculiar worship of Pindos that reminds us of both writer Alexandros Papadiamantis and poet Andreas Embirikos, offering us ideal passages that will accompany the dramaturgical “ritual”.