The production approaches the Asia Minor Catastrophe through poems written by poets from Asia Minor, whose verses are marked by a strong lamenting mood, proportional to the tragic nature of the 1922 events.
The collective trauma of the loss of “Paradise” echoes across the poems of the refugee-poets, becoming a link to respective contemporary situations and also to the lamentation over the loss of people, places, hearths, relationships and freedoms in a wider sense. The performance aims at creating a safe context for a different lamenting ceremony but also an open space for reflection on the questions of loss and refugeeism.
Focusing less on the detailed narration of the events revolving around the Asia Minor Catastrophe and more on their emotional perception and symbolic representation, Stage 22 presents a grief-lifting ceremonial event that praises peace and life.
Continuing its research on intergenerational participatory story-telling, the APARAMILLON creative team focuses on the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the story of two places directly linked to the ’22 refugees. Nikaia and the island of Chios, one of the main first stations of the uprooted.
The basic dramaturgical stepping-off point is the concept of the house, both as the material manifestation of relationships grounded in a specific space and as a mental construction. A house is placed on the stage as a scenic indicator of every lost house of the refugees and at the same time of their effort to acquire a new roof over their heads.
The dramaturgy draws upon testimonies and archival material from refugee associations, engaging in a conversation with melodies performed by the students of the Musical Schools of Chios, in a scenic fusion of theatre with music, which bridges two places and two eras.
The Black Journey is the real life testimony of a young Greek man who was recruited to take part in the Asia Minor Expedition.
The bijoux de kant company talks about the vital needs, the hunger, the thirst and the cruelty planted by war in the souls of all people, regardless of their nationality. It talks about the uprooting, the life of refugees, and the new cultural identity of Greece. In a field of memory, in a landscape of fragments, an unknown soldier of the Engineer Battalion vividly describes the wound of being uprooted and rewrites history.
The protagonist is accompanied by an Angel, his younger self, and eastern melodies of Asia Minor performed by a young girl from Athens, who sings to the Smyrnaean rhythms of a culturally new Greece.
Using the Asia Minor Catastrophe as a starting point we will work on the provocative and enigmatic story written by Giorgos Chimonas, Doctor Ineotis.
The wandering and the History of the masses, the history of humanity itself, its ending and the inevitable renaissance of something new are the essence of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and are also powerfully present in Chimonas’ text. Chimonas writes a story but its narrative is being constantly interrupted, in the same way that dreams work. And the dreamy element in the archaeological site of Deskati in Grevena is the Tarkovskian setting that perfectly matches with the poetic writing of the text.
The non-realistic speech delivery, the scenery, the music and the singing, are the elements that will compose our performance.
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.