The Donkey’s Tale

A popular 16th-century Cretan poem featuring a wolf, a fox, and a donkey has been adapted into a modern musical fairy tale with visual elements titled The Donkey’s Tale. It is a piece that satirizes various types of human individuals across different times and places.

Animals play the role of humans. They speak, imagine, dream, conspire, and make jokes. With folk humour, rhyming verses, and an idiomatic language, the performance “covertly and painlessly” criticizes the Western European social classes and the oppression of the weak by the powerful.

Natalia Kotsani and Tasos Kofodimos set the poem to music and perform it, maintaining its plot and units. Visual artist Natalia Manta tells the story using both analogue and digital means and highlighting its modern allegorical aspects, while four musicians on stage engage with the heroes and their tales through music, crafting a parallel narrative of their own.

I fylláda toy gadárou or Gadárou, lykou, kai alepous diigisis hairei is one of the most well-known folk books among the modern Greek people, with numerous reprints up to the 19th century. It is a work by an anonymous poet, written from a humorous and satirical perspective and published in Venice in 1539, twenty years after Bergadis’ poem Apókopos .