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.
A search for the paths of events, images, and ideas, through time: Die Wolke art group presents Ichne (“traces”), a contemporary dance performance that sources its materials from interviews, focusing on the workings of memory and oral communication towards the development of imagery originating from the Asia Minor cultural identity.
Movement, along with musical and sonic compositions, approaches the inherent subjectivity of descriptions, low fidelity, gaps, and negative space that reveals the dimension of time in poetic imagery, thus focusing on the intersubjectivity of narrative refractions.
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.
A spatial performance based on Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler
A freestyle artistic venture about the existential connection between humans and nature. A healing promenade, almost like an afternoon walk. An almost primeval, inner, psychotherapeutic conflict that makes peace with the determinism of co-existence.
In the spatial performance The Song of the Earth, the ensemble musicians are positioned at key locations along the main walking path on the island of Agios Achilleios in Small Prespa Lake, performing solo pieces by Billone, Xenakis, Murail, Saariaho, Yun, Hosokawa and other composers. The walk will end at the location of the reconciliation ritual, the partially demolished niche of the Agios Achilleios basilica, with the performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde [The Song of the Earth], in Schoenberg’s arrangement.
The audience’s unconfined wandering across the natural landscape and their almost random encounters with solo musical snippets from modern music of the past few decades, places them in the spotlight, almost at the centre of a contrast. The more, however, they move forward, the more they realize that all that is made with empathy and respect can co-exist in harmony. The conflict is increasingly weakening. At the end of the path, as the sun sets and Mahler’s music echoes in the 10th-century basilica, the audience not only loves each other, but also themselves.
Within the Greek-speaking villages of the Salento plain in Southern Italy lies a captivating tradition that intertwines myth with reality and still echoes to this day. It has to do with the cure of women affected by the bite of a poisonous spider. It is the phenomenon of tarantism.
The performance La tarantata by Encardia is inspired by the faces of women in the remote areas of Southern Italy and, by extension, by women on a global scale who bear the “conflicts” imposed on them by their immediate surroundings or society. The women as lovers, mothers, wives, refugees, or victims of war, objects of desire, or abandonment, the “tarantata” women…! And as the conflict transforms into a mental poison, these women “cast the evil away” and are led to redemption through an ecstatic dance, to the beat of healer-musicians. The performance comes complete by inviting the audience to participate in a redemptive dance with clear references to the tarantism phenomenon.
The En Dynami theatre company, after conducting extensive research on modern dramaturgy, is now treating a classical text for the first time: Sophocles’ Antigone. A social group that daily clashes with the state, society, laws, and the mentality of our fellow citizens regarding issues of acceptance, accessibility, and social inclusion, wonders whether they live in a world that is just and whether laws are designed to protect people or the opposite. They wonder how far they would be willing to go for their beliefs. “The impossible cannot be done”, says Ismene in the prologue. We, however, ought to go for it. Antigone’s story is written to inspire us. Everywhere and always.
In New Zealand, a river was granted legal person status. The Ganges River in India heard about this and liked the idea, so it also obtained such a status. In Iceland, there is an ongoing campaign to present a glacier as an election candidate.
The environmental organization The Bee Camp presents a transformative performance experience, written and directed by Anthi Founta, inspired by the once unthinkable idea of granting legal rights to elements of nature. And this is how, after 160 years of dispute, the river Whanganui, becomes the first river on earth to belong to itself, all the way from the mountain to the sea. Can you imagine that? Nature belonging to itself?