A traveller along with her aids arrive at an unknown, destroyed land, which is however full of hidden traces from its previous “inhabitants”. The numerous accounts and testimonies found in this place (some are read, others are sung, and others are reproduced by machines) reveal the causes that have shaped today’s reality. The performance Night on Earth directed by Alexandros Koen is a suspenseful thriller, during which the travellers (with the help of audience members) must gather as much evidence as possible.
From the Bible to the Romantics, for two whole millennia, the relationship of Man with Nature has been at the heart of poetic creation. Man is a child of Nature: he cannot exist but on Nature’s terms. Excerpts from the Bible and works of William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, Goethe, Novalis, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Solomos, and Sikelianos – revolving around Byron’s great apocalyptic poem “Darkness” – are all selectively bound together and complete each other.
An experiential theatrical tour across the visual art installation The Museum of Unnatural History by Dulcinea Compania. Bringing to life Salman Rushdie’s novel Luka and the Fire of Life, Luka and his two favourite animals, the dog and the bear, introduce us to the memories of their adventurous journey into a nature that has become unnatural due to human intervention. Our hero discovers his supernatural agony for animals, insects and sea creatures, as he wanders across a world, where everything is altered, industrialised, degenerated. The reason for his trip: his father has fallen into an eternal sleep and Luka will be able to wake him up only if he solves the metaphysical mystery of the history of Man and Nature.
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?