The Girls in the Sailor Suits unfolds the thread of the true story of an urban family in Smyrna. It presents the drama and the greatness of Hellenism in Asia Minor through the eyes of two children born where “everything was soft and warm like a hug, where people enjoyed the blessings and the wealth of the East and the love of each other and were happy.”
As the events unfold, pushed forward by time, everything that marked the smiling and kind people of Ionia passes in front of the eyes of the central heroines, the twin girls Katinaki and Maritsa: from the happy days, the culture, and the beauty of life in Asia Minor to the obligatory settling down in refugee settlements and the contribution of refugees to modern Greece.
A theatrical performance about History that time fights to cover with its ashes. For a country that insists on declaring its presence in people’s eyes because, in the end, homeland is people themselves and everything that dwells in our soul. Like the wish the little girls in the sailor suits make: “Let tomorrow be a day of happiness…”
Two separate inter-artistic projects: a photography installation titled Compositions and a musical performance titled Zruits I-II, which means Dialogues.
Compositions presents stories from the interwar period and historical moments of the Armenian community through 150 unique pictures from the archival photographs of the “Armenika” magazine, curated by Vangelis Ioakimidis. Zruits I-II is a meeting of duduk with classical guitar, a conversation between the traditional and contemporary Armenian music by Vahan Galstyan and Lefteris Chavoutsas, performed by singer Maria Spyridonidou.
Compositions and Dialogues take root in the same place and call attention to stories and memories, whole worlds that are brought to life in the shade of an apricot tree, a Prunus Armeniaca – the symbol of Armenia.
Camp 22 is a performance that focuses on the “Hi-story”: the Hi-story of our nation, the Hi-story of a show, our personal hi-story, a Hi-story from the human perspective.
Whether we actively participate in them or we are just a spectator, we, ourselves, create our Hi-stories. And in order to keep them in our memory we photograph every moment, to recall where we were, whom we were with, and how we were.
That’s why Camp 22 asks the right questions to start a dialogue. There where time does not exist, where everything is possible, where there are no borders. At Camp 22 they play “breaking” music. At Camp 22, the world, the stories and our lives belong to its people. At Camp 22 history is written by its protagonists.
The Music Theatre Company Rafi collaborates with the Oros Ensemble, composer Apostolis Koutsogiannis, poet Marios Hadjiprokopiou and visual artist Petros Touloudis to create a musico-visual cantata that illuminates moments from the life of Koutaliani, as strongmen from Asia Minor used to be called, over different historical periods: from the late 19th century to the postwar era.
The legendary life of these persons also serves as an allegory for the transition from the late-19th-century world to the successive displacements of the early 20th century, the Asia Minor Catastrophe, and the suffocating borders of the modern Greek state.
The work features the legendary Panagis Koutalianos and his descendant Dimitris, Charis Karpozilos and Giannis Keskelidis or Sampson, the giant of the Greek catch known as “Attilio” or “the Asian” (sic).
A proposal that combines the original traditional music of Asia Minor, from the days of joy and prosperity to the days of the uprooting, folk-rebetiko music as it evolved in metropolitan Greece, and contemporary music.
Three different orchestras co-exist onstage, the original traditional orchestra of Smyrna, the Folk-Rebetiko orchestra in the form it acquired in inland Greece, and a Classical Symphony Orchestra performing the Oratorio. The latter will present in its world premiere Christos Samaras’ work Mnimes (Memories).
This musical journey is a sequence and co-habitation of music, poetry, dance, images and performing, composing a complete, ripe, and interdisciplinary performance-concert that illuminates the eternal Asia Minor of Greeks.
A performance that will mostly feature old instrumental pieces from the wider region of Asia Minor ingeniously rearranged by the Violione Orchestra.
The goal of this alternative twenty-member ensemble of exclusively bowed strings is to bring out a romantic and at the same time communicative and outward-looking mood, with elements of earlier and more modern techniques, taking us on a musical journey from the past into the future with abundant improvisations while creating a dynamic continuation of the old style of performing bowed stings into the contemporary one.
The orchestra is conducted by Giannis Zarias, assistant violin professor in the Department of Music Science & Art of the University of Macedonia.
This musical performance involves a structured interactive improvisation (stemming from the form of the amane itself), which is connected to the Greek poetry of the 30’s.
The music is inspired by the historical/traditional amane but also provides space to more modern and free musical experimentations. The aim is to emphasize the fact that this is not a music tradition in danger of extinction but a potentially living form, which can function in the present even outside the context of its historical frame of reference.
Respectively, regarding the lyrics, the form of amane will also be preserved, but, instead of using popular verses, this musical performance will use excerpts from 1930’s “art” poetry.
A village built between the mountains and the sea, providing its inhabitants food and protection, starts getting eroded by the presence of a factory that is progressively destroying its land, air and water resources. A remarkable stage experience that brings to life the story of the students from Anthopyrgos who are fighting to save their land.
What happens when the first signs of pollution appear? When the first tree, the first animal dies? How can this destruction displace a whole community? How can a teacher manage to save an entire village with the power of his students? In this production, Galatia Grigoriadou-Soureli’s literary work is transformed into direct theatrical speech while modern dance and contact improvisation, by employing the forces of gravity, turn movement into pictures and create dance-theatre images that set the pace for the change of scenes and the work’s rapid development.
Hippo theatre company presents the work Against the Wind: Tira’s Flying Adventure, a surrealistic mystery adventure for children, written and directed by Fotis Dousis and Alexandros Raptis. The text treats an aspect of the wider ecological crisis that is not particularly known: the way that light pollution, but also deforestation, affect the life of migratory birds.
It is a fascinating production with abundant comic and lyrical elements, in which people and animals must work together “for a better future”, as it is proven that profit and big economic interests are the first cause of nature’s destruction. Hippo theatre company, continuing the special genre of physical theatre it has coined (kinemo), creates a performance dominated by intense physicality, high energy levels, live music and special movement techniques, offering a rich entertainment experience.
The production Beware of the Monsters! is an imaginative play for young audiences, based on Swedish writer Marie Rohde’s popular book Planet SOS (True Monsters), which has met with great success worldwide.
The most dangerous environmental threats are contrasted with mythical monsters of world mythology, who through narration, live singing and confessions manifest their power sources, as well as their vulnerabilities. All of the “monsters” appear through the misty atmosphere of a dream that prevents a big profit-driven ecological disaster. The dream and its heroes are a valuable source of knowledge for our small audience members, all the more because the monsters themselves reveal their enemies, urging children to use every means possible to vanquish them, so that the planet can be set free from their presence.