The Kore opens the chest. As she unfolds the rugs, one by one, she recalls everything her mother told her. Each weft, three stories: the story of the world–with wars, harvests, and fairs –, the story of the community–with songs, teasing, fairy tales, and blankets –, and the silent story of the heart.
With expectations, loneliness, and dreams. This is how the weaving hours used to pass under the lamplight. Women’s hands resembled those of the mythical, ageless Weavers. Yet times have changed. The Kore no longer weaves to warm herself and others; she weaves to remember and create. Wefts become voices. And the loom becomes a musical body. The threads are quivering. Through the final weaving, where memories come together, Erchigos is born – a work made of sound.
We thank the ‘To Pleteno’ of Xanthi for the generous donation of the loom.
In an era when time accelerates, the collective spirit is shattered, and lived experiences are replaced by information, the performance Io: On the Mountain of the Great Gods draws inspiration from and begins with the mystery of the island of Samothraki, exploring faith as a realm of ideas, conflicts, and connections. A contemporary rite of passage about the fire of our civilization, humankind’s inhumanity, and solidarity, inspired by Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Starting from traditional wedding customs, we encounter a deserted Prometheus. The sacred wedding intended for the bride Io cannot be realized. None of the attendees knows the ritual anymore.
The Chorus leader sings about the failure of human societies and the pain of the Titan who is punished for the gifts he gave humanity. The musical compositions by People of the Wind provide the Chorus members with an opportunity to explore new interpretations of the myth and the story. Are there other ways of making connections beyond the ones we reproduce?
The performance The Archaeologist is a fresh, satirical, and profoundly humorous adaptation of a bold and controversial novel of the same title by Andreas Karkavitsas. In a Greece that is constantly searching for its place between the past and the future, a group of actors presents a performance about an “excavation” that takes place not only in the ground but also in our national consciousness. The work’s theme revolves around Andreas Embiricos’ quote, “Today as tomorrow and as yesterday.”
Karkavitsas’ novel was written in 1903, in a Greece humiliated by the 1897 defeat, financially suffering from consecutive bankruptcies, and seeking its identity between the glorious past of classical antiquity and the urgent need to catch up with the contemporary civilized world. His work was considered blasphemous because it spoke in a demeaning way about classical Greek art. Nonetheless, it remains relevant as it explores the relationship between contemporary art, the past, and the future.
In September of 1951, the exiled residents of the island of Ai-Stratis decided to stage a theatre performance there for the first time. They chose Aeschylus’ Persians. The censorship authorities allowed this because just four years earlier, the same play had been mounted by the National Theatre to celebrate the Dodecanese’s union with the rest of Greece. Moreover, Aeschylus’ text had always been used to underscore national supremacy and the continuity of a lineage dating back to ancient times. It was, therefore, considered the most appropriate choice in the process of reforming the leftist exiles. Besides, lines from the original drama, such as “Go ahead, Greek children” and “Now, you’re fighting for everything,” dominated the slopes of the “New Parthenon,” as the island of Makronisos (which also served as a place of exile) was called.
That performance on Ai-Stratis in 1951 was perhaps the first documented performance in Greece staged by those defeated in the official history—those whom the regime treated as the dangerous “Others” and whose struggle was condemned to fall into oblivion. It was perhaps the first time that instead of being used to celebrate the display of supremacy, Persians returned to its tragic origin.
This performance serves as a multisensory ritual of awakening, a manifesto of emancipation that connects the past to the present through the female voice, as an act of resistance and survival.
Revolving around poems by women from South Asia and the Middle East who dared to speak out in regimes of silence, this piece brings together poetry, the body, and image. Each verse turns into a gesture, each pause into a shadow, and each breath into a whisper that requests space and light.
Through the blend of performance art, original music, scenography, and technology, the production Is It Written? Maktoub highlights the female experience as a universal narrative – timeless, bold, lyrical. The female performer’s body becomes a field of memory and metamorphosis: it challenges itself against the past, questions tradition, and creates space for freedom. Through marginalization and repression, a new figure is born – not a victim; a storyteller, a flame. Is it written? Or is it perhaps time we rewrote it?
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.