How important is it for a child to follow their dreams and not those of other people? How much courage does someone need to admit their resemblance to the “enemy”?
It is difficult for someone to discuss about politics with a child. It is hard to present them History and its curses in an objective way. Sometimes though, the infallible mirror of a myth, does not hide these issues – it reveals them, more clearly, in a more “digestible” form than ever before.
The work is inspired by the enchanting Asia Minor fairy tale “Machaira” (Knife). It tells the story of two friends, a prince and a poor child, who were violently separated but then found each other again, through a journey in search of the “Great Idea”.
Three narrators will traverse the multicultural Asia Minor portraying images in three sections.
Before, during and in the wake of the Disaster. An intertextual performance inspired by historical events, Dido Sotiriou’s novel Farewell Anatolia (Matomena Homata) and Geis Milton’s The Lost Paradise-Smyrna 1922, as well as by myths and written accounts. Memories and testimonies of real persons who lived in Asia Minor come to life and transport us to the magical world of Smyrna, there where the East and the West harmonically co-exist. But also in the subsequent tragedy. The tragedy of the Catastrophe and persecution. Melodies and live music, songs, local treats, feelings of joy and pain, they all create the canvas of the history of Asia Minor.
Using imagination as a vehicle of expression and communication, a story is created for the whole family. A peaceful celebration to acquaint ourselves with Izmir and the cultural heritage of Asia Minor.
Island of Kos, the journey begins in 1890, in the homeland of the great Greek singer, Marika Papagika.
In 1913 she follows her parents who migrate to Egypt and two years later to the USA, where she settles and lives to the end of her life, in 1943. New York is the starting point of the great career of this special singer, who recorded more than 200 light music, Smyrnaean, folk and rebetiko songs. Her reputation spreads and her songs are loved through her records that reach every corner of the earth.
A music-theatre benchmark performance in honour of the legendary Marika, the first among all other important Greek female singers in the USA, whose life and creative trajectory have acquired the dimensions of a true legend.
This is a performance that combines excerpts from Aeschylus’ Iketides (The Suppliant Women), historical facts, testimonies, traditional sounds but also original texts and songs, in order to shed light on the saga of the relocation of the young women who constituted the vast majority of the refugee population.
Those young widows, single and orphaned women, in their attempt to claim their professional and personal “rehabilitation” in the patriarchal Greece of ’22, are exploited by men and subjected to racism by Greek women who see them as rivals.
They call them ‘pastrikes’ (the “clean ones”) but not in order to praise their love of grooming and cleaning: those times in Greece the only women who often washed themselves – because of their profession – were prostitutes. “Honest” women did not need to wash any “shame” off of them.
Onirodrama theatre company created an intertextual original performance for the whole family titled The Nightmare of Persephone#Chernobyl. In a utopian atemporal setting where everything is possible, where reality merges with fantasy and where the problem becomes so crucial and unmanageable, a different mechanism of self-preservation is set in motion.
The myth of Persephone according to Homer’s hymn to Demetra, Nikos Gatsos’ poetry, true accounts of the Chernobyl tragedy by writer and Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich, Andri Snær Magnason’s The Story of the Blue Planet, and Apostle Paul’s Hymn of Love from his epistle to the Corinthians inspire and help compose the canvas that will depict the problems of energy crisis, climate change and ecological destruction. The participation of children in the show is its most important part. The performance is a protest, a pleading and at the same time an answer to the “powerful ones” who destroy “our home”, the planet Earth.
The body is earth. It carries rivers. Their water masses move inside of us, run through us and move us. Water is nothing but us. It is our first relative and the first medicine to which we turn. As long as we continue to poison and exhaust our water resources, how will we be able to clean our wounds?
Running Dry invites audiences to a dance performance, where water returns as a Fury, as a primeval urge. The Furies cannot exist in the absence of the wild. This is what they invoke: the untamable, defending the wild landscapes of the soul. A Fury is water shortage, drought, flood, the rising of the sea level, the rivers that dry up, the wrinkling skin. She is not a punishment; she turns into knowledge. Dancing bodies return to the water – their oldest wild relative –, and through motion waves, voices, confessions and gestures they unfold personal water maps of physical memories and weave a world of bright co-existence.
Two Oddly-Shaped Stones, a production for teenagers of all ages by the active theatre company Apparatus, is a stage composition drawing themes, concerns, images and sounds from the thought that nature knows no crisis. Through a playful narration it peeps at an entire universe of probabilities and possibilities opening up in front of us.
Four characters are looking for joints and cracks in a place that connects them with the environment, culture and memory – the element that will finally bring them together. With the goal of creating something with whatever is available, toiling to leave behind them traces and not only ruins, they are looking for the values of materials and thoughts, they are trying to understand the changes and find their place in this mercurial universe. In a play with materials, light, music and poetry, they find their balance between gravity and lightness, they take action and shift places, they change the space and get changed by it.
Inspired by a folk legend of Epirus, director Konstantinos Markellos (author of the works The Abduction of Tasoula, Dancing Plague, and Two Oranges for Christmas) created a folk-style text following the Paraloges (a type of Greek folk narrative songs) model, written in verse and in the local Epirus dialect.
A group of actors-musicians perform sometimes as Narrators and other times as Acting Characters. They also sing original compositions inspired by polyphonic songs from Epirus, under the guidance of Vasoula Delli and Natalia Lambadaki, who are members of the vocal ensemble “Pleiades”.
The old woman Itsa played a special role in the community of the village Aetomilitsa in Konitsa. She had the traits of a good witch, spreading around her relief mixed with fear. In July 1974, when general conscription was declared, she gathered the girls at St Nicholas church to perform a primeval, apotropaic dance. A reverse dance, counterclockwise, with the dancers’ faces not towards the center of the circle but outward. As they danced, they rhythmically repeated the words: “It’s nothing, dear, it’s nothing. The enemies are in the sea and children at home”.
In the highly charged space of the Nekromanteion of Acheron in Preveza, we watch the final moments of a dying woman who, standing on the verge between life and death, struggles to understand and accept her imminent end. Solely relying on her voice and memories from the Greek tradition and literature, she becomes a conduit for the universal experience of death agony. She raves, sings, and tells stories, as if she wanted to console her own self, always having beside her a visible and at once invisible fellow traveller. The one who watches, accompanies her with his music, and eventually escorts her to her passing from the worldly to the otherworldly life. An effort to understand and purge the second part of the pair “Life and Death” – this so mundane and inextricable part of every being, that is yet so difficult to accept.
We are experiencing the repercussions of a civil war exhaustion. The people are ill; their wounds have brought the beast out of them, have turned them into creatures that walk a tightrope between life and death. Tired faces that have grown ugly, worn out by war, pain, destruction, wretchedness, and abysmal hatred; towards brothers, fellow travellers, those who were called upon to share both the fruitful and the barren land with, God himself. The only one who still carries the Light within her, innocence, hope for an untainted life, is the Bride; she wants to become the fertile soil where the young generation will stem from to love and co-exist in harmony. However, she becomes the sought-after loot; the precious diamond that everyone will defile. Since they cannot respond to its brilliance, they have to dip it in their mud. No matter how much they try to resist the momentum of destruction, the heroes have already surrendered to the absolute nature of causality.
* Our warm thanks go to Mr Nikos Karavasilis, the President of the Cultural Society of the Red Church, for his valuable assistance and support in bringing this performance to life.