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.
The production Cura, conceived and supervised by Vassilis Boutos and directed by Thodoris Gonis, is an allegory for nature, a cruel and tender ritual in a world that is thirsty and hungry for the Word. The Barber and the Supreme, the last couple on earth, will worship each other to be able to save their Mother Nature, everyone’s Ultimate Hairdresser.
The performance, set in an open air setting where the great celebration of cura is being prepared, includes original texts written by Glykeria Basdeki and Thodoris Gonis, as well as excerpts from works of ancient, medieval and modern Greek literature. The basis of the dramaturgical composition is the essay Aesthetics of Pindos (or The Delight of the Mountains), written in 1923 by Aeakos Pyrridis. Nymphs, mountains, and rivers are intertwined in a peculiar worship of Pindos that reminds us of both writer Alexandros Papadiamantis and poet Andreas Embirikos, offering us ideal passages that will accompany the dramaturgical “ritual”.
The active theatre company C. for Circus’ new production You, Nature! is a special theatre and music performance based on Chinese writer Yan Lianke’s novel The Years, Months, Days. It talks about a year when draught seemed to never end. From morning to evening, an old man known as the Elder, the story’s central figure, can almost hear his hair burning. A terrible draught forces the inhabitants of a remote mountainous village to flee – all but this old man and a blind dog, who could not withstand the exhausting journey across the mountains in search of food and water. The Elder is keeping watch over a single ear of corn that has grown in the infertile land. Devoted to it and to the hope it gives him, every single day he fights against defeat, every single day he wins a victory over death. A stubborn struggle for survival until the final dramatic climax, when one of them must sacrifice himself so that the other one can survive and keep the corn ear alive. A story about the power of life!
The music theatre performance Perhaps We’re Brothers In The End by Fenia Papadodima is based on Indian Chief Seattle’s earthshaking letter, written in 1854 as an answer to the representative of the government in Washington asking to buy their land. “If we sell you our land, remember that it is sacred…” The goal of the work is to shape a common conscience dictating a truth that is yet to be fully grasped: to stop the destruction of Nature, we first need to change our very worldview. A musical journey around the Red Church in Voulgareli, built in 1280, where scattered paintings by Giorgos Kordis narrate the transformation of man and the planet, from the fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden to this day, conversing with the happenings.
The original composition also includes text excerpts from Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World and Philip Sherrard’s The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology.
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.