The multi-level musical performance The Language of Sea Shells, featuring Thodoris Voutsikakis, a prominent singer from the younger generation, and Marina Kalogirou reciting, presents the musical idioms of Mediterranean cultures along with excerpts from their written works, evoking emotions. Alongside them performing will be the Municipality of Patras Plucked Strings Orchestra “Thanasis Tsipinakis”, conducted by Anastasios Symeonidis.
The performance focuses on the contemporary Mediterranean Individual, who longs to move beyond historical divisions and find the shared inner ground that unites them with their neighbouring peoples, providing them with a strong sense of hope for the future. Morocco, Egypt, Spain, Tunisia, France, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Greece, Algeria, Turkey… The Mediterranean, this known yet unknown region, a palimpsest, a mosaic of people, cultures, religions, languages, customs, habits…The sea that gave birth to civilizations, embraced differences, the sea with the many faces that both connected and separated lives, has always been a cornerstone for its inhabitants, their struggles and dreams, as well as a source of inspiration and tranquility.
In the end, does the Mediterranean serve as a line that divides or unites the countries watered by it and their peoples? And what would happen if this sea didn’t exist – would these nations remain separate or would they potentially never come together? The people have often managed to heal their wounds and bridge the gaps dividing them through common ground or simply by accepting the cultural elements of those “opposite” them.
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.