Manolis Mitsias invited the acclaimed Greek actress Karyofyllia Karabeti to join him in performing songs that reflect and inspire our collective memory, both in good times and during today’s dystopian era. This is a heartfelt tribute to poets who have contributed their verses to songs, taking us on a musical journey through the history and culture of modern Greece.
Unsurpassable Manolis Mitsias takes the stage alongside Karyofyllia Karabeti, who recites poetry and sings live for the first time. The performance features songs with lyrics by Nikos Gatsos, Odysseas Elytis, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, Manos Eleftheriou, and Lefteris Papadopoulos – all of them renowned poets who set the standards for exceptional Greek songs.
Three sisters return to the island of their origin to tackle inheritance issues. Their father has passed away; they no longer have any relatives, and all three now live exclusively in Athens. Ever since they were little girls, they have dreamed of the big city, longing to escape so they can study, fall in love, and enjoy better professional prospects. Returning to their family home brings them face to face with the lives they have chosen, their childhood fantasies, and the people from their early years who have shaped them.
Drawing inspiration from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, this new piece attempts to illuminate the concerns of a young generation living in large urban centers, working hard, searching for love, and ultimately striving to find a “Moscow” in which to exist.
A performance that uses space as a living observer of time’s flow. Three generations of performers symbolize the past, present, and future on both a real and an imaginary time horizon. They interact in a shared space, shaping and changing it, adding or destroying elements. Time is observed through the earth and the surrounding space. Music is added as a fundamental component of the performance to play the role of time and directly and substantially affect the events. The live music converses with the movements of the performers, both moulding and being moulded by their actions. The performance structure is based on philosophical Taoism, introducing an additional central axis, alongside the temporal one, into the stage space, choreography, and dramaturgy.
A group of people, a contemporary “chorus”, attempts to (re)compose a mind-blowing and at the same time ritualistic music-theatre performance about Smyrna, with strong images and narratives questioning fragments of the history of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and borrowing elements from ancient tragedy.
Pieces of history and historical documents are recited in chorus. Chorus, melismatic choral singing, use of phrases from ancient drama choral parts in translation or in the original, messengers’ narratives, laments.
These narratives and comments will be interrupted by real persons’ testimonies that weave the aching, blood-stained human web. Excerpts of testimonies from EXODUS, Koinos Logos, the narratives of Filio Haidemenou and Angela Papazoglou, and of soldiers on the front lines have been selected and pieced together in an original composition.
The cicada (tettix in ancient Greek) is by nature associated with the process of transformation when it turns from a nymph into an adult. In the movement-based music performance Pontic Cantada the contemporary music ensemble TETTTIX (with a triple t) presents its own imaginary version of the forced “transformation” of a society.
After the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Treaty of Lausanne, a part of Pontic Greek refugees settled in Corfu. The mingling of populations, mutually influencing one another, forced the two parties to reconsider their beliefs and habits.
Through drama and satire and in a quasi-vaudevillian mood, TETTTIX and Eugenia Demeglio (choreography/movement) transform the kemençe and the mandolin into a new entity, in a context where otherness evokes reflection and stigmatization and is at the same time refreshing, invigorating and inspiring.
On a stage that is also an archaeological site, five artists from Cephalonia who live and create in 2022, bring to life narratives from the days of 1922, hum melodies, and look for the thread connecting them to their ancestors, who were either born on Cephalonia or Ithaca or ended up there hunted down, orphaned, and frightened. Alongside them a British lighting designer, a Cephaloniot set designer who lives abroad, and a director with roots in Cappadocia.
The performance presents archival material revolving around the reception of 7,000 refugees and the integration of those who, in the end, remained on these two islands.
With no sadness, but with the intent to communicate the atmosphere of that era and collectively redefine the concept of “refugee”. Because refugeeism is not an instant occurrence in world history.
What are the reminders of our civilisation? What kind of waste is there and in what forms? Is ancient heritage a waste of the past? Is the garbage of the present the cultural heritage of the future? What do we leave behind and what will we be remembered by? The production Sewage or What We Will Be Remembered By, in an active dialogue with contemporary visual arts, aims at creating a hybrid work of Art, an anti-legacy.
The basic dramaturgical starting point is the concept of sewage, both as a material imprint of human civilization’s destructive intervention in nature and as a metaphor for the things we leave behind to future civilizations. Materials that could constitute this future heritage are put on the stage. Objects, ideas, opinions, local factors and divine solutions enter into a dialogue, while visual arts help to materially capture that, which in theatre, unfortunately (or fortunately), dies after the end of the performance.
Alphabet, one of the most well-known poems of the groundbreaking Danish author and poet Inger Christensen, a modernistic poetic conception, at once prophetic, topical and timeless, with social and ecological concerns, is presented for the first time in Greece as a music theatre performance by Kentro company. Five performers – three actresses along with two onstage musicians – seek, through emblematic poetic compositions, a piece of the lost heaven, on a day, perhaps, after the end of the world. Their sharing of the stage will create a powerful audiovisual environment. The performance is targeted at our collective responsibility towards the environment and nature, sustainability and the continuation of life on the planet.
BEartH is a multi-art performance of original mixed music for contra tenor and bass voices, clarinet, bass clarinet, violoncello and piano, pre-recorded parts of electroacoustic music, and dancing. As is obvious from its title, the work revolves around four axes: Genesis, Existence, Earth, Creation. Τhe tetradic character of Tetractys is innate in almost all of the structural parts of this work, which is the fruit of the study of Hesiod’s Theogony, John’s Revelation, the Orphic Hymns, William Blake, John Milton and Dante Alighieri’s poetry and Nikos Kazantzakis’ Askitiki. Its connective links are the power of creation, the necessity of harmonizing man with his natural environment, existential concerns, and the contrast of opposite-complementary notions. Excerpts from the original texts will also be heard through set poetry and narration.
A cocktail paid for by the tourism workers
For most children, summer is the most carefree time of the year. For adults, summer is a very serious matter that requires organization, planning, and money. For some professionals, summer is identified with their jobs. Those who work during the summer, even in exhausting conditions, must conceal their tiredness to avoid dampening the spirits of holiday-goers. Travelers, on the other hand, invest their money in their vacations, hoping to be compensated for the frustrations and fatigue accumulated throughout the year.
The focus is on what often goes unnoticed during the summer: the thoughts that tour guides do not share with the tourists, the conversations among the kitchen staff, and the cramped 20-square-meter rooms where four waiters have to stay, sharing the space with 23 cockroaches.
Are we all equal under the sun or do we bring the already existing inequalities with us into tourist resorts?