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Pieces of history and historical documents are recited in chorus.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.
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?
A popular 16th-century Cretan poem featuring a wolf, a fox, and a donkey has been adapted into a modern musical fairy tale with visual elements titled The Donkey’s Tale. It is a piece that satirizes various types of human individuals across different times and places.
Animals play the role of humans. They speak, imagine, dream, conspire, and make jokes. With folk humour, rhyming verses, and an idiomatic language, the performance “covertly and painlessly” criticizes the Western European social classes and the oppression of the weak by the powerful.
Natalia Kotsani and Tasos Kofodimos set the poem to music and perform it, maintaining its plot and units. Visual artist Natalia Manta tells the story using both analogue and digital means and highlighting its modern allegorical aspects, while four musicians on stage engage with the heroes and their tales through music, crafting a parallel narrative of their own.
I fylláda toy gadárou or Gadárou, lykou, kai alepous diigisis hairei is one of the most well-known folk books among the modern Greek people, with numerous reprints up to the 19th century. It is a work by an anonymous poet, written from a humorous and satirical perspective and published in Venice in 1539, twenty years after Bergadis’ poem Apókopos .
Our life is a journey
into the Night, into the Winter,
we seek our path,
in the starless meadow.
The theatre and music performance This Is How It Began, directed by Victoria Fota and featuring music by Lefteris Veniadis, is based on the first part of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night [Voyage au bout de la nuit].
In a rush of enthusiasm, the young medical student Ferdinand Bardamu voluntarily joins the French Army, right after the outbreak of World War I. Soon, however, he regrets this action, as he sees from close up the murderous incapability of his superiors, the brutality of human nature, and the absurdity of war.
Bardamu is no role model; he is not a war hero. His unorthodox stance and rebellious views could be described as nihilistic. They do express, however, the innermost thoughts of every person who, realizing the horror of war and the futility of conflicts occurring in the name of nations, religions, and ideologies in general, prefers to survive and not be turned into yet another dead “hero”, who will forever remain unseen.