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Region: Ionian Islands

The Donkey’s Tale

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 .

This Is How It Began, Based on Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night

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.