In Andreas Flourakis’ new work The Guardian of the Lake the imaginary converges with ecology, and modern language with our folk tradition. The writer joins once more forces with director Roubini Moschochoriti, after their successful collaboration on the production for young audiences Asia Minor, to mould a luminous world full of imagination and children’s images.
The guardian of a Greek lake who wants to travel across the world for the first time, meets his potential replacements: a Greek-American investor, a school student, and a Finnish scientist. None of them seems good enough to him, while a spot of unidentified origin appears on the surface of the lake, a frog with Tourette’s syndrome is giving him a hard time, and all the animals of the wetland are becoming worried by these sudden changes. What will the guardian do to be able to go on his trip but also save his beloved lake? A work written for young and older audiences who want to love theatre again.
Four visitors participate in a peculiar sound tour. The voice of the archaeological site’s director gradually leads them to questions that connect the monuments they are now visiting, those they have already visited and others that stand in different parts of the world – with climate change. Through the questions, what progressively develops is a narration loaded with associations about the impact of climate change on cultural heritage, in the past, present and future. For as long as the questions persist, the visitors are faced with ignorance, agony, hope for the future. Statistics alternate with texts from the Romantic period, singing, dancing, poetic elements, music, soundscapes and humor, while the narration composes a torrential list of endangered beings that want, however, to survive and believe in an optimistic future.
Snow Whites is a performance for two narrators and a four-member instrumental ensemble. In this performance, three Snow Whites come together to discuss the pains of growing up, the cost of coming of age, and the gifts of the woods. Snow Whites, like all fairy tales, knows no language, religious, or cultural boundaries.
Relying on the most vulnerable of all musical instruments, the human voice, they cross over time and lands, undergo changes, and offer us wonderful versions of their story from the Balkans, Europe, and Africa. The magical fairytales are songs that pass down from one generation to another, each time dressed in the rhythms and melodies of the community of the story-teller who narrates them.
Extinction. Heartbreak. Grief. Faith. In you. Who left. And in you. Who came. In the paper that is torn. In the whole family. In Monday evening. And in Tuesday evening. In modern theatre (modern art). And in modern humans. In sweet summertime. In our Argos. In culture. And in the whole of Greece. Death to winter. Death to death. Inspired by Euripides’ The Bacchae and Margarita Liberaki’s Sparagmos (Heartbreak), the characters onstage will attempt to preserve a world made of paper. The performance will try to tell the story of the mythical king Pentheus, also known as “the man of many sorrows”.
The youth-oriented novel When the Statues Went Away by Angeliki Darlasi, adapted for the stage by the author herself and directed by Christos Christopoulos, has been turned into a special performance designed for children aged 6 to 11 years.
Once there was a girl who had heard statues singing. She had danced with them in the moonlight. She had seen them shedding tears. Because statues come alive at night. Angelina was well aware of that, as she grew up in a museum. Tiko and the statues were her best friends. When Mussolini declared war against Greece, the fear that the darkness of Nazism would prevail grew even stronger. And all those involved in the museum, from archaeologists to plain workers, all of them shared a common anxiety. They all protected the same secret, which seemed to be summarized in just one phrase: “We must make haste…”. Angelina will want to learn that secret and help her friend, Tiko, hide his own.
In the Fortified Troupakis-Mourtzinos complex in the Old Town of Kardamyli, a monument that serves as a testament to the story of the last members of the Palaiologos family, Fenia Papadodima takes us on a tour across the land of the Nykliani. A land and a world that is at once cruel and fascinating. A place where death is constantly present.
Through her original music, the portraits painted by Giorgos Kordis on stones hanging on the walls of the tower, and the texts – Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Homer’s Nekyia, as well as folkloristic and philosophical studies, and oral traditions –, the performance explores a woman’s position within a harsh, patriarchal family. Her weakness and strength. Her cry and lullaby. The boundary between life and death. In this misty, hovering “in-between” realm of Mani. Alongside her performing – an ensemble of renowned musicians.
The Dance of Death, a piece conceived and choreographed by Iris Karayan, focuses on the concept of conflict in times of war – a topical and deeply evocative theme.
Drawing inspiration from the painting Der Krieg [The War, 1929-1932] by German artist Otto Dix, as well as his collection of fifty etchings and engravings from 1924, Iris Karayan choreographs a performance that intertwines political, expressionistic, and allegorical elements, combining the art forms of dance and music. Hovering between opposite poles, such as chaos and harmony, conflict and concord, tension and calmness, the performance will revitalize the Ancient Theatre of Gythio with the energy of its four dancers’ movement, creating a powerful and dense choreographic narrative based on the concept of conflict.
Four actors and a musician travel to Arcadia, seeking fragments of the myth. Their goal is to found a utopian community in harmony with nature, following the tradition of the Arcadian Ideal.
From ancient to contemporary times, Arcadia has been the place onto which European thought has projected the idea of a lost paradise on earth. It is a place where myth and reality blend. At the same time, it reflects the issue of Greece’s heterodefinition, given that many of the thinkers who shaped the perception of Greece never actually visited the country.
How far is the Western European mythical tradition of Arcadia from the modern Greek experience? Can we imagine an ideal society today? Can we imagine a life in harmony with nature, or does something like that come in conflict with our modern lifestyle?
The piece hot dark matter, inspired and choreographed by Zoi Efstathiou, explores the transit of refugees, drawing parallels to the passage from heaven to earth. It also compares refugee reception with the arrival of hot dark matter, a whirlwind moving leftwards and carrying information, an ambiguous mass.
Hot dark matter is a programme that tracks bodies in the deep sea, a programme that delves into the Odyssey-like journey of refugees who are driven away from foreign countries. Focusing on the body of a dancer moving leftwards as they strive to move towards the light, the concepts of exclusion and integration, intergroup contact and conflict, are being shaped. The piece treads a fine line between the presence or absence of a realistic conflict that arises during the reception of hot dark matter, as the bodies clash, align, merge, experience exclusion, and move forward together.
The music theatre performance In the Labyrinth: Accounts and Poems by Incarcerated Women brings to life poems, thoughts, and accounts of women who have been imprisoned, as well as those who have been released from prison.
The emotional fluctuations, internal conflicts, and mental struggle of these women are brought to the foreground through the performance of traditional songs from various parts of Greece and Southern Italy. Seven female artists – five musicians, an actress, and a dancer –join forces on stage to create a poetic, musical, and visual representation of the Labyrinth.
A contemporary ritual that blends storytelling with live music and dance, creating a performance that is both dynamic and ardent, while also embracing a more traditional (“doric”) approach to presenting various stage expressions, with the goal of vividly portraying on stage the Labyrinth found within the minds and souls of incarcerated women. A hymn to every individual’s personal journey towards the much-desired freedom.