Two young men between two worlds, as another Pentheus and Dionysus. Using ancient texts and other documents, they will try to find the roots, to remember, to recall. Technology, progress, growth. What do ancient people call Need? Why are the four seasons of the year getting extinct? What is humanism? Is man the centre of our world? Is there an ecological conscience? Are the great civilizations disappearing?
A performance, with the Hill family at its core, in search of euphoria through co-existence. In this painful journey towards memory, they will be assisted by four musicians, composers, performers, and the actress and director of the performance Sofia Hill. Each one of them will compose their own original music, will set choral parts from ancient tragedies and other texts to music, and will perform pieces of classical and traditional music. The road against oblivion is painful and the catharsis inevitable. The epilogue, however, is a hymn to life.
An unexpected musical conversation, Alexandros Drakos Ktistakis’ new music work Selva Oscura, attempts to musically capture the forces that make forests an inextricable structural element of our survival. Written for a chamber orchestra, the work is divided into instrumental parts, improvisation, and parts with set paralogés (narrative folk ballads) performed by Elli Paspala with an original text by Alexandra K*.
The fragile rhythmic and melodic balance among the members of the orchestra, where each musician focuses both on their individual duty and on the orchestra’s goal as a group, reminds us of the balance and organisation of a precious ecosystem. At the same time the work musically captures destruction and rebirth. Its rhythmic contrasts outline the alternations of the life cycle and the destruction of forests. The realisat destruction, the despair of “why” and the hope for rebirth are all aspects that emerge through its musical structure. “After a fire, forests are burnt but not dead”.
An open air sound installation by Dimitris Georgakopoulos and Coti K., a sculpture that serves as an Aeolic harp. The work’s title has been inspired by the myth of Icarus. The two elements of the myth that gave rise to the work’s concept are arrogance and fall.
The installation consists of two rectangular six-metre-long and three-metre-high surfaces, made of one hundred three-metre-long wooden boards arranged horizontally and parallelly, a short distance apart from each other. These surfaces converge to each other, leaving only a narrow passing between them. The air entering them gets compressed and comes out forcefully through a row of strings about two metres long, producing an eerie yet enchanting sound.
The work deliberately chooses not to use modern technology and to be based on its relationship with nature, raising the question about the extent to which man can create works without harming the environment.
“Because people cannot see the colour of words, the tints of words, the secret ghostly motions of words (…); is that any reason why we should not try to make them hear, to make them see, to make them feel?” – Lafcadio Hearn
Japan and Greece – two cultures conversing in the new music theatre work titled Tsunami that will be presented with a script and directed by Elpida Skoufalou. On 11 March 2011, a catastrophic earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a gigantic tsunami, which not only had huge cost in human lives but also caused the biggest nuclear accident after Chernobyl. When disaster struck, poet Mayuzumi Madoka organised haiku composition sessions with the survivors. She collected 126 haiku poems that served as inspiration for the “Tsunami” of this musical performance. With speech, original music – drawn upon the encounter of Japanese musical traditions with those of Greece – and dance as a vehicle, this work focuses on climate crisis and its detrimental effects on our lives and souls.
International performer Erini, accompanied on the piano and the Cretan lyre by Giannis Papadopoulos and Giorgos Kontogiannis respectively, joins forces with visual artist Vassilis Galanis and dancer Sophia Filippou on an interactive and improvisatory performance aimed at awakening audiences to the climate crisis. Prose and poetic texts by the awarded emerging poet Evá Papadakis accompany the performance. The performers sing adaptations of traditional Greek songs on stage, recall the past of the archaeological site, and using improvisation as a tool, imagine the present and the future awaiting us in terms of images and choreographies.
Through the performance, emphasis will be given on man’s relationship with nature, which has historically been an object of worship and an inspiration for creation. Besides, it is no coincidence that the numerous references made to nature in traditional folk songs aim at bringing out man’s love for it, love as a natural phenomenon, as well as the motif of man’s struggle for survival. The work explores the crushing effects of the changes brought about by climate crisis, starting with the displacement of populations and energy crises as a result of wars, and moving on to the tangible or intangible cultural heritage.
Evrotas attempts to make a poignant artistic commentary on man’s relationship with Nature and the necessity of protecting the natural environment over the generations. The flow of the action of the five performers – each of them of different age –, in tune with the natural daylight, invites audience members to focus on actions that sometimes take place close to them and other times far from them, so that they can change their perception through space and time. Audience members are asked to take a walk with stops at various spots, where they can change their field of view so as to better observe the landscape and identify the human interventions that alter it, realising in this way the ”stake” of co-existence. Manolis Manousakis’ original music takes the audience on a journey at times along the river and at times across the city. This alternation will raise questions. Evrotas’ goal is to raise awareness along with questions about the co-existence of man and Nature.
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”.