On the occasion of the centenary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the Encardia ensemble presents a special and very topical musical programme.
An excellent anthology of songs and texts that will illuminate the ever-topical issue of refugeeism and migration.
A focal point of the performance will be human solidarity, the only thing that can alleviate the “Foreigner’s” pain, even transform it into hope and optimism.
Emerging from the bleakness of history, rowing across the river of time, women of different ages and ethnic backgrounds meet here and now. Olympia! Summer 2022!
Dialogic “episodes” dramatise the horror of war, the Exchange of Populations, the collapse of the Great Idea. Monologues narrate little by little, with epic solemnity, the same, almost repetitive history. The performers, all of them anonymous members of a tragic chorus, will unite their voices in the interpolated songs, the festive odes and monodies, and will bring out the theatricality of the “testimonial” narration, arousing emotion in audiences, who will get to look the violence of History straight in the eye.
The refugee narrative is deconstructed and integrated into a historical chamber drama that sometimes seems like an ancient tragedy and sometimes like a musical Requiem.
In September of 1922, an American citizen charters “Mimosa”, the ship that will transfer 2,000 Greeks from Smyrna to Piraeus. Three traveling players are among the passengers. A mysterious burlesque comes to life on the deck of “Mimosa”. The traveling players unfold their performance through storytelling, singing and dancing, challenging the boundaries of tragic and comic. In the middle of the sea, they take us on a journey through the depths of human soul, in its attempt to survive, to find its roots, to attest, to smile, to trust again.
Fiction braids with documentary, in this dark comedy, dedicated to the multiple adventures of the Catastrophe of Asia Minor. Drawing material from the dark impasses of the National Schism, the play reconstructs, in a fictive context, heroes of the period who fought for the uncertain future of integration.
The Black Journey is the real life testimony of a young Greek man who was recruited to take part in the Asia Minor Expedition.
The bijoux de kant company talks about the vital needs, the hunger, the thirst and the cruelty planted by war in the souls of all people, regardless of their nationality. It talks about the uprooting, the life of refugees, and the new cultural identity of Greece. In a field of memory, in a landscape of fragments, an unknown soldier of the Engineer Battalion vividly describes the wound of being uprooted and rewrites history.
The protagonist is accompanied by an Angel, his younger self, and eastern melodies of Asia Minor performed by a young girl from Athens, who sings to the Smyrnaean rhythms of a culturally new Greece.
1966: Twenty villages, field crops, trees, dozens of monasteries and churches, including the Temple of Episkopi that has been designated as a cultural monument, were sunk to build the hydroelectric dam in Kremasta. Two thousand local residents left the area between Evrytania and Aetolia-Acarnania, watching their villages being destroyed for the sake of upgrading Greece’s energy production.
Four musicians and singers, one actor and an emotionally charged text represent the multiple feelings associated with the uprooting, memories, nostalgia and tradition, in the face of the inevitable subversion of everyday life in the name of “growth” and “progress”. Traditional songs and tunes from Armenia, Cappadocia, the Arab world, Roumeli, Spain, Thrace, Cyprus, the islands and the rest of Greece coordinate, co-colour, and go hand in hand with the text, aiming at achieving communion with the audience.
The production is a composition of fragments from Anton Chekhov’s works Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull. The Russian writer brings us face to face with man’s interaction with the environment and climate. He reveals and passionately speaks against the environmental, climatic and geological destruction of nature by man. He places man’s relationship with nature on the basis of a moral concern. The text, songs and the music all interweave, creating a “musical one-act play” to remind us that nature is a gift to man. And when man doesn’t destroy nature, the land becomes beautiful. Therefore man also becomes “beautiful” in turn. He fills his life with beautiful feelings.
War is the ultimate form of conflict between adversaries. The event The Art of War, written and directedby Konstantinοs Thanοs and Alkmini Kalogirou, is a representation of a war battle in the style of a board game, especially designed for children and teenagers.
Through the use of miniature soldiers, combat weapons, and strategic techniques for achieving victory from Sun Tzu’s book of the same title, children will be made aware of the impacts of war and the emotions of those involved – victims, aggressors, and bystanders. In a time when games play such an important role in children’s everyday lives, this analogy-based representation uses game-playing as a tool for a multifaceted and experiential approach to war and conflict.
Drawing inspiration from the myth of Prometheus, Spyros Kouvaras continues his choreographic explorations across our collective memory. Using movement, sound, and image as tools, he delves into the monumental struggle of the mythical hero, in an effort to uncover the parallels between ancient times and modern history. The choreographer “transports” the body to the fragile present, all the while perceiving a dream of the future concealed within the myth. As he plays with the different definitions of time, the original electroacoustic music and the surround sound installation lead the performers to a dance that evokes images reminiscent of the landscapes of the unconscious.
A choreographic uprising or a manifesto about freedom? PROMETHEUS 2024 (unbound bodies) brings to the foreground the proud independence of a form of heroism that explores the limitless boundaries of imagination and sheds light on the contemporary battlefield, which essentially is our own culture. This way, it focuses on the anthropological aspect of the myth, raising a crucial question in our modern, volatile world: Can humans save humanity?
We are the first to be part of a “co-habitation” arrangement between humans and machines. Experimentation no longer focuses on the dialogue but on the new content itself, along with the urgent, burning question: “We instead of Them or They instead of Us? Are we with Them? We as Them or They as Us”. The confrontation takes place at the only spot allowing room for a pause, in the uncharted space where artificial intelligence meets emotional intelligence.
Artificial Confidence is a musical techno-noir piece. The allegory running through it like a beam of light, and the ritual of an anthropo-mechanic event combine elements of music theatre with the norms of spoken word theatre. The libretto and stage direction emphasize the ambiguity of each Test without concrete data, while the musical composition constantly comments on the mechanics of modern mediation, where no one knows whom or what they are called upon to mimic – do creations mimic their creators or vice versa?
Giorgis Zarkos, a writer from the inter-war period generation, submits one of his short stories for publication in the Great Hellenic Encyclopedia in the late 1920s. The story is indeed published, but under someone else’s name. After trying in vain to rectify this injustice at his own expense, he ends up breaking the shop window of the publishing house “Pyrsos” three times.
This action, along with his unconventional character, leads to him being placed under “watch” at the Public Psychiatric Hospital of Athens (Dafni), under DA’s orders. His experience of being confined in Dafni for 54 days, as recorded by he himself in his books, sheds light on the bleak conditions of psychiatric institutions and their inmates.
The performance Giorgis Zarkos: Three Stones, a Shop Window, and a Confinement, which will be presented at the Castle of Patras, explores the writer’s personality and oeuvre, as well as his conflict with the literary, cultural, judicial, and psychiatric establishments of his era.
*Contains graphic descriptions