Are there male and female “purposes,” gender-based inclinations and talents? Are fields like science, pharmaceuticals, architecture, or astrophysics suitable for girls?
Spring 1960, Missolonghi. A group of students from the Girls’ Junior High School crosses the city streets in protest against the establishment of a Practical Junior High School exclusively for boys, which would exclude them from STEM subjects. This is a story about women born in the Greek countryside after World War II and during the outbreak of the Civil War, who envisioned a life equal to that of men for themselves. Self-luminous girls, and therefore strange for their time and ours, in a world where gender roles still define the dominant national narrative, despite their superficial transformation. A work about youth and the talents that nature hides within people, regardless of time, place, gender, or social mores. An original performance inspired by true and (truly Greek) stories.
ENIGMA is an acrobatic-theatrical performance. Utilizing theatre and aerial acrobatics as valuable tools, three performers bring the myth of Oedipus to light. Through a contemporary stage interpretation, the myth calls for an informed and creative engagement with major existential questions.
Everything begins and unfolds in the thorny realm of the Enigma. The Sphinx hovers continuously, reminding us of the constant conflict between chaos and reason, between unchangeable destiny and human will, and between the painful path of searching for truth and self-awareness. The Sphinx “treads” on Oedipus’ ruins, unless the opposite occurs. Always within the boundaries of the Enigma, which is intertwined with human existence. What are the contemporary Enigmas/Sphinxes that contemporary Individuals/Oedipuses are called upon to solve? Who gives birth to enigmas, the “Monster” or Humanity? Is the solution to the Enigma redemption or hubris?
How does a contemporary text sound when it engages in dialogue with an older one, such as an excerpt from Odysseus Elytis’ poem Axion Esti (Worthy it is), after an oral testimony? How could all these elements come together in an emblematic composition by Dmitri Shostakovich about World War II? Musicians Faidon Miliadis, Laertis Kokolanis, Enkela Kokolani, and Angelios Liakakis will perform Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in an open dialogue with actor Dimitris Mandrinos. A new theatrical monologue by Thodoris Iosifidis, intended for the Ancient Theatre of Pleuron, will attempt to express through words what music conveys as experienced emotions. The sources for this piece, which converses with music, include survivors’ accounts, as well as earlier and more recent literary texts associated with war. Literary and musical motifs blend in an effort to acknowledge the collective trauma caused by World War II.
The site-specific installation and sonic happening take the myth of the Achelous River as their point of departure. Here, geomythology serves as a living memory and a transformative force. The notion of diversion refers not only to the rerouting of the river itself but also to a shift in historical and cultural narratives.
Panos Charalambous draws on familiar motifs from his practice—irrigation pipes, metal basins, a boat from Lake Amvrakia—reimagined as vessels of animate ecologies. The tsamiko, deconstructed and elongated, becomes a gesture of embodied and environmental reflection—a choreography of memory inscribed in both body and landscape.
Angelos Krallis constructs a sonic palimpsest, layering rast tonalities, micro-environments, and live processing into a form of acoustic excavation.
Diversion emerges as a practice of reconfiguring our relations with water, land, and time—toward a present of coexistence.
The past has a profound impact on Disability, Art, Culture, and their management, both through societal and cultural beliefs and through political and technological advancements.
Understanding this historical trajectory is crucial for creating a fairer and more inclusive future for individuals with disabilities. This theory can explain the importance of the past and memory, as well as how they can be redefined, reconstructed, and function anew under new conditions and conventions in culture, art, science, technology, education, and life itself…
When economies collapse, institutions face challenges, and moral values are questioned, revisiting the past becomes necessary. Sometimes people need to delve into their cultural heritage to be able to adjust their compass and orient themselves toward new directions for a better future.
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.