Event Category: Theater

EDIT. arvan (girl, daughter)

directed by Christina Matthaiou

Play performed in Greek

Extension of performances thanks to the warm response of the audience! “vaiza” will return to PLYFA for 3 more performances on January 18, 24 & 25.

The show that thrilled the audience and critics and stood out at last year’s Epi Colonos Off-Off Festival, returns for the second year, from December 4 and for only 10 performances, at the “PLYFA” theater in Votanikos.

Christina Matthaiou, in her first directorial venture, brings on stage the original work “vaiza” {ETYM. arvan “My speechless apple” and “Christ in the snow” and inspired by the myth of La Loba, as he is captured in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s book “Women Who Run With the Wolves”, he composes a performance that speaks of the power of femininity. The power to break, to expose, to be imperfect, to differ, to define yourself, to feel, to express, to live!

Mani, mid 19th century.

A young woman, Milia, is murdered by her father and brothers to wash away the shame of the family, after she was found “broken” on the first night of her wedding. She is buried alive in a stone pit at the entrance of the village. Only her head remains out of the soil until she dies. Now Milia has a voice. Now La Loba is giving her the chance to tell her story. To be reborn.

Without limiting itself to describing yet another femicide, the play explores the perspective of each of those involved. Six persons who have never spoken, captive to social dictates and formality, now speak.

Drawing material from the Greek tradition and the overall European and Balkan history, the show speaks about today.

Director’s Note

Remember that sound you hear when you’re under the surface of the sea? And as your oxygen runs out, and the force of the water pulls you out, you struggle to hold on. There. Inside her. Listen for a little while longer, this primitive sound that brings you back. In the womb of life.
They say that tears are made of sea water, so that when people cry, they can bring the sea closer to them. And let her, the great mother, come like this to accompany them when they need her.
When they are in pain, when they mourn but also when their happiness is so great that it causes the water in their body to rise, so much so that they are in danger of drowning. And they cry. To get the excess sea out of them.

“Don’t let sorrow become a tear, Don’t let pain become a cry…”

Have you ever noticed the cheeks of women who have lost children? It’s as if the sea cursed them to never dry up. To keep her there to keep them company.

“Not a drop will escape you for the dishonorable! He embarrassed us and he will pay. She should go unscathed.”

And the sweat? What is sweat?
Water too. Seafood. Because when the sea and the fire of love meet, they become sweat. Which comes out of the bodies in love, so that one of the other can know the sea. The sea that swells inside them.
But man is not only made of water.
It is also soil. Earth. Who expects you to return her children to her, when the sea dries up in them. And when she closes them in her bowels, again, by watering them with sea, she gives birth to them again.

“You have to listen to the soil. Smell it. Taste it.”

And the ashes? What is ash?
She is also a lover’s dust. Burned bodies, before the sea touched them to cool them. Voices. Where they don’t run out of air. And they are silent.
Losses. And presences that “exist in absence”.
“Have you ever seen the fire forbid the coals?”
And the ending? Death;
“The end does not recognize death”
Why “are you killed, lost, if you are thought of by a myriad of names?”
Water, earth and fire meet on stage. In a ritual of mourning and rebirth. A performance made with materials of land and tradition. A project entangled in roots that pull it to the past. And four voices. Air. Which carries the dusty memories of all our bloody history to the water. Which will wash them away and lead them to purification. Water will make them again.
“Because time is water. Water that sculpts the stone like the sea the rocks
(…)
And richer water than tears, none.”
Christina Matthaiou

a work for voice, viola, and guitar

with Cleopatra Markou, Michalis Katachanas and Vassilis Tzavara.

is repeated for only 6 performances, from November 1 to 16 at PLYFA.

The performance “Venebra”, a piece for voice, viola and guitar, is inspired by the short story “Women who sing farewells” by Chrysostomos Tsapraῒlis, which can be found in the collection of his short stories and the engravings of Fotis Varthi “Women who return” ( Antipodes publications, 2020). The common starting point of both creators are nine absurdities of the folk tradition, nine faces of women who are in painful, threatening and eerie situations creating “a new narrative of the pain of women who have been, are and will be”. Venebra is a woman who spreads with her voice paradoxical melodies and purposes that are sweet, but at the same time deadly. Born in the midst of a war, she managed to survive from
him, but scarred by the breath of death, whose shadow remained her only real companion and family. A woman doomed to find no real peace among the living, being a discordant but charming dissonance to their existence. The idea for the original short story came from Propontida’s absurdity “Korasin etragoudage” and from the mythological mist of women whose song is deadly (Sirens, Banshees). “Venebra” comes to give the original short story sound and breath through three instruments (voice, guitar, viola) and musical improvisations that sometimes accompany and sometimes collide with the words, sometimes abandoning them, sometimes allowing them to recover and sometimes
they transform into songs – either more clearly and distinctly, or like dim memories and faded echoes. A landscape of sounds from strings, human and non-human, that pulsate seeking to shake off the identity of the omen revealing the inner and unspeakable, exorcise the prescribed fate.

Teaser

Play performed in Greek

Extra performances beyond Mondays and Tuesdays:
Wednesday 25/10/2023, Friday 27/10/2023 at 21:00 and Saturday 28/10/2023 at 20:00.

This play is performed in Greek
The show is suitable for people over 16

Genesis No. 2 by Ivan Viripaev is a “tragedy of meaning” that manages to combine humor and realism, with deep questions about meaning and existence. It talks about freedom and imposition, loneliness and connection between people. He talks about God and with God, who is one of the characters of the work.

“If you believe in God, this does not mean that God also believes in you”

But it is about a humanized, revolutionary God, who defiantly declares that he does not exist, forcing man to look for what might exist beyond him. Is there anything else?

“In everything that exists around us, there is something else, something other than what we see”

Through the text worlds and characters are born, current and eternal that have the flexibility to transform through the eyes of the viewers. This brings to the surface thoughts and feelings that we all have, but perhaps don’t know how to put into words.

The polyphonic nature of the text is also reflected in the direction, which tries an innovative approach to the work. Five actors alternate in the roles of the play, changing characters in each performance, spontaneously, without any prior agreement as to which role each one will take on in each scene. Thus, through this game of self-determination, each performance will be different, unpredictable and truly “alive”.

The ETÚTI Theater Group, directed by Kali Voikli and with the original musical composition of Viki Kapetanopoulou, create an alternative performance, where Viripaev’s text emerges as the “main face of the work”.

The performance is held under the auspices and with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture.

An actress embodies (only) discourses of women connected to the dense field of gender violence. The roles played are both fictional and real, and they are essentially “political figures” rather than fixed and materialized identities. The social worker, the mediator, the psychologist, the mother, the peer, the activist, the lawyer talk about trauma in a waiting setting. A trauma that does not appear as a psychological process or a physical wound, but is a political stake.

This play is performed in Greek.

The co-emotional landscapes concern those “atmospheres” that are created individually and collectively and that co-shape the public space as a place of political confrontation with the injustices that it produces every day.

Adopting the slogan “we are full of f–rage” that the brutal public murder of Jacques Kostopoulos highlighted and that echoed at the same time in the protest marches for Eleni Topaloudis, as in other cases of femicides, in this work care is intertwined with the rage it creates the daily reproduction of the injustice of the deaths of those who haunt the public space, while the search for social justice is constantly pending.

The text of the show is a transcription of a series of fiction audio documentaries – podcasts produced through interviews and systematic research within the framework of the research program “Co-emotional landscapes of care: Gender-based violence and resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic”*, Department of Social Anthropology, Pantheon University.

*The research program “Co-emotional landscapes of care: Gender-based violence and resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic” is funded by ELIDEK (Hellenic Research & Innovation Foundation), within the framework of the 4th Call for Action “Science and Society “, Flagship Action entitled “Interventions to deal with the economic and social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic”, with the Diotima Center as a collaborating organization and housed at the Department of Social Anthropology, Pantheon University of Social and Political Sciences.

A documentary performance about work

This play is performed in Greek.

“Work is half our life! And what are you doing?
Do you throw it away? You don’t.”

Three actors, with unique material the narratives of people who worked, are working and will work in different professions, compose the show and ask themselves:

Can we imagine a world without work?
What exactly is a typical eight hours?
Does our work define us? And if so, how much?
What makes a man endure his work over the years?
What does he hope and expect?

Work arose as a Human need.
However, how humane the working conditions end up being for those who make up The Human Resources?

Nova Melancholia presents a performance diptych consisting of the performances SEBASTIAN and VANITAS. These are two distinct parts that complement each other with common references to art history and movie stars. Two shows with a “camp” mood that play with death.

This play is performed in Greek.

SEBASTIAN

The performance is the totality of its cultural references. Reflecting on the tradition of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, as it is reformulated through the dense figurative representation in Western art from the early Renaissance onwards, we focus on concepts / sensations / symbols that touch our own sensibility and imagination. Sebastian is a polyprismatic archetype, a kaleidoscope, an avatar of desires and moods. We read poems, reenact paintings, act, pose, sing, dance, get inspired by the tradition of an eccentric, experimental cinema. We are interested in the co-emotional and embodied practices through which we today can relate to such a symbol.

Sebastian is associated with youth, beauty, sports, archery, carnal pain, hideousness, homoeroticism, martyrdom. A primary co-signification around Saint Sebastian (since the Middle Ages) is the Plague, the Black Death. We associate the tradition of homoeroticism around the figure of Sebastian, with the AIDS disease that was considered in the 80’s and 90’s a kind of “gay plague”. Like people at the dawn of European modernity, we too today resort to Saint Sebastian as an apocalyptic symbol of evil. The show is dedicated to those who take the risk to go from vision to experience, from representation to performance, risking the misunderstanding of existence.

VANITAS

The performance of the group Nova Melancholia is a stage meditation around the concept of vanitas. The performance is articulated through the (counter)juxtaposition of the emotionally charged sound of the electric guitar and Andy Warhol’s cynical and often funny speech. The performance VANITAS wants to become an ephemeral mirror of our “vanity”, its illusory shine. At the same time it works like a seductive baroque painting: it exorcises the fatigue of the days and restores faith in the beauty of life!

In art history, vanitas is the symbolic work of art that shows the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death; these concepts are presented by the juxtaposition of a skull with symbols of wealth, affluence, and luxury. The Latin noun vanitas comes from the adjective vanus (void) and refers to the phrase from Ecclesiastes “vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas” (vanity of vanities, all things vanity). Vanitas still lifes, a popular genre in 16th- and 17th-century Western Europe, often depict luxurious vessels on rich fabrics, musical instruments, books, scientific instruments, smoking paraphernalia—everything that can bring joy and pleasure to man—together with hourglasses, fragile glass objects, skulls. All this suggests the futility of wealth, the passing of beauty, the inevitability of time. These paintings call for contemplation, they act as a memento mori (reminder of death). However, the flip side of vanitas could be carpe diem (seize the day). A celebration of the ephemeral and the senses, an affirmation of the uncertainty of existence, a memento vitae (reminder of life).