Event Category: Theater

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).

Performance dates and times: March 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30 and April 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 at 21:15.
On March 25 and 26 and April 8, double show and at 18:30.

Based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel “The Passions of Young Werther”, translated by Stella Nikoloudi

Play is performed in Greek.

I have a lot in me. So many. But love? Love!
I can’t fit her. I can’t hold love inside me…

On October 29, 1772, Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem committed suicide in the provincial town of Wetzlar, Germany. The young Goethe at the time is surprised and upset by the death of the one whom he smilingly called “the one in love”, when he met him wandering in the moonlight. Goethe’s unexpected connection with Jerusalem in terms of society’s contemptuous attitude towards them, the bad relationship they both had with their superiors as well as the coincidence of falling in unrequited love lead one to suicide and the other to writing the epistolary novel “The Passions of Young Werther”.

Goethe’s (1749 – 1832) youthful epistolary novel, The Passions of Young Werther, from its very first publication, in 1774, was a huge success and strongly influenced the morals of the time. He was considered a symbol of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Rush) movement, a forerunner of the Romantic movement, and exerted a strong influence on art and philosophy. With this project he chooses to make his first public appearance, the newly formed group 400 lbs. Goethe’s hero, a young man characterized by the innocence but also the frivolity of his age, full of drive and passion, leaves the city to live in a provincial town. There he meets Lotte, who is engaged to another young man. His unrequited love for her will quickly push him away, to another city, to another life completely contrary to his nature. His conflict with the aristocracy of the city leads him to retreat back to the countryside and Lotte. With his return, the epilogue of the drama is written.

However, the performance does not focus on Werther’s suicide, which is one of the most well-known solutions in the history of literature, but on his existential anguish before this act. In his great effort to stay alive, at a time when he is on a prescribed path to death. Vertheros is a story of cruelty, a story of imposing the logic of the wider society on an infinitely sensitive man who is dying. In a confession-like narrative that faithfully follows the epistolary pattern of the novel itself, the group tries to tell this very story. Goethe writes in his memoirs: “I had lived, I had loved, I had suffered much. It would be bad if everyone didn’t go through a time in their life when it seemed to them that Vertheros was written exclusively for them.”

In today’s climate, the group 400 lbs, created by young actors – recent graduates of drama schools, is introduced to the public for the first time, with a performance that aims to have a moment of real emotional connection, an honest encounter with the viewer. The director Dimitris Charalambopoulos says about the choice of the project:

“I had already distinguished the play from my student years at the drama school. I graduated a few months before the outbreak of the pandemic. A personal experience, as well as the imprint of confinement in society and the arts, made me return to the text. Rereading Vertheros I felt I had to share this story, this emotion. What we attempt as a group comes from our deep belief that it is worth bending over the beauty and ferocity of human feeling, while everything around us says the opposite. Previous generations taught us everything but not how to feel (or at least that’s what happened to me). And on this thought I wonder: Is this struggle, with yourself, with the people around you, not a part of life? Like a baby! First you grope the world. Then you stand on your feet. Then you fall. And you get up. And again the same. And after you learn to stand, everything else comes. How else;”.

The politically sharp and highly topical work of Edouard Louis, “Who Killed My Father”, returns to PLYFA with a new cycle of performances, from March 9 to April 2. The performance of the Little Things Orchestra directed by Christos Theodoridis, which reminded us how personal politics is, comes back at a critical moment for the entire artistic world, the who continues to fight against a political decision, PD 85/2022, which is not a “matter of aesthetics” but a “matter of life and death”.

This play is performed in Greek.

The theater group b.p.m. theater group presents for the first time the play by Danai Liodaki “Those you didn’t catch”

“Those you didn’t catch”, a feminist comedy about female friendship is presented for the first time by the group b.p.m. (beats per minute) in PLYFA. The project approaches issues such as gender violence, female oppression, sexual harassment, through the prism of female empowerment and the bond of female friendship.

The project “The ones you didn’t catch” follows four childhood friends who unexpectedly meet again. Without knowing what brought them together again and why, they decide to take action “so that our bosses don’t fall for us, we don’t get spat on in the street, we don’t have to be afraid to come home at night and in general you know, for all that” . We follow step by step their journey towards the creation of a secret feminist group, but also their reunion, the doubts and obstacles they encounter, in a story with humor and sensitivity, which oscillates between action and narrative, between realism and the imagination.

When the health minister of their country announces the ban on abortion, the four women decide to upgrade their action with a big business. What follows will reunite the four friends forever.

The b.p.m. team was founded in 2018 by graduates of the drama school of the Art Theater – Karolos Koon and quickly distinguished itself with awards and remarkable success in its performances. After the successful second year of performances of “Hyperspace or else..”, the group insists on taking a stand on contemporary political and social issues, keeping a humorous and fresh perspective. The original, contemporary play “Those you didn’t catch” is expected to be released immediately by Kappa Publishing.

This play is performed in Greek.