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Golden Record

The b.p.m. theatre group presents the new theatre work by Danai Liodaki

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What is worth preserving from the history of humanity? This is the question from which Golden Record, the new performance by Danai Liodaki, takes its starting point. The performance takes us back to 1977, when NASA created a record containing music, images and sounds and sent it into space aboard the Voyager mission, in an attempt to introduce life on Earth to an unknown extraterrestrial recipient. The performance returns to this real-life event, revisiting it in an era of war and destruction.

Almost fifty years after the spacecraft was launched, two sisters, while clearing out their parents’ house in a small village in Greece, discover a series of letters that bring a family secret to light. As they unravel the thread of the story, they travel through Greece during the struggle against the dictatorship and into a world changing at dizzying speed. From the neighbourhoods of New York and the creators of the Golden Record, to the Lebanese Civil War and the Palestinian people’s resistance, personal journeys become inextricably intertwined with major historical events of recent decades, revealing a hidden history that emerges from the past to illuminate the future.

Blending fiction with real historical figures and events, Golden Record is a work about memory, loss, and resistance to oblivion. A deeply anti-war work that seeks out the stories of those who were left outside official historical narratives.

Danai Liodaki (“Match,” “Those You Didn’t Get to See,” “Hyperspace or Otherwise…,” “With the Bees or with the Wolves”) continues to engage with contemporary political and social issues, proposing theatrical forms that combine elements of contemporary fiction and documentary theatre. The play Golden Record is published by Kapa Publishing.

The performance was presented as part of the 2026 programme of the Greek Ministry of Culture’s “All of Greece, One Culture” initiative.

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Duration: 90 minutes, no interval

SEBASTIAN
Nova Melancholia

SEBASTIAN returns for two unique nights in Athens before being presented at the Nicosia International Festival 2026. The performance has been honored by the Theatre and Performing Arts Critics Association with the Performing Arts Award. A performance with a “camp” sensibility, a kaleidoscope of references around the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, an avatar of desires and moods that plays with death and exorcises the darkness of our days.

Sebastian is a multiprismatic archetype, a kaleidoscope, an avatar of moods and desires. Delving into the tradition of Saint Sebastians’ martyrdom, as recast through its dense representation in Western art from early Renaissance onwards, we focus on concepts / senses / symbols resonating with our own sensibilities and imagination. The performance is the grand sum of its cultural references. We read poems, recreate paintings, mince, pose, sing, dance, and draw inspiration from an eccentric cinematic tradition of experimentation. We are interested in exploring those affective and bodily practices which will enable us to relate to a symbol like Sebastian in the present.

Saint Sebastian is associated with youth, beauty, sports, archery, physical pain, salacity, homoeroticism and martyrdom. Already since medieval times, there is a strong connotation linking him to the Plague, Black Death. We tie together the tradition of homoeroticism as expressed through the figure of Sebastian and the AIDS disease, which, in the 80s and 90s, came to be regarded as a kind of ‘homosexual plague’. Just like people did in early European modernity, we too resort to Saint Sebastian, assigning him with an apotropaic function to help us ward off evil. The show is dedicated to those who dare cross over from vision to lived experience, from representation to presence, thus taking the risk of being consumed by the blazes of existence.

The performance is dedicated to HIV-positive activist Zack/Zackie who was brutally murdered in Athens in September 2018, and experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger who died in May 2023.

“The language of theatre is not ‘natural’. We have to create it over and over again (says Roland Barthes). And we are indeed so rarely given the opportunity to watch a group of people construct their own language in front of us! Piece by piece, this precious pastiche called SEBASTIAN is moulded in Nova Melancholia’s performance.”

Louiza Arkoumanea (theater critic)

“SEBASTIAN is the most beautiful – so to speak – and thoughtful and elaborate performance I have seen in recent years, with a language that connects references and personal emotions and metaphors from art and experiences without pretension, in a way that is honest and effortless and ultimately redemptive.” 

Argyro Bozoni (art journalist)

“For the first time, a younger generation of creators is approaching AIDS primarily as a cultural legacy, as an archive of images, losses, and forms of resistance that continues to organize collective queer memory.”

George Sampatakakis (prof. University of Patras) 

http://www.novamelancholia.gr/en