Category: Perforances

Pantelis Mpoukalas

Yannis Kalavrianos

Alexandra Boussoulenga, Rania Yfantidou

Thodoris Ekonomou

Dimitris Sotiriou

Nikos Vlassopoulos

Panagiotis Barlas

Alexia Mpeziki

Charis Pehlivanidis

Elina Eftaxia, Isabela Tudorache

Marleen Verschuuren, Maria Lazaridou

Giorgos Glastras

Giorgos Kafkas

Nikolas Maragopoulos

Christos Stylianou

Maria Tsima

Anthi Efstratiadou

Thanasis Raftopoulos

Momo Vlachou,
Stellina Vogiatzi,
Despina Gianopoulou,
Ioanna Demertzidou,
Danai Epithymiadi,
Aigli Katsiki,
Lida Koutsodaskalou,
Maria Konstanta,
Alexia Mpeziki,
Zoi Mylona,
Marianthi Pantelopoulou
Katerina Papadaki,
Rebecca Tsiligaridou

Dimitris Chountis

Euripides, at the end of his life, offers us a work of transitions and successive dilemmas, brim-full of irony and unexpected comic moments; a text that continues to raise a plethora of discussions among literature, drama and theatre scholars.

Like the other works that deal with the house of Atreides, it contains characters stigmatised with an ancestral curse. So, we know in advance that things are not likely to evolve smoothly.

Impregnated with the atmosphere of his era, the doddering Athenian democracy and the upcoming defeat in the Peloponnesian War, the work depicts a world where faith in heroism and patriarchal values has been shaken. A world in which the mob becomes a protagonist of the action, while the heroes, unstable, full of weaknesses, petty, cowardly, and with constant changes of opinion, are precipitated. Only the struggle for power remains, in a different form each time. The conflict between public and private, man and woman, city and family, generate heroes who do not hesitate to cross the line.

We are not dealing with a romantic story of self-sacrifice, or a simple patriotic drama, but with a case of constant struggle and imbalance, a story of reversals, with Euripides stating the obvious: in every war the older generation sacrifices the younger and there are many among the young who accept their destruction.

It’s not just the wind that has ceased in Aulis but life itself. Everyone is waiting for something to happen. And very soon, this will be the abolition of logic.

Yannis Kalavrianos

The National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG) is currently the largest theatre and wider cultural organisation in our country. Comprising of 4 winter venues, 2 open-air theatres, and also organising Greek and international tours, it functions as an active cultural hub since 1961.

The new institutional framework of the NTNG was passed in 1994, and according to that, the theatre is administrated by a seven-member Board of Directors and an Artistic Director.

The NTNG is supervised and subsidised by the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

The NTNG has been a member of the Union of Theatres of Europe (www.ute-net.org) since May 1996 and served as a member of its Board of Directors until 2013. The NTNG is also a member of the International Theatre Institute.

The annual repertoire of the NTNG combines in-house productions, co-productions with other theatre organizations and special tributes. The NTNG also hosts Greek and international guest performances. Its activities expand well into other cultural domains, such as education, literature, fine arts, exhibitions, conferences and international festivals, educational theatre programmes and other social activities.

Based on the core belief that education and culture are basic necessities and wishing to remain a theatre open to society, the NTNG implements in practice a strategy founded on the following:

• Wide-ranging repertoire
• Low ticketing policy and various classifications of benefits
• Corporate social responsibility that focuses on population groups who for various reasons have no access to theatre performances
• Emphasis on the production of high quality performances for children and youth.
• Awareness raising social activities
• Strengthening bonds and collaborations with cultural organisations, municipal authorities and charities
• Reinforcing the theatre’s international presence

www.ntng.gr

Yorgos Chimonas

Izumi Ashizawa

Elena Katsouri, Thelma Cassoulidou

Ermis Michael

Vasilis Petinaris

Sock Team

Stephanie Polykarpou

Giorgos Kyriakou

Nayia Anastasiadou,
Νiki Dragoumi,
Ioanna Kordatou,
Themida Nikolaou,
Loukia Pieridou,
Maria Filippou

Intercultural Bacchae: The first artistic collaboration of its kind in Cyprus theatre history: a synergy between Cypriot artists and a Japanese female artist.

For decades, scholars have been referring to the surprising similarities between ancient Greek drama and the Japanese Noh theatre. These two traditions, from two distant countries, mysteriously share similar aesthetics. This became our production’s incentive: to combine two different cultural codes and aesthetics and create our new performance language in the form of an intercultural production of Bacchae.

Through our Bacchae production, we stylistically juxtapose the worlds of East/West, Male/Female, Reason/Instinct. Dionysus is presented as an “idea”, a spiritual concept, elusive and provocative rather than a tangible character. Japanese-inspired techniques and aesthetics are utilised to represent Dionysus and Bacchae, “the Others”. The Western realism exemplifies the rigid and falling world of Pentheus. The juxtaposition of two completely different acting and aesthetics visualizes a clear tension between the two worlds: the resident vs. the stranger. This conflict further mirrors the recent European and American immigration crisis.

Except for the male actor who plays the role of Pentheus, all other cast members consist of female performers. Thus, we tackle old structures, including theatre, where the voice of women as “the Others”, was shrouded, silenced and excluded even from their own representation. Now, women claim it all back.

Izumi Ashizawa

Belacqua Theatre was founded in 2017 by actress Ioanna Kordatou. Aiming to bring the actor’s body and movement to a more active and creative position within the theatrical process, it draws upon various branches of Physical and Devised Theatre.

Focusing on classical and modern texts (taken from drama and the wider spectrum of literature), it presented its first production WMWMWM, based on Samuel Beckett’s radio play Words and Music in 2017 during the “dubitanda Platform of young theatre makers” and in 2018 during “theYard.Residency.18”.

Hoping to create a continuum of theatrical education and development, through contact and exchange with international theatre artists, it has invited and worked with Izumi Ashizawa for the production of Bacchae.

Izumi Ashizawa Performance was originally founded in 2002 by Japanese director Izumi Ashizawa.

Izumi Ashizawa Performance explores the physical story-telling with unconventional puppetry and object animation and masks. Based on Japanese physical performance techniques, Ashizawa’s movement techniques are taught around the world and her devised pieces were performed internationally, including the U.S.A., Japan, the U.K., Canada, Australia, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Romania, Poland, Turkey, Iran, Peru, and Estonia. 

Examples of Izumi Ashizawa’s original theatre works: The Blue Rocks, Gilgamesh, Le Morte de La Fontaine, Haoma and the Warrior, Minotaur, Dreams in the Arms of the Binding Lady, Mysterious Lake, The Little Goddess etc. 

Izumi Ashizawa has won numerous awards including the Medal of Honour for Cultural Excellence from the City of Piura in Peru, the Kennedy Center American College Award Excellence in Directing and Technology, the Capital Fringe Director’s Award and the UNESCO-Aschberg Award.

www.izumiashizawa.com

Giulio Guidorizzi

 Tullio Solenghi

Andrea Viotti

Paola Maffioletti

Pietro Sperduti

Marcello Cotugno

Martina Garciulo

Elisabetta Pozzi

Federica Carrubba Toscano

Giovanna Di Rauso

Viola Marietti

Marcello Cotugno

Totò Onnis

Mimmo Mancini

Simonetta Cartia

Silvia Salvatori

Tiziana Schivarelli

Giulia Messina

Federico Vanni

Margherita Carducci, Elisabetta Neri, Federica Carruba Toscano

Tullio Solenghi

Giorgio Signorelli

Roberto Alinghieri

Giuliano Chiarello

Riccardo Livermore, Francesco Mirabella

Elisabetta Neri

Federica Gurrieri,
Irene Jona,
Federico Mosca,
Roberto Mulia,
Gabriele Manfredi,
Andrea Di Falco

Lysistrata is the only comedy written by Aristophanes named after its protagonist; in this case its female protagonist. This choice is not random, as Lysistrata is one of the most resoundingly dominant characters on the varied scene of Attic comedy. The plot is well known. Lysistrata convinces all the Greek women whose fathers, husbands and sons are periodically involved in war, to take part in a sex strike in order to persuade them to end the war.

However, alongside this main storyline, there is another one that I find even more revolutionary, and which makes Lysistrata the first true heroine of female emancipation. This event is the moment in which the women occupy the Acropolis, with the aim of confiscating the financial resources needed to continue the war, and which shows a first bold example of female governance. This is a very important fact when placed in the historical context in which the story is set. In Greece, in the 5^th century B.C., the state was organised with a clear distinction of roles between men and women, a structure that generated an equally rigid division of space between exterior and interior, between civic and domestic. The threshold of the house was the boundary between the two spheres of competence; the man was entrusted with the political leadership, administration and military defence of the state, and the woman, segregated at home, was taking care of the domestic economy and raising children, yet she was receiving no form of authority within the society. Lysistrata is important above all because of this, because with her brilliant resolution she succeeds in subverting, albeit temporarily, this rigid establishment, exhibiting for the first time a sort of upside-down healthy universe.

In the reading of the play that I want to give, these two parallel tracks run constantly throughout the narrative arc, supported by an extraordinary comic mechanism that absolutely must be maintained in all its effectiveness. A comedy in every aspect, with jokes, comic timing, situations, characterisations, worthy of the best tradition of comic theatre, which is often unfairly subordinated to dramatic and tragic theatre, so here it has an occasion for fundamental redemption.

The added value of finding ourselves in one of the places that was often the scene of narrated events, the splendid city of Syracuse with its historic theatre, although eliciting an initial “tremor from veins and wrists”, stimulates us to seek that essential empathy with the public, just as at its debut back in 411 B.C. when Lysistrata, with all her comic/revolutionary strength, appeared for the first time to the astonished, yet amused audiences of the time.

 Tullio Solenghi

The very essence of the cycles of classical plays performed in Syracuse has been forged not only by the words of the great playwrights of the past but also by the faces, voices and gestures of artists who have left their indelible mark on both theatre and history. 

The Greek theatre has been revived by artists like Annibale Ninchi, Elena Zareschi, Vittorio Gassman, Valeria Moriconi, Salvo Randone, Glauco Mauri, Elisabetta Pozzi, Lucilla Morlacchi, Giorgio Albertazzi, Ugo Pagliai and Piera Degli Esposti; directors of the calibre of Irene Papas, Krzysztof Zanussi, Mario Martone, Orazio Costa, Antonio Calenda, Luca Ronconi, Peter Stein; as well as translators and ‘re-writers’, scholars and artists like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edoardo Sanguineti, Salvatore Quasimodo, Vincenzo Consolo, Dario Del Corno, Guido Paduano, Maria Grazia Ciani, Umberto Albini and Giovanni Cerri.

The art of theatre and the emotions evoked by these classical plays when performed “at the most important classical theatre in Europe” are rendered possible by more than 400 people, who are the backbone of INDA: the craftsmen who built the sceneries and make the costumes in the INDA workshops and who look after the theatre every year.

Even though INDA is over 100 years old it is especially relevant to young people since the Academy of Ancient Drama trains children and students as of the age of five and the International Festival of Classical Theatre for Young people at the Palazzolo Acreide hosts thousands of students from all over the world every year on the steps of the Greek theatre of Akrai for a festival full of youthful ideas and enthusiasm.

A timeless festival at a unique theatre where the show goes on for more than a hundred years; an event that makes Syracuse the focal point of the revival of ancient drama through continually new perspectives: the brainchild of Count Mario Tommaso Gargallo who founded INDA, the National Institute of Ancient Drama in 1913.  A wager placed on the 16^th of April, 2400 years after Polis, at a meeting of the aristocracy and the wealthy citizens hosted by the local nobleman led to the return of ancient drama at the Syracuse Greek theatre.  Since then, it has seen the best actors from the national and international scene performing in front of thousands of spectators from May to July.  The very first production was Agamemnon by Aeschylus, directed, translated and scored by Ettore Romagnoli, stage-designed by Duilio Cambellotti and costumes by Bruno Puozzo. Although the play by Aeschylus was the first step, the trail blazed by INDA for over a century includes mythical heroes like Medea, Oedipus and Antigone, as well as the introduction of comedies in 1927 with The Clouds by Aristophanes, taking the lead.

While the classical plays in the Greek theatre of Syracuse are reinvented every year, the memory of the event that accompanies thousands of spectators from all over the world is preserved in the archives of INDA. The archives were declared as archives of particular historical significance and interest by the Ministry of Heritage and Cultural Activities and contain a vast collection of papers, images, sketches and other material at the Palazzo Greco, the historic seat of INDA. The activities of INDA, that was previously a public institution and became a Foundation in 1998, are not limited only to the staging of classical plays at the Greek theatre of Syracuse, the International Festival of Classical Theatre for Young People at the Palazzolo Acreide and the Academy for Ancient Drama, but also extend to the organisation of a broad spectrum of events, conferences and debates all over Italy. Since 1931, INDA has been publishing “Dioniso”, a journal of studies on ancient drama, the chief editor of which is currently Guido Paduano. “Quaderni di Dioniso” is a publication linked to the scientific approach of the journal and containing the minutes of conferences organised by the INDA Foundation as well as monographs on topics connected to classical theatre and its rebirth in modern times.

www.indafondazione.org

Isidro Timón, Emilio del Valle

Emilio del Valle

Isidro Timón, Emilio del Valle

María de Melo

Álvaro Rodríguez Barroso

José Manuel Guerra

Jorge Muñoz

Carlos Tello

Jorge Muñoz, Gustavo del Río

Isidro Timón, Luis S. Molina

La Almena Producciones, Maltravieso Teatro

Clara Barquilla, Ana Mos, Jesús Pablos Castañeda, Esther Sáenz

Juan Díaz

Camila Almeda

José A. Lucia

Cristina Gallego

Amelia David

Mamen Godoy

Rubén Lanchazo

Javier Uriarte

Estefanía Ramírez,
Raquel Bravo,
Guadalupe Fernández,
Sara Jiménez

Fernanda Valdés

Javier Uriarte

Estefanía Ramírez

Euripides writes about the myth of Hippolytus on two occasions. The first work, Hippolytus Veiled, scandalizes the Athenian spectators with a very sensual and sexual proposal, in which Phaedra does not hide her desire for Hippolytus, her stepson, and the latter covers his face with a veil embarrassed by his stepmother’s words. Later, encouraged by the success of his contemporary Sophocles’ Phaedra, he rewrites Hippolytus, a much craftier proposal more in line with the taste of the times.

Hippolytus is a contemporary classic, extremely interesting to us nowadays. The confrontation between the love Phaedra feels for Hippolytus will lead her to suicide driven by Hippolytus’ intolerance and what will people say. The defeat of a woman embarrassed for loving, as opposed to the intolerance of a man who says “I wish all you women would die”, clearly expresses the man-woman struggle, in which the woman is always at a disadvantage. Common sense is provided by the nurse, a woman representing unconditional love, and who could not be further away from those goddesses whose sons and daughters’ happiness matters much less than the dispute they hold between one another to prove which of the two is more powerful.

In our proposal tragedy falls on Phaedra. She cannot resist loving Hippolytus. She assumes her tragic mistake and commits suicide. Taking a look at the titles of the dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we will come to the conclusion they are all either collective (Persians, Trojan Women etc), or individual (Oedipus, Medea etc) heroes/heroines. The version written by Isidro Timón and I, was inspired by the two compositions by Euripides, the failed and the successful versions, bearing in mind Sophocles’ Phaedra and rationalizing the passionate, emotional and sexual relationship between a man and a woman who, beyond their social relationship, stepmother-stepson, were two young people of similar ages. Always from the immense respect inspired by an author who has been able to withstand the test of time so well.

Emilio del Valle

Maltravieso Teatro was established in 2015 by Amelia David and Isidro Timón, two professionals with extensive training and experience in various fields of the performing arts in the Extremadura but also the Spanish theatrical scene. Since then, it has staged four productions: La inauguración (Unveiling) by Václav Havel, Vis a Vis by Isidro Timón, El desván de nunca jamás (The Neverland Attic) by Isidro Timón and Hippolytus by Euripides adapted by Emilio del Valle and Isidro Timón. Maltravieso Teatro proposes adaptations of both classical and contemporary plays.

maltraviesoteatro.com

Luis S. Molina, an actor and producer, is the head of La Almena Producciones, a production company that has worked with advertising agencies and film producers for the provision of audio-visual media services as well as an executive producer. It has also worked with many municipalities for the production and organisation of various events. It is a producer and co-producer of more than 20 stage productions including Hippolytus.

Jera Ivanc

Jaša Koceli

Ana Kržišnik Blažica

Srečko Fišer

Darjan Mihajlović Cerar

Branka Pavlič

Miha Peric

Marta Kosturska

Tajda Podobnik

Mankica Kranjec

Samo Oblokar

Tina Prpar

Kristijan Guček

Helena Peršuh

Marjuta Slamič

Raiven

Patrizia Jurinčič Finžgar

Arna Hadžialjević

Jure Kopušar

Miha Nemec

Lev Lipušček

Siniša Bukinac

Ana Facchini

Medea Novak,
Vida Fabčič,
Hana Ferizović,
Kati Harej,
Petra Kolenc,
Ajda Podgornik Valič,
Helena Simčič,
Barbara Simčič Veličkov,
Anja Trobec,
Lucija Zorn,
Ana Žnidarčič

Farah Chamma

I am inclined to think that The Trojan Women is an oratorio and not a drama. At the beginning there is a state of despair, which then only deepens over time. A radical sadness is emanating from the text. Loss on loss, the end of civilization, suffering, destruction of identity… I saw an exceptional opportunity in this, because I think sadness can be extremely expressive and this can be achieved through music. This brings us back to the thought about the ancient tragedy which was a mixture of speech, singing and acting. Music transforms the experience and opens the emotional door in us. We have tried to create a world that will, with its intensity, address our hearts and consciences. Troy still exists. Troy is Syria, Iraq, Palestine. Troy is today. At the moment, the number of refugees in the world is higher than ever in the history of humanity, more than sixty million. Every three seconds someone becomes a refugee. As people of Europe, we are jointly responsible for helping people in need. The world is too intertwined to ignore each other.

Jaša Koceli

The Slovene National Theatre Nova Gorica is the successor of the Primorsko dramsko gledališče, which was founded in 1969. In 1994, a new theatre building with a modern stage and technical equipment and a hall seating 371 was constructed. A small stage hall with 107 seats was added in 2011. In 2004, the theatre was declared an institution of national importance, fully financed by the state, and changed its name to Slovensko narodno gledališče Nova Gorica (Slovene National Theatre Nova Gorica).

The location of Nova Gorica, a town on the juncture of the Slavic and the Romance cultures, has significantly influenced the repertoire and artistic orientation of the theatre. The repertoire consists of contemporary and classic plays; it is marked by the local, Mediterranean colour, and by openness to new research and experimentation.

The high artistic level of production has been proven by a number of awards and participation at Slovenian and international festivals and tours abroad. In 2001, the theatre became a member of the European Theatre Convention (ETC).

www.sng-ng.si