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angeliafóros – Akropoditi Dancetheatre 819 1024 akropoditi13

angeliafóros – Akropoditi Dancetheatre

Greece

The performance on 14/7 will be followed by an open discussion with the audience.

After the end of a battle, a group of survivors returns to their homeland, burdened with the task of announcing what they have witnessed and endured. Their journey spans an entire night of marching, exhaustion, reflection, inner monologue, intentions, attempts, and questionings—regarding both the message they must deliver and the way in which it should be announced.
Their speech, initially resembling that of a war messenger—bearing news of defeat and destruction—gradually becomes distorted, blending with the content of their announcements, truth and falsehood intertwining, and their very identities dissolving.
The site of the announcement becomes a new battlefield where past and present meet and clash. Through this confrontation, the messengers take on shifting roles: at times, they are soldiers, at others, agents of power, angels, or birds.
The announcement itself shifts between past and present, moving through crimes, wars, uncanny acts, curses, punishments, and misinterpreted truths. Eventually, it reaches the future as prophecy, articulating destiny in an incomprehensible language. Likewise, those delivering the message transform into messengers of ancient tragedies, modern journalists, and ultimately, prophets.

The piece explores the concept and significance of the announcement — from the universally resonant and weighty speeches of messengers in ancient Greek tragedy, to the sensationalism, exaggeration, and indiscretion of contemporary journalistic discourse, and beyond human language, to the mysterious and incomprehensible voices of prophets and angels.

Credits
Concept, direction, choreography: Angeliki Sigourou
Choreographer’s/director’s assistant: Dimitris Baltas
Performers: Angeliki Aggeletaki, Evi Aresti, Timothy Ashplant, Dimitris Baltas, Antigoni Choundri, Josephine Gray, Afedia Kanellopoulou, Ariadni Kitsou, Christos Kollias, Sofia Koktsidou, Xeni Kottaki, Manti Papandreou, Vivi Sklia, Anmar Taha, Konstantina Thanasouli
Music and sound design: Fotis Mylonas
Set design: Akropoditi Dancetheatre
Costumes: Matina Megla
Sketch: Evi Aresti
Graphic design, program and poster design: Vivi Sklia
Texts: Adapted excerpts from monologues of ancient Greek tragedies, excerpts of headlines and news articles, passages from prophetic texts of the Old Testament (Daniel), the New Testament (Revelation) and the Quran (chapter 56), references to the book Fractured Loyalties (Ashplant, Timothy 2007), and texts composed by the company.
Adaptation of ancient Greek tragedies: Angeliki Sigourou, Timothy Ashplant, Christos Kollias

Duration: 70 min.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1089992293,  https://vimeo.com/1098097081


5, 6, 12, 13 July, arriving time 05:30 (in the morning)
7, 14 July, arriving time 19:30 (in the evening)

The performance is a collaboration between Akropoditi Dancetheatre, historian and writer Timothy Ashplant, and the company ibodies.

Akropoditi Dancetheatre

The Akropoditi Dancetheatre was founded on the island of Syros in 2004 by Angeliki Sigourou. Since its inception, the company has remained a diverse ensemble, featuring dancers and actors from Greece and abroad, as well as community artists from various disciplines.
Among other works, the company has produced the following pieces to date: Glossa (2018), Medusa (2014, 2017), Punishment (2017), Sebastian (2013, 2015), Prayer in 7 Parts (2012).
akropoditi.com/dancetheatre

ibodies company

The impetus for the work of ibodies is based on the fundamental insight that theatre – as an arena in which performance takes place – demands a unique and radical language that is useless and in the disservice of any agenda other than its own primacy as a form of language. As such, the poetics of awareness is an absolute given in their continued search for a radical scenic language.
ibodies are based in Gothenburg, Sweden, led by Anmar Taha and Josephine Gray. Their work has been presented at venues and festivals across Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Asia.
www.i-bodies.com

Timothy G. Ashplant

Timothy Ashplant is historian and writer. He taught for 25 years at Liverpool John Moores University, ending his career as Professor of Social and Cultural History. Since 2013, he has been a Visiting Professor at King’s College London, attached to the Centre for Life-Writing Research.  His research has focussed on the use of life stories by ordinary (non-elite) people to defend their interests and promote their claims for social justice.
His book Fractured Loyalties: Masculinity, Class and Politics in Britain, 1900-30 (2007) examined how men who fought on the Western Front in the First World War tried, through poetry and autobiography, to grasp the enormity of the war, which had fractured the religious and political values in which they had been brought up.  They became messengers to their society, struggling to put into words their – sometimes revelatory, sometimes traumatic – experience of industrialised warfare. He has also had a long involvement with photography. In the 1980s, he was a member of a community arts group in Oxford, for which he took part in several photo projects.  In the 1990s, he was one of the directors of  Oxford Photography, an Arts Council-funded organisation which promoted photography in the Oxford region by organising exhibitions and lecture series.  He also contributed, through one-person and group photo shows, to the annual Oxford Artweeks festivals.  In 2018, with the support of the Municipality of Syros-Hermoupolis and the Syros Photographic & Film Club, he held a one-person show, “Σύρος – Ερμούπολη, η ματιά ενός επισκέπτη 2009-2017”.
Since 2014, he has attended Akropoditi DanceFest and taken part in dance and dance-improvisation workshops.

It will have your eyes – Ilias Kounelas 1024 1024 akropoditi13

It will have your eyes – Ilias Kounelas

Greece

An existential comedy by Ilias Kounelas

An actor who performs as a clown doctor visits a terminally ill patient and starts performing at her bedside on her demand. During one of the performances, the patient takes the lead to test her acting abilities.
The play magnifies the remaining stash of life that has yet to be lived when in confrontation with death, while at the same time it superbly relinquishes the instinct for survival, which so relentlessly has recently taken us in.
Ilias Kounelas, October 2023, Athens

Credits
Conception – Direction of concept: Ilias Kounelas
Assistant Stage Manager: Aleka Tomprou
Scenic and Costume Designer: Katerina-Christina Manolakou
Cast: Nantia Katsoura, Ilias Kounelas

Duration: 90 min.
Trailer: – 

 

Ilias Kounelas

He is teaching since 2012 at the Athens Conservatory Drama School the class „Clown / a class about failure“. It’s a self-exposure class that has as subject the things that actors do not love about themselves.
He is rapporteur of the Laskaridis Foundation. The title of his contribution is “The pleasant story of a failed man”.
An alumni of the National Theatre of Northern Greece Drama School, since 2006, he has collaborated with many distinguished directors and many important theatres.
In 2010, after working for commercial theatre, he starts dreaming of a chamber theatre where the audience and the actor will be sitting on the same level and will have “common skin in the theatre game”. He thus creates a theatre “of the person”, where he starts giving value to each spectator as a person. He believes that every person in herself constitutes a full theatre. He abandons the classical theatre stages and creates performances in natural surroundings that are addressed each time to a limited number of spectators. He plays in abandoned neoclassical houses, in church yards, in squares, rooftops, prisons and hospitals.
The performance “Garden – Ashes / from the velvet album of the 20th century” (2011 -2013) for example, was staged for two years in an abandoned neoclassical building at Kolonos for 22 spectators each time.
The performance “The 8th day” was staged in 220 homes in the whole of Athens. The performance hosted and was hosted. It could be played in anybody’s living room, but you could always visit it in any living room it was being played. It traveled to Cyprus, Salonica and Greek-speaking homes of Switzerland, and it constituted a distinct experience for those who attended each time.
In the summer of 2014 he conceives the action ”Hospital visit” and suggests it to the National Theatre, which embraces it to this day. In this action, theatre is performed in hospital rooms, always around a bed, for sick spectators, usually in their final stage. The action ”Hospital visit” counts 600 performances and keeps on.
On May 2018 he grounds the Cultural Consolational Care Organization “Person/face”, which has as its goal to make performative art accessible to spectators that on the current moment of their lives cannot come to the theatre.
He also directs performances that represent the “narrative of the good” in the era of the crisis and convey hope and braveness to the audience. Some of them are:
“Love / a trilogy about the narrative of the good”
“I am sea years old / a song about the generation gap”
On March 2018 he publishes the book “The handbook of a good clown” ( Kaleidoscope Publications ).

Theatre – Anmar Taha & Josephine Gray (Iraqi Bodies) 1024 1024 akropoditi13

Theatre – Anmar Taha & Josephine Gray (Iraqi Bodies)

THEATRON
Theatre workshop

This workshop intends to reaffirm the notion of theatre in its original Greek sense, the place where things are made visible: theatron.
Focus will specifically be placed on how an actor, dancer, musician, or any performer may prepare him or herself to be (before attempting to be someone else). In this state of being, which precedes any act, the person is able to see more clearly the various acts that they clothe themselves with in daily life. If theatre is the place where we see; it is important that the person treading the stage is him/herself aware of what s/he presents to be seen.
We will be engaging with physical practices stemming from various traditions that we in Iraqi Bodies have collected and amalgamated into our own practice over the past decade. We will attempt to poke at the blocks we carry which hinder us from fully diving into the depths of our own abyss. Those blocks might have arrived from years of previous training or simply by the judgments we make each day about ourselves and others. Approaching our being as one we will explore all its facets including movement, breath, and voice. Although the workshop will be conducted in English the texts, we will be working with will be adapted to the various spoken languages present in the group. Upon acceptance to the workshop, you will be sent a few short texts to familiarise yourself with in preparation for the workshop.

Level: All
Ages: 16+

Photo credit:

Iraqi Bodies

The work of Iraqi Bodies explores the link between movement and gesture, between dance and theatre. The development of their artistic practice has been deeply influenced by the likes of Antonin Artaud, Jacques Copeau and Tatsumi Hijikata while retaining a constant dialogue with thinkers, writers, and poets such as Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, Le Comte de Lautréamont, William Shakespeare, Henri Bergson, Krishnamurti and many others.​
The poetics of awareness is an absolute given in their continued search for a radical scenic language.​
Iraqi Bodies is based in Gothenburg, Sweden, since 2009 and is led by Artistic Directors Anmar Taha and Josephine Gray.
Their work has been presented at: Dansens Hus, Pustervik, Atalante, Inkonst,TeaterTrixter, StoraTeatern, GöteborgsStadsteater, GBG Mime Fest, SPIRA, RegionteaterVäst, Göteborgs Dans -ochTeater festival, Aerowaves, Kalamata Dance Festival, Dance Days Chania, BITEF, CostanteCambiamento Festival, Fadjr International Theatre Festival, Cairo Experimental Theatre Festival, Carthage Puppet Theatre Days, Carthage Theatre Festival, Tanztendenzen, BOZAR, TunnelhuisAntwerpen, Monty Antwerpen, Nitra International Theatre Festival and more.

A User’s Manual – Konstantinos Papanikolaou 1024 1024 akropoditi13

A User’s Manual – Konstantinos Papanikolaou

Greece

‘’It is also a mistake and a very frequent one to use the word natural when we mean either socially acceptable, morally desirable or aesthetically pleasing’’.

According to Hall (2005: 18-20), representation is the ability to describe or imagine. Representation is important because culture is always formed through meaning and language, in this case, language is a symbolic form or a form of representation. We are constantly exposed to representations of a “reality” that’s a far cry from the actual circumstances of our everyday lives. We identify with such representations through a game of validation and rejection that conceals certain other possible options from us. And we assimilate these representations as stereotypes, thus legitimizing dominant discourses that not only do us a disservice but also often undermine us. While we may have our reasons for doing what we do, we are not however mindful of what what we’re doing actually does.

Credits
Choreography & Performance: Konstantinos Papanikolaou
Dramaturgy: Paraskevi Tektonidou
Set & Costumes, Design, Video Maker: Olga Sfetsa
Light Design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Sound design: Alexandra Katerinopoulou
External Eye: Stavroula Siamou
Production: Onassis STEGI
Production Management: Delta Pi

Touring Support by Onassis STEGI’s Outward Turn Program

Duration: 40 min.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/711572387/bf863c2665

 

 

Konstantinos Papanikolaou

Konstantinos Papanikolaou holds a postgraduate degree in dance from University Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis and has studied psychology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Ηe has collaborated with Gerard & Kelly, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Patricia Apergi, Jenny Argyriou and others and has performed in the Biennale of Munich, Lyon and Birmingham, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Hellerau (Dresden), The Place (London), Mercat des Flors (Barcelona), etc. In the theatre, he has colaborated with Argyris Pantazaras, Kirki Karali, Eleni Efthimiou, Lilly Meleme etc. In 2020 he choreographed and performed the solo ‘Tonight and every Night’, presented at the ARC FOR DANCE Festival; and in 2021 he presented ‘ The diving horse and other mythologies’ at the Onassis New choreographers Festival. Portions of the research and development for his latest work  “A User’s Manual” were undertaken at Trois C-L (Luxembourg), Le Grand Studio (Brussels) and Pole Sud Strasbourg as part of the support provided by the Réseau Grand LUXE network. He has been  awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).

Drama as a polyphonic poem – Akyllas Karazisis 1024 1024 akropoditi13

Drama as a polyphonic poem – Akyllas Karazisis

* Workshops Occupancy *
We would like to inform you that the DRAMA AS A POLYPHONIC POEM – AKYLLAS KARAZISIS Theatre Workshop is fully booked!
Places on a waiting list will be reserved in case of cancellation.
Thank you!

Theatre Workshop

This workshop will be focusing on excerpts from T.S. Elliot’s poem Waste Land translated by G. Seferis (Ikaros Publications).
Aiming to explore the orality and choral narratives the present workshop will be diving into excerpts from the writer’s poem so as to create improvised jam sessions. Thought and lethargy will be utilized as acting motivators and great significance will be given to all the participants in an attempt for everyone to emancipate their expressiveness.

Ages: 17+
Levels: All

Photo credit:

Akyllas Karazisis

Akillas Karazisis was born in 1957 in Thessaloniki, Greece. After having completed his studies in Germany he started working as an actor in both Germany and Greece. So far he has collaborated with a number of directors such as G. Chouvardas, M. Marmarinos, V. Papavasileiou, L. Vogiatzis, T. Moschopoulos, D. Karatzas, Milo Rau, Karin Henkel, Albrecht Hirche, Heiner Goebels and more. He has also directed for a variety of theatres in Greece and Germany such as the Greek National Theatre, the Greek National Opera, the LTT Tuebingen, the LB Altenburg and more. For the last 20 years he has been teaching drama to a variety of drama schools such as the Athens Conservatoire, the Greek National Theatre and more.

FOR AN INTEGRAL PERFORMANCE – Eleana Georgouli 1024 1024 akropoditi13

FOR AN INTEGRAL PERFORMANCE – Eleana Georgouli

from the individual to the collective landscape and vice versa

The workshop will be structured in two parts:

In the first part, we will focus on a comprehensive training on psychophysical techniques allowing us to explore our personal capabilities and helping our bodies dispose of automatic, daily habits. More specifically, we will focus on strengthening our centre, opening our physical axes, enhancing our diaphragm and respiratory muscles, releasing our spine, releasing breath, sound, voice and physical and vocal rhythmic pluralism.

In the second part, we will focus on creating a collective workspace that combines physicality, musicality and speech, where the training toolkit is transformed into action. We will travel from body to sound, from sound to musicality and from there to speech. How do we follow and codify psychophysical impulses? How do we listen to the rhythmic pluralism that is inherent in our body? The participants will be invited to collaborate -each through their own expressiveness- in the creation of a collective score. The group / ensemble will compose its own unique narrative that will emerge through the energy of the ensemble, structuring an original chorus.

* Participants will be asked -prior to the workshop- to know a small text that will be sent to them by the coordinator. Participants are kindly requested to wear comfortable clothes and carry with them trainers and water.

The workshop can be attended by actors, directors, dancers, choreographers, students of drama schools and professional dance schools as well as artists who already have an experience in physical expression.

Ages: All ages
Levels: All levels

Photo credit:

Eleana Georgouli

Eleana Georgouli works as a director, performer and theatre teacher. She studied at the Department of Theater Studies, in the University of Athens and graduated from the Drama School Art Theater of Karolos Koun (2008). She continued her postgraduate studies (MA in Physical Performance & Intercultural Actors Training) with Phillip Zarrilli as a mentor, at the University of Exeter in Great Britain and graduated with DISTINCTION (2009). As an actress Eleana has been honored with the AWARD FOR YOUNG THEATER ARTIST from the Hellenic Association of Theater Critics at the KAROLOS KOUN AWARDS 2016 for her performance as “Maria” in Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck” and as “I-330” in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We”. Eleana has participated in productions in Greece and abroad and played leading roles in plays of classical and modern repertoire such as MEDEAMATERIAL by H. Muller (Medea), AJAX by Sophocles (Tekmissa), JULIUS CAESAR by W. Shakespeare (Calpurnia) etc. She has been a founding member of ZERO POINT Theater Group, during her collaboration with the company (from 2008 to 2017) she played the leading roles in the plays: THE MISSION by H.Muller, WE by Y. Zamyatin, IN THE PENAL COLONY by F. Kafka, WOYZECK by G. Buchner, METAMORPHOSIS by F. Kafka, THE JUSTS by A. Camus, AS YOU LIKE IT by W. Shakespeare, TO HAVE DONE WITH THE JUDGMENT OF GOD by A. Artaud. In the field of artistic education Eleana has been coordinating workshops at institutions such as EPIDAURUS LYCEUM | International Summer School on Ancient Drama which operates under the Athens & Epidaurus Festival. She is a member of the teaching staff at the professional drama school of ART THEATER – KAROLOS KOUN (from 2017). Eleana is the artistic director of RETRꝊSPECTIVA company, that focuses on performance creation, psychophysical performer’s training, original dramaturgy exploring the continuous interconnection and dialectic relation between past & present.