Before Now After is an interdisciplinary project bringing together contemporary dance, traditional live music, oral history, documentary film and photography.
Through a contemporary journey on the island of Leros, the project creates movement while focusing on the meeting with ‘the other’ body (that of the local population, the co-creator, the place, the object) and a dialogue across the collective past, present and future.
The project explores the excavation of the past as an opportunity to listen through the body and to meet with opinions and events of another era. A chance to converse through art with the local community, to set in motion different ways of relating to our history and exploring the collective undertaking of shaping our future.
IN PRESENTIA deals with the Asia Minor Catastrophe through the notion of mourning and the encounter with the sea. The work highlights the complexity of the trauma’s longevity, combining light, the sea’s movement, and sound. A visual and sound installation – it functions as a score for the performance.
A silent ‘in-memoriam’ tribute to all refugees who experienced the trauma of displacement, who lost their lives in this very sea or moved on to a new life. We attempt a dialogue inside the silence of loss, recollecting memories from our past, like invaluable flashes of insight that shed light to the darkness of mourning.
We bring the dead to life within our memory, with tenderness towards what remains in presence, as a part of our lives, invaluable.
On the occasion of the centenary of the Asian Minor Catastrophe, we commemorate the uprooting of innocent civilians through a project that aims at making children from Kos historically aware about the events that occurred during the Asia Minor Catastrophe.
The children will participate in a two-week seminar (29/8/22 – 9/9/22), where they will construct “hero”-puppets depicting refugees from 1922 and onwards, while also learning how to animate them. Through theatrical improvisations, children will express the pain, violence, and cruel treatment experienced by immigrants. The workshops will come complete with a performance that will be held at the Roman Conservatory in Kos (10 and 11/9/22).
The purpose of these performances is to raise awareness and invite people to reflect on peace and show solidarity towards refugees of wars of the past and of the present.
A work that attempts to explore the question of collective memory, the way History stands not only on the experience of the past, but also of the present. In a historical path, that it is unclear whether it is linear or circular, bodies progressively learn how to handle the fragility of coming together and the search for new land.
Concepts such as uprooting, alienation, violent expatriation, rupture of the sense of “belonging” and identity, constantly recur and alternate with each other.
A thread from yesterday to today, where collective memory meets the personal, lived history, the locus of the body and its claims. Perhaps one should undergo many small, successive deaths, wander beyond the boundaries and the dividing lines that exist mostly inside them, to manage to seek a redemptive utopia, an “elsewhere”, a new place.
“If you can’t flourish in a certain place, start thinking that maybe it’s the environment’s fault, not yours…” Stereo Nero Dance Co. follows the life of the inhabitants of Mastichochoria in Chios and analyzes their connection with the life cycle of the “weeping tree” (mastic tree). Through poetic imagery and motion motifs, the company observes the unique characteristics of the local micro-climate and explores the formation of a respective culture. Focusing on the constantly changing weather, The Teardrop raises questions about the vulnerability of the symbiosis of the human with the non-human, and about the loss of the inscribed collective experience. Studying the present condition, through accounts, archival material and cultural references to Chios, and through the prism of the ongoing climate change, the performers create a community with new characteristics that is coming from the future. The familiar interweaves with the unfamiliar, as man tries to find his place in the emerging environments.
A whale washes up on a city beach and starts decomposing. The locals are indifferent, yet two of them, Pierre and Odile, decide to watch this death up close. Their lonely walk along a vast sandy coast climaxing with their encounter with the dead animal is a journey of realisation and search for man’s responsibility towards animals and nature.
In the production The Whale theatre pairs up with the visual setting and Nalyssa Green’s ambient music to bring Paul Gadenne’s most representative work and one of the first books to have touched upon the issue of ecology onto the stage. As the writer himself notes: “It is true that we are very little. Very weak. However, no matter how little and helpless we might be, we can do this. Even the littlest people can do this – a little effort with ourselves, every one of us.”
Michalis and Pantelis Kalogerakis’ performance Man Should Live Poetically is based on the work and reflection of poets of different generations and from different places. Music, songs, speech and images create a web of timeless stories about the diversity of nature and its influence on man’s psyche and evolution. After dominating the earth, the animals and eventually his own fellow-men, he is now faced with the consequences of his actions that threat the climate balance. The way man will handle climate crisis is today’s biggest challenge. The futility of existence should not be a cause of destruction and exploitation but a reason for offering, showing respect and realizing the perishability of things. Art illuminates the path through which we can change our perception and attitude towards nature.
A music/visual work of art/game in the form of an Aeolic sound installation is coming to the beautiful Chora of Amorgos. A farewell song about a world that is being lost. The shells of the windmills still stand there imposingly, the wind keeps blowing, yet what man visits is only a memory. A life left behind. Clay objects and constructions scattered across the windmill hill create musical sounds and phrases powered by the wind. Every single moment the sound changes and transforms the place and time. A walking experience of sound, a sound photography, an invitation to let ourselves go into the voice of the wind; to play once again with it; to immerse ourselves in reverie.
Studies have shown that cycling, as opposed to travelling by car, saves 150 grams of CO2/km and is, unquestionably, one of humanity’s greatest hopes for a future of zero carbon emissions. With this in mind, Tak Tak Do theatre company presents an original musical fairy tale with an adventurous plot for children, inspired by the only bicycle maker in Greece, Giorgos Vogiatzis.
In the production A Cyclist Changes the World, Diagoras uses a bicycle for his daily transportation. One day, he comes across the Mayor and the two of them bet that if Diagoras tours Europe on bicycle, the Mayor will build cycle paths! And this is how a journey full of adventures and unpredictable encounters begins! A musical fairy tale that unfolds as an enchanting tour across the characteristics and traditions of European cultures and at the same time as a reminder of the benefits of green commuting.
A performance drawing information from scientific and anthropological research and transforming it into a subversive visual, choreographic and musical concept. Bodies Floating Into the Land focuses on the protection of biodiversity in the Mediterranean Sea and the effects of climate change on human and non-human organisms. Starting with invasive foreign species, such as lionfish, toadfish, purple jellyfish etc., which are transported through ballast tanks along with sea water used to maintain the ship’s stability, we ponder upon the vulnerability of all of the “sea creatures”. The work is informed by the place where it is held – here, the fierce god of the sea turns into a positive figure as a miracle doctor. The symbolic character of the cure conveys messages of hope for the future of the planet and consolation against ecological grief.