City-state

“Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. In a few days from now, the universe will fall on our heads. Which is why you must learn your history.”

A mysterious backer stages a theater production beside a wall. He compels the characters in the production to remember the history of their city, Athens. Song and dance, comedy and drama, historical narrations, politicians and citizens, doctors and patients. The lesson begins with a reference to the defining features of the ancient Greek city-state: freedom, independence, self-sufficiency. Then come the blood, the city planning, the people, the building materials, the conquerors.

Roland Barthes insists that “the city is a discourse”. It speaks to its inhabitants and they speak to it by living in it, by wandering through it. The city is a text, too, whose user is also its reader and forms their identity through its narratives. The characters in “city-state” are users and readers of Athens. They speak the language inscribed on them by the city itself. The production takes a snapshot of their Athens and invents its (hi)story.

What can happen when you search for the city’s core, its center? Who consent to inhabit it? Who undertake to run it? Who decide to abandon it? How has the Dromokaition mental home impacted on its history? All the above are scrupulously enacted on stage under the robust—sometimes mild, sometimes severe—direction of an enigmatic backer/maestro of international renown. Premier performances of timeless Greek hits supply the stage with artificial oxygen. A sitting room that looks like an MP’s headquarters of decades past, but isn’t. A production that recalls a review, but isn’t. A financier who’s presented as a man of the theater, but isn’t.

With the help of politicians, journalists and authors, the Kanigunda theater company has written a text about Athens, a compulsory exhalation prior to suffocation.

Kanigunda theater company was founded in 2005 by the actors Maria Kechagioglou, Maria Maganari, Giorgos Frintzilas and Rebecca Tsiligaridou, and the director Yannis Leontaris; since 2007, it operates as a civil non-profit company. In the course of time, the troupe expanded with the participation of the actors Anthi Efstratiadou, Petros Malamas, Efthymis Theou, and Marianna Janni, as well as of the stage director Korina Vasileiadou.

Stage and costume designers Thalia Istikopoulou and Georgia Bourda are among the company’s regular collaborators. The troupe has occassionally collaborated with the actors Lydia Fotopoulou, Thanassis Dimou, Dimitris Agartzidis, Syrmo Keke. The troupe doesn’t have a permanent theater home, whereas it received an operating fund by the Greek National Center of Theater and Dance for the theatrical seasons 2007–2008 and 2008–2009.

Kanigunda is not a theater company with permanent members; it is more of a condition of collaboration, which takes a different shape throughout these last years, every time there is a need and a potential of a theater performance. The goal is challenging the boundaries of the working methodologies followed from time to time. For this reason, the troupe is tested on each occasion in different theater genres, in its attempt to “practice” in diverse theatrical codes: the discourse of tragedy (“Elektra” by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 2005–2006 and 2008 [revised]), the local rhymed idiom (“The Sheperdess,” 2007), political allegory (“Genesis No 2” by Ivan Vyrypaev, 2009), comedy (“Vengera” by Elias Kapetanakis, 2009), or political satire with elements of varieté (“City-State,” 2011). The intense emotional and ideological drive that is fueled by the subject matter of each performance is the common starting point for all members of the troupe, in their shared aspiration to explore style and form.

Parellel event

Friday 6 May

After-performance talk with Kanigunda members, Stavros Stavridis, assistant professor of Architecture School, NTUA, and Deo Kangelaris, theatrologist, reader at the Faculty of Drama Studies, University of Salonica.

Credits

Dramaturgy
Kanigunda Theater Company
Direction
Yannis Leontaris
Set & Styling
Thalia Istikopoulou
Assistant to the Director
Marianna Tzanni
Lighting Design
Maria Gozadinou
Assistant to the Set Designer
Georgia Bourda
Choreography/Movement
Haris Pehlivanidis
Cast
Maria Kehagioglou, Yiorgos Frintzilas, Maria Maganari, Rebecca Tsiligaridou, Efthimis Theou, Anthe Efstratiadou
Co-production
Onassis Stegi & Kanigunda Theater Company