Erotic Postcards from Greece
Anestis Azas - Lena Kitsopoulou
Dates
Tickets
Venue
Time & Date
Information
Tickets
General presale: from 15 Oct 2020, 17:00
Full price: 15 €
Reduced, Friend: 12 €
Neighborhood residents: 7 €
People with disabilities, Unemployed: 5 €
Companions: 10 €
Production
Age guidance: 18+
English Surtitles
At weekends 24.10-25.10, 31.10-1.11 and 7-8.11.2020 with English surtitles
Duration
1 hour & 50 min (no interval)
Introduction
Which summer season left you with the most intense memories, and why? Which island is your favorite? Did you go away on holiday this year? This performance by Anestis Azas, his first collaboration with Lena Kitsopoulou, is an “anti-tribute” to Greek summer – to the before, the now, and the after of our summertime and other realities in Greece. A work set to revive our lives and our appetites.
A performance that leaves nothing standing in its wake, exposing everything to the hot Greek sun. Old habits, pathogens, summertime themes, epidemiological loads, tanned bodies, music hits, the desperate times of 2020, Greek lovers and ’70s-style flirting, fleeting love affairs, pills, empty pockets, and people who hate summer. Which Greek summer myths are we left with after the strangest summer in recent times? Is Greek summer a way of thinking? A way of looking at things? How does it unfold in the midst of a pandemic? What have been the effects on the emotional state and daily lives of today’s Greeks, and on the country’s once roaring tourist trade? At the end of it all, what was it we missed most out of everything summer means?
“Erotic Postcards from Greece” – an episodic musical farce on the myth that is Greek summer – was stopped five days before its premiere in March due to the lockdown. The work is finally to be presented on the Onassis Stegi Upper Stage on 22 October 2020, with the inclusion of additional elements that sprang readily from the new ways life is being lived since March.Embedded media
If you want to enjoy embedded rich media, please customize your cookie settings to allow for Performance and Targeting cookies. Your data may be transferred to third-party services such as YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Issuu.
Before Lena Kitsopoulou, Kostas Koutsolelos, Ioanna Mavrea, Theano Metaxa, Sofia Priovolou, Gary Salomon, and George Vourdamis bring their winter clothes out from storage, they grab their beach tents and bats, and talk to us about the compulsive notion that is Greek summer, all dreamy and erotic – a thing recognized here as a collective, national and, in part, international fantasy constructed out of various social stereotypes. They also align themselves perfectly with the times, with the situations we currently face, offering lessons on surviving 2020 filled with cutting honesty and caustic humor. Scenes of everyday life in a pandemic are set to famous seaside songs, and threaded through with clichés that equate the touristic with the sexual in Greece’s marketing as a summertime retreat.
In this, their first collaboration, Anestis Azas and Lena Kitsopoulou explore the dark side of Greek summer: a moment for exceptions and relaxation, a point that helps define time itself and the ways in which it is perceived in Greece, and a season filled with expectant hopes and their denial. It is a performance that strikes a balance between autobiographical and fictive elements, exploring a variety of allusions to summertime imagery in order to comment on the patriarchy and national identity, on sexuality and sexism in our society today, and on cancellation and panic in our new post-Covid economic, social, and cultural realities.
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Programmed for the 2019-20 season, the production was cancelled due to the precautionary national health measures put in place by the Greek government to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
Anestis Azas, a veteran of documentary theater, returns to Onassis Stegi four years after “Clean City” (co-directed with Prodromos Tsinikoris), which has toured more than 40 stages across Europe and beyond since 2016 – including the Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), the Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates), and the Festival Grec (Barcelona) – with the sustained support of the Onassis Stegi “Outward Turn” Cultural Export Program. With this new work, he goes beyond the limits of purely documentary theater to arrive at a hybrid form that re-examines the relationship between documentary and fiction, negating and redefining the borders between them.The singular author, director and actor Lena Kitsopoulou collaborates here as the writer of the text, upending everything we thought we knew about the Greek tourism industry in her inimitable renegade way.
Rehearsal photos
Image1/8
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Credits
Special thanks to Eleana Tsichli for her support and artistic assistance in the performance’s research and preparation.
Special thanks to George Depollas and Penelope Gerasimou for kindly providing us photo and video material.
Thanks also to: Katerina Zouganeli, Stathis Kokkoris, Christina Bonarou, Andriane Koufou, Konstantinos Koukas, Dimosthenis Petrovas, Dimitris Polychronis, Paola Revenioti, Stavros Toubis, Vassilis Toubis, as well as the clothing companies BASEHIT, EMERSON & Sun of a Beach
