Fast Forward Festival 1

The Onassis Stegi also breaks out of the auditorium with site-specific performances in unexpected spaces and a revelatory peripatetic show in the streets of Athens.

Digital cameras, iPods, mobile telephones, the Internet, and live-cinema, documentary and editing techniques are all mobilized in the interactive, multimedia and site-specific spectacles the Onassis Stegi will be hosting as part of the 1st Fast Forward Festival (FFF). Because the theatre of now is restless and hybrid, a collage of arts, techniques and media and an exciting, groundbreaking, holistic experience closely bound up with the technological advances and quickening socio-economic pulse of our times.

As Katia Arfara, the Festival’s artistic director, notes: “The Festival will give us the opportunity to explore new trends, but especially the sort of hybrid performances that transcend and simultaneously broaden the boundaries of the arts. I’m talking about more than new forms; this is turning the way we’ve grown accustomed to watching theatre on its head. The artists and theatre companies hosted at the FFF use new technologies as a dialectical medium for redefining the role of the audience, the place of art in public spaces, and the limits of activism and artistic action. And it is certainly no coincidence that the Festival will see theatre move out of the Onassis Stegi and into the center of Athens in an attempt to engage directly with current socio-political realities”.