Heatwave | Υiannis Panagopoulos
Text based on short stories by Vivian Stergiou
Dates
Tickets
Age Guidance
Venue
Time & Date
Tickets
*Onassis Stegi Neighbors can purchase their tickets only at the Onassis Stegi Box Office from Wednesday to Friday, between 12:00 and 18:00. Access from the “Artists Entrance” on Galaxia Street.
Onassis Stegi Friends presale: from Saturday, 6 March, 17:00
General presale: from Saturday, 9 March, 17:00
Information
Information
On Friday 5 & Saturday 6 April the performance will start at 18:00.
The performance includes nudity and is suitable for ages 16 and up.
English surtitles
Performances with English surtitles in March: οn Sunday 31 March 2024.
Performances with English surtitles in April: on Friday 5, Saturday 6, Sunday 7, Saturday 13, Sunday 14, Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 April 2024.
Duration
80 minutes
Introduction
A peal of bitter laughter at Greek summer or rather a fictional ethnography of Greece, based on stories of everyday people who abide by their petty rituals. Within a scorching day. Within a scorching summer.
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During a scorching summer day cluttered with crummy cottages, warm seas and naked bodies, a breathing museum of anti-heroes sit carefully around the table of the holy Greek family, among doilies, television sets, fruit pits, running juices, and everything from which we must avert our eyes. They fool around watching videos from the 1990s, as things went south after that. They pray to their gods, they swim and they preach, they sell and sell themselves at affordable prices. They offer experiences and they enjoy, enjoy, endlessly enjoy. They await the big final score and if they never make it, “remember where we started” always saves the game. Alas. In their summer “paradise,” what they really want is for someone to understand and care for them, to touch and be touched.
A performance for the Greek summer made of dreams and nightmares, eroticism, and voyeurism is what Heatwave by Υiannis Panagopoulos is. Drawing dramaturgical material from Vivian Stergiou’s short story collections Liquid Blue and Skin, the performance conjures a fictional ethnography of a world that is heading with breakneck speed towards the end.
Small stories of everyday people within an urgently shrinking framework. As they cling to their rituals. As their communication falls apart. A performance about lazing beneath the scorching Mediterranean sun. Until the grand moment, or the grand finale.
A performance for the Greek summer made of dreams and nightmares, eroticism, and voyeurism.
Performance photos
Image1/5
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
- Giannis Panagopoulos is a graduate of the Athens University of Economics and Business and the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Theater Studies (School of Fine Arts) of the University of Peloponnese. He was the artistic curator of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Special Olympics held in Athens in 2011. He made his acting debut in theater in 2009, while in 2019, he made waves as a director with his performance "Blue Liquid or Sky Doesn't Look Good from Solonos Street" at the Experimental Stage of the National Theater, in the framework of the Young People’s Stage Festival.
- This is the second time Panagopoulos has drawn inspiration from Vivian Stergiou’s short stories as a director. For the needs of the “Heatwave” performance, he revisited her book “Blue Liquid,” with complementary excursions to “Skin.” As a director, he aims to highlight modern Greek dramaturgy and further develop his research, which began in 2019. Borrowing from Stergiou’s texts, he comments, “Such is life. ‘It moves on, not as consolation but as truth covered in cliches. It goes in circles, dissolves, then is born again to move into circles, then dissolves once more to be born again later.’”
- The characters of “Heatwave” are essentially anonymous, everyday people who never made it in life or whose lives were not generous to them. “People staffed in crummy cottages and lukewarm seas who spend a scorching summertime going down memory lane and reminiscing about their experiences,” as the show’s contributors vividly described. Of course, they do maintain all their summertime rituals: the morning Greek coffee, an afternoon game of backgammon on the balcony, and discussions around the lives of others, always beginning but never finding a way to resolve.
- The theme of Greek summertime, with its characteristic types of people, has appeared among Onassis Stegi productions in the recent past. In 2020, Anestis Azas directed the work “Erotic Postcards from Greece” by Lena Kitsopoulou, a caustic anti-tribute to the myth of the “Made in Greece” summer.
- In "Heatwave,” too, the myth of the Greek summer is once again deconstructed. Harnessing the dogma of collectively reminiscing within summer hot, dry landscapes, interlaced with unforgiving bouts of heatwave, the performance delves into the madness of the intolerable extreme temperature that actualizes into the “disgrace” of nudism, the meltdown of human bodies and activities, and, even, the act of sticky-sweaty love.
- Vivian Stergiou’s short stories “Blue Liquid” and “Skin” are published by Polis Publications.
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Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Credits
Supported by the Onassis Stegi “Outward Turn” Cultural Export Program.
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