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A cultural diet of summer delicacies


Dance, theatre and music feature prominently on the Athens Festival's agenda

CHRISTY PAPADOPOULOU






Les Ballets C de la B present 'pitie!' at Pireos 260 on July 13-15

Oscar-winning queen Helen Mirren, French cinema dame Jeanne Moreau, Berlin's Deutsches Theatre and Belgian dance group Rosas are some of the big names to feature in the Athens Festival's cultural programme this summer.

Under artistic director Yiorgos Loukos, the annual fest casts the spotlight on theatre, dance, music and art. Performances take place at various venues around Athens, including the ancient Irodio theatre, the Megaron Mousikis and the festival's experimental venue at 260 Pireos St.

For the first time in years, the National Opera has not made it into the festival programme. Still, there are new collaborations to look forward to. The Athens Fine Arts School's graduates have undertaken the design of the festival's colourful posters and promotional material.

At the announcement of the festival's programme on March 31, Loukos did not seem alarmed by the global economic crisis and its effect on cultural affairs. If not for the festival's slightly compressed duration - from June to mid-July - things are looking up, he said. He pointed to the event's growing following over the last few years.

"In 2005 the festival sold 80,000 tickets. This figure has gone up to 244,000 tickets per year. In the last three years we've sold a total of 750,000 tickets and we hope to reach sales of a million."

The festival kicks off with a tribute to Greek poet Yannis Ritsos on the centenary of his birth. Performers Roula Pateraki, Karyofyllia Karabeti and Akylas Karazissis will interpret mythological personas from Ritsos' Fourth Dimension poetry collection which spawned his seminal "Moonlight Sonata".

Ritsos will also be commemorated with a concert of his poems set to music by Mikis Theodorakis and performed by Nena Venetsanou and Dimitris Bassis among others.

In an attempt to establish a connection between music and poetry, the festival will also feature Southern Cross composer Thanos Mikroutsikos' tribute to Nikos Kavvadias and a concert by Nikos Xydakis based on the life and work of Alexandria-born poet Constantine Cavafy.

As part of its revised profile under Loukos, the festival continues to have a soft spot for dance. Performances focus on the bourgeoning contemporary dance scene, although there is one classical ballet performance - Swan Lake by the Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet. Among this year's highlights is Michelle Anne de Mey's 1990 work Sinfonia Eroica, in its 2006 revised version. Inspired by Beethoven's monumental Symphony No 3, the choreography explores the eternal male-female battle. Belgian Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker will present her classic work Rosas danst Rosas, which is based on repetitive patterns.

Jiri Kylian's Last Touch First and Les Ballets C de la B's pitie! bear echoes from Anton Chekhov and Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion, respectively.

On the theatre front, Deutsches Theatre will present Gerhart Hauptamnn's Rats (1911), a play written a year before the German playwright was awarded a Nobel Prize. The dying tradition of Cairo's muezzins summoning the faithful to the mosques is at the centre of the Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll group's Radio Muezzin.

Socio-political issues such as violence and the hunt for power are central to Barcelonan group La Fura dels Baus' production, which makes references to the hostage crisis at Moscow's Dubrovka theatre in 2002.

More lighthearted, Victoria Chaplin and Jean Baptiste Thierree's Invisible Circus welcomes viewers to the magical world of transformations through the encounter of a magician and an acrobat.

Music selections cover a vast gamut from the classical Sinfonia Varsovia under the baton of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki to the electronica music Synch festival to Capeverdean singer Lura.

Apart from local treats such as the National Theatre's staging of Euripides' rarely performed Alcestis, the Epidaurus theatre will host a much-anticipated international coproduction by London's The Old Vic and New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music. The three-year Bridge Project will kick off with a production of William Shakespeare's Winter's Tale directed by American Beauty director Sam Mendes and featuring Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and Ethan Hawk.

Art exhibitions are not missing from the festival's agenda. A tribute to shadow theatre, In Praise of Shadows, will feature William Kentridge's opera-inspired illustrations, Jockum Nordstrom's collages and Katariina Lillqvist's handmade puppets. Organised by the Istanbul Modern and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the exhibition will take place at the New Benaki Museum. The same venue will also host Duane Hanson's sculpture exhibition inspired by the American Dream and its demise.

For full programme,visit www.greekfestival.gr


ATHENS NEWS , 03/04/2009, page: A24
Article code: C13332A241