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Artistic planning 2015-2016 (13/05/2015)

VASSILIKO THEATRE
 
CHILDREN’S STAGE “THE  SECRET GARDEN” by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Theatrical adaptation and direction: Marianna Toli
Launch: 11 October 2015   

The Secret Garden symbolizes our neglected inner world which, once discovered through love for humanity and the necessity of positive thinking, we apprehend in depth our nature and strength. The playwright states: “The power of a simple thought is equal to an electric battery. It could get in the service of the highest good or the supreme evil. Letting a negative thought creep in our mind and settle for a long period of time looks like allowing a severe microbe to get installed in our body. It might never come out of our organism as long as we live”.
Taking care of other fellow humans and the earth that hosts us keeps away every bad thought which detains us to a state of no life.
The play is staged for the first time at the NTNG.
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“THE SUICIDE” by Nikolai Erdman
Translation: Kostis Skalioras
Direction: Giannis Rigas
Launch: 6 November 2015

Nikolai Erdman lived in the era that led to the art boom of the early 20th century in Europe and wrote the play “The Suicide” in 1928. Its performance was banned by the Stalinist regime and was produced for the first time in Russia a few years after Erdman’s death.

Semyon Semyonovich Podsekalnikov, the play’s central character, is in despair because of his long-term unemployment, while his environment believes, due to a misunderstanding, that he has decided to commit suicide. Thus, a horde of people representing the intelligentsia, the church, the business world, the arts, as well as their selfish self, passes by Semyon’s house trying to convince him to kill himself to their interest.

It is an amazing bitter comedy, an impressive theatrical play, popular and emancipated of any feeling of guilt, whose structure and conception remind us of Mayakovsky’s poetry and the golden age of silent films.

First performed at the NTNG

WOYZECK” by Georg Büchner
Translation: Antonis Galeos
Director: Stavros Tsakiris
Launch: 29 January 2016

Woyzeck: the third, incomplete play by a young German naturalist studying the fish’s nervous system, named Georg Büchner, dead very young, at the age of twenty-three. / Woyzeck: the work that heralded the psychiatric research on bipolarity. / Woyzeck: a work for the oppressed, the proletarians, the deprived. / Woyzeck: a work for those who love till murder and suicide. / Woyzeck: a hero archetype of the twentieth century, who haunts the rock ideology, the beatnik poets, Jackson Pollok’s paintings, the cinema of protest, the post-modern theatre. / Woyzeck: a play with multiple stagings all over the world, adapted for the screen (10 films), the opera (Alban Berg) and comics. / Woyzeck: The prophet of a damned army marching through our nightmare future.

 
THEATRE OF THE SOCIETY FOR MACEDONIAN STUDIES

THE SEAGULL” by Anton Chekhov
Translation: Xenia Kalogeropoulou
Director-Dramaturgical Advising: Giannis Vouros
Launch: 28 October 2015

MACBETH” by William Shakespeare
Translation: Dimitris Dimitriadis
Director: Anastasia Revi
Launch: 22 January 2016

Macbeth, a strange and undefined name, alike the mist in distant Scotland. In the castles of the northern land live shadows, murderers and sleepwalkers. Through the forests and lakes in the Highlands arise witches who foretell bizarre desires and calculate time through atrocious acts. In the battlefield corpses pile up and victories shock the mind: blood seeks more blood. Confusion between good and evil becomes enormous and enchants the soul because «The beautiful is wrong and the wrong is beautiful»


LAZARISTES MONASTERY - Sokratis Karantinos Stage
THE WEDDING OF KOUTROULIS” by Alexandros Rizos Rangavis
Director: Giannis Kalatzopoulos
Launch: 2 October 2015
The performance of the summer season will be staged at Lazaristes Monastery - Sokratis Karantinos Stage.

About the play:
“The Wedding of Koutroulis”

The wealthy but with humble origin Emmanuel Koutroulis, a tailor from Syra, arrives in Athens accompanied by his roguish servant Strovilis, determined to ask to marry the beautiful, ambitious and very younger of him, Anthousa, daughter of a prominent and socially ascendant hotel owner, Mr. Spiros.
Anthousa has a secret relationship with the young and dressy Xanthoulis. Wanting to avoid this incongruous wedding without displeasing her father, Anthousa says that she will marry Koutroulis on condition that he leaves tailoring and he becomes a …Minister; something that can not be done!
The love-struck Koutroulis begins then, with the help of his servant, to buy supporters who will vote him. The competition of the Great Powers (England, France, Russia), the willingness of some publishers to be bribed, the ease with which various party leaders change political camp to get various offices in return, the vanity of some artists who promptly praise the new star of politics, the extortions, the scandals and of course the credulity of the average Greek voter will make the miracle and Koutroulis gets married to Anthousa. Everything seems to be going well until the fraud is revealed and justice intervenes...
The play continues on stage...

YOUTH STAGE “ROMEO AND JULIET on the road
Based on William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”
Adapted and Directed by: Stelios Hatziadamidis
Choreography: Giannis Martos
Launch: 9 October 2015

Why is there so much hate on the road? Maybe I am born different? Unable to be loved? Or able to be loved only by few? Shakespeare’s word passes through the channels of the modern consumer society and illuminates the limits of love, hate, racism. The borderline of personal revolution and self-construction. A multimedia performance in which hip hop, classical music, dance, speech and video visualize the universe of an emblematic adolescent love, that of Romeo and Juliet.

Staged for the first time at the NTNG.

LAZARISTES MONASTERY - Studio Theatre

THE PARTHENON BELOW by Minas Vintiadis
Direction: Pericles Choursoglou
Launch: 30 October 2015

 The Parthenon Below is a tiny settlement –with benches and caves– where the “New-Homeless”, one of the two lead characters of the play, lives under the Acropolis. He sells books to make a living, he washes himself in public toilets, and he eats in the commons organised by the Municipality and the Church. The other one, the “Nouveau-Poor,” an executive of an investment company, lives in his modern apartment, having lost all his financial powers, in total despair. His last chance is to do something good for his children, something that will eventually save his posthumous fame. In order to achieve that, he needs a partner-in-crime. Thus the paths of these two people meet one afternoon, when their life changes in a game of conflict and revelations. A wall is raised between them, a wall as transparent as a mirror that breaks in pieces when a secret and a truth are revealed. Reality and imagination clash in today’s Greece, in the age of awkwardness...

Staged for the first time at the NTNG


SOTIRIA BELLOU
REBETISSA: THE ERRANT LIFE OF A SINGER by Sofia Adamidou
Director: Christina Chatzivasiliou
Launch: 18 December 2015
 
Sotiria Bellou struggled a lifetime. She struggled hard and carved her own path in life. We will get to know this passionate figure through this demanding monologue. Staged for the first time at the NTNG.
 
Wine out of Vinegar by Michael Anthis

Stage author, director and music composer Michail Anthis has been awarded prizes for six of his plays, three of them have won the Greek State Award of the Ministry of Culture for the years 2006, 2009, 2013.


The play
Orestes, a 65 year old washout winemaker suffering from Alzheimer, who made wine out of vinegar, has been abandoned by his wife Eugenia twenty years ago, and lives with his caretaker Semele in his estate. Semele has to go away, so she asks his sons Dionisis and Manolis to take care of him. Dionisis secretly asks his mother Eugenia to come as well. This meeting of Eugenia and Orestes twenty years after their separation is full of incidents. Orestes lashes out against her, then falls in love with her again and flirts with her, when his mind is “muddled up” because of his illness. In the context of tragicomic situations such as these, everybody is looking for a place in both of Orestes’s parallel universes, sometimes for balance among themselves, and at the same time they are trying to define their own self in the real world. Eugenia is trying to fulfill a love affair cut short in the past; Dionisis to reconcile himself with what time is left to him; Manolis to have the estate transferred to him in order to pay his debts or else he will go to prison; and Semele to find her way towards a new life, difficult yet to define.  


MACEDONIA THRACE GROUP
 
The stage performance “Oh my kidneys” directed by George Kiourtsidis, will be on tour for the winter with the Macedonia Thrace Unit.
 
 
PARALLEL ACTIVITIES
  • The NTNG will be organising new events in the context of BIG DAYS. This year’s events will be dedicated to Anton Chekhov, Georg Büchner, William Shakespeare and Nikolai Erdman.  
  • The NTNG will continue offering educational programs for schools.
  • The action “In-House” Theatre will be continued as well.
  • In the context of the 2014-2020 Partnership Agreement, the NTNG aims to achieve the following goals in the field of culture:

Α) Establish an Ancient Drama Academy, for Greece and Southeastern Europe
 
This proposal concerns the implementation of a trans-national three years program and, at the same time, the possibility of establishing a new institution, the Ancient Drama Academy, which will link the precious cultural heritage of Ancient Drama to modern  cultural creative activity, provide employment and motivation to the cultural industry of Thessaloniki and our country in general, and support cultural and religious tourism in Thessaloniki, which is a metropolitan centre for  all of Northern Greece and the Balkans.

Β) Organise a playwright competition and promote Greek plays in Southeastern Europe and vice versa.

Published: 6/5/2015

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