Lygourio, 2 - 16 July 

The National Theatre of Greece held its 7th International Ancient Drama Workshop from 2 to 16 July in Lygourio, Argolis. This year's Workshop, took place for a second year in partnership with the Municipality of Epidaurus, run by the director and actor Argyris Xafis together with choreographer Cecile Mikroutsikou and the musician Yorgos Karoumpalos. The academic head was Dr. Irene Moundraki.

The Workshop’s intensive programme included speeches, discussions with artists, masterclasses, and activities such as a guided tour of the archaeological site of Epidaurus, to help foster both a connection with the place and its history, and a sense of its importance. Participants were also able to watch performances at the two theatres at Ancient Epidaurus, while this summer they had the special opportunity to attend rehearsals of the National Theatre of Greece production of the Aeschylean trilogy the Oresteia, directed by the internationally renowned Theodoros Terzopoulos as part of the Epidaurus Festival.

In addition, the Workshop continued to work with the Master's Programme of the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of the Peloponnese, Creative writing, Theatre and Cultural Industries.

The Workshop was aimed at young theatre professionals, including actors, directors, graduates of drama schools, and stage practitioners in general who wanted on the one hand to deepen their knowledge of ancient drama and investigate how it functions, and on the other to try their hand working on specific topics. At the same time, the main objective of the Workshop was to encourage a fruitful conversation about the reception of ancient drama in the modern world, approaches to staging it, and issues arising from it, while also strengthening the dialogue that tragedy itself has with the individual.

The International Ancient Drama Workshop was instituted on an annual basis in 2016. It is a member of the International Ancient Drama Network created, coordinated and financed by the Ministry of Culture to educate people working in the theatre at various levels and in diverse capacities about ancient drama, familiarise the general public with the genre, and develop the conditions under which theatre people from different countries can work together.

 

The destruction of myths
The Workshop focused on the example of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, what Aristotle called a “perfect example of ancient tragedy”, on the myth, and on the unique way in which it connects the personal with the public and the political. It will explore issues that concern us on both the personal and the political level, including the repression of guilt, the erasure of the individual and collective past, and the way in which society creates myths only to destroy them in order to survive itself.

It will also consider a question that nags at anyone working in this genre: is there psychology in tragedy or are the mechanisms of the science of psychology based on the archetypal codes of tragedy?

Different translations have been used, examining variations in the style of each translator in order to explore the landscape of the tragedy, which is at once so attractive yet so difficult to negotiate. The technical aspect – once a common vocabulary for mutual understanding has been arrived at – will focus on the approach that Argyris Xafis has developed over the years for himself: Melos, Epos, Rhetoreia (song, epic, oratory).

Recognising them in the ancient dramatic text is the key to unlocking it at a practical level, while the way they are connected or in conflict give rise to unexpected artistic results that go far beyond the well-known forms of modern theatre.

This workshop on ancient drama is first and foremost for actors and stage professionals who want to learn about it in practice rather than in theory, bringing it live to the stage, in public. A relationship with music, rhythm and the basic theatrical concepts and techniques of modern drama is almost a prerequisite, so that – using them with relative ease – they can be surmounted. And there, as Argyris Xafis notes, “in this known-unknown place we meet our past but also our future. Because I view ancient tragedy as a genre that comes from the future."

It is worth noting that Oedipus Rex and its performance at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, on 3 March 1585, is the cornerstone of the revival of ancient drama in modern times.

 

Working languages
English & Greek (knowledge of English is also essential for Greek participants).

About the teachers

Argyris Xafis is an actor, director, translator and acting teacher. He is a graduate of the National Theatre of Greece’s Higher School of Dramatic Art. Since 1997, he has worked with some of the most important theatrical institutions in Greece, including Amore Theatre, the National Theatre of Greece, the State Theatre of Northern Greece, the Onassis Stegi, the Athens Epidaurus Festival, Thision - A Theatre For The Arts, etc., as well as with Theatre Mahagony in Germany. In 2023, he was appointed Artistic Director of the Thision Theatre - A Theatre For The Arts, along with Io Voulgaraki. He has acted in plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Calderon de la Barca, Schnitzler, Goethe, Buchner, and Dimitriadis, among others. Directors he has worked with include Thomas Moschopoulos, Michail Marmarinos, Yannis Houvardas, Io Voulgaraki, Yorgos Lanthimos, Efi Birba, Elli Papakonstantinou, Nikos Mastorakis, Cezaris Grauzinis, Vangelis Theodoropoulos, Vassilis Mavrogeorgiou, and Albrecht Hirche. He has won the Dimitris Horn Award, the Critics’ Association Award, and the Hellenic Film Academy Award for Best Male Lead. He is a founding member of the Pyr and Eptarcheia theatre groups. He has taught acting for 15 years at the Drama School of the Athens Conservatory.

Cecile Mikroutsikou graduated from the National School of Dance in 1999. She has performed with the dance companies Analia, Sine Qua Non, Ypsilon, and Griffon, at dance festivals in Greece and abroad. She has presented works she has choreographed at the Kalamata International Dance Festival, the Athens Concert Hall, and many Dance Festivals in Greece and Europe. Since 2000, she has worked as a movement and choreography director on productions for the National Theatre of Greece, the Athens Epidaurus Festival, the Athens Concert Hall, the State Theatre of Northern Greece, Neos Kosmos Theatre, and municipal regional theatres. She teaches movement and improvisation at drama schools in Athens.

Yorgos Karoumpalos was born in Patras. He started classical guitar lessons with Haris Pegiazis and went on to receive a diploma in the instrument from the Athenaeum Conservatoire, where his teacher was Giorgos Mouloudakis. He is a final year student in the Department of Music Studies at the University of Athens. He composes absolute music and music for the performing arts, and is also an orchestrator. He has attended composition seminars with the composer and teacher Periklis Liakakis. He has written music for the theatre and for short films. He works regularly with the composer and director Thodoris Abazis and the composer and orchestrator Alexandros Livitsanos. He has worked as a composition assistant on Lamington (Municipal Theatre of Piraeus, Omega Stage, directed by Marianna Calbari with music by Thodoris Abazis); Spirtokouto the musical (the Onassis Stegi, directed by Yiannis Niarros with music by Alexandros Livitsanos); On Bear Ridge (Piraeus Municipal Theatre, Omega Stage, directed by Io Voulgarakis with music by Thodoris Abazis); and With a certain freedom (a work of musical theatre performed at Piraeus 260 as part of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, conceived and directed by Thodoris Abazis). He has played classical guitar in numerous concerts and has worked with a number of major Greek artists as a member of the Municipality of Patras night string orchestra.

 

Talk

On Saturday 13 July 2024, the theatre scholar, critic, and essayist, Eleni Varopoulou, who translated The Oresteia for the current National Theatre of Greece production directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos, gave a talk entitled Aeschylus’ Oresteia in modern theatre: translations and approaches to staging.

 

Eleni Varopoulou
Eleni Varopoulou is a theatre scholar, critic, journalist, translator, and curator. She studied law in Athens, and theatre studies, media theory, and sociology of art in Paris. From 1974 to 1996, she wrote theatre reviews for newspapers in Athens, as well as articles on artistic and cultural issues, chiefly looking at contemporary trends. She has translated Aeschylus, Euripides, Heiner Müller, Walter Benjamin, Brecht, Hermann Broch, Goethe, Falk Richter, and Wajdi Mouawad. For Theodoros Terzopoulos, she has translated Aeschylus’ The Persians and Prometheus Bound, surviving fragments of his plays for the production Epigoni at the Attis Theatre, and most recently, The Oresteia for the National Theatre of Greece production that premiered at Epidaurus in 2024. She has taught theatre studies at the Universities of Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki, Frankfurt, and Berlin. She has served as president of the Hellenic Centre of the International Theatre Institute (1984-1992); special consultant to the Advisory Council of the Athens Concert Hall (1991-2011); advisor to the Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Greece, Nikos Kourkoulos (1998-2007); artistic director of the National Theatre of Greece summer academies (1999-2009); and board member of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival (2019-2022). She originated and ran the Argos Festival (1994-1997), and was the head of the Hellenic Cultural Foundation in Berlin (2014-2016). In 2023, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of the Peloponnese. She has published widely in Greece and abroad. Most of her books are published in Greece by Agra and Nefeli, while many of her texts have been translated and published in Germany and France.

 

Interventions

The Workshop continued its collaboration with the Master's Programme of the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of the Peloponnese, Creative writing, Theatre and Cultural Industries. On Saturday, 6 July 2024, Angeliki Spyropoulou, Professor of European Literature and Theory in the Department of Theatre Studies and Director of the Postgraduate Studies Programme, and Ioanna Papadopoulou, Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek and Latin Literature and Theatre in the Department of Theatre Studies, gave talks entitled Oedipal problems, and The "Rex" and the City, respectively.

 

Angeliki Spyropoulou
Angeliki Spyropoulou is Professor of European Literature and Theory in the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of the Peloponnese and a Research Fellow at the University of London. She studied at the University of Athens and the University of Sussex (MA, PhD). Her research interests include comparative literature with an emphasis on modernism/modernity, gender and history, literature-theatre-art, classical-modern relations, philosophical approaches to literature, and literary and cultural theory.
She has published the following books: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Palgrave-Macmillan), Walter Benjamin: Images and myths of modernity (ed.), Modern Greek prose (ed.), Representations of Femininity (ed.). She has recently contributed to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism, Sentencing Orlando (Edinburgh University Press), and 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press). Her most recent book is Historical Modernisms: Time, History, and Modernist Aesthetics (Bloomsbury), co-edited with Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the director of the Postgraduate Studies Programme of the University of the Peloponnese, "Creative Writing, Theatre, and Cultural Industries", which began in 2022-23. 

 

Ioanna Papadopoulou
Ioanna Papadopoulou was born and raised in Athens. She studied Classical Ilterature at the University of Athens, and completed her post-graduate studies in the School of Philosophy of the University of Thessaloniki, where her doctoral thesis was on the topic of ancient drama. She then began post-doctoral research (with support from the State Scholarships Foundation) on the topic of ancinet riddles in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Athens. Her research interests and publications focus on ancient Greek and Roman drama and metre, ancient geography, and distance learning (and its application in the teaching of Greco-Roman theatre). Her monograph “Antiphonies in the Choruses of Aeschylus” (Athens 2006) was awarded a prize by the Academy of Athens. Since 2019, she has been permanent Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek and Latin Literature and Theatre in the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of the Peloponnese. She is a reviewer for international culture and theatre periodicals, some of which she also sits on the editorial board of, and has been an academic consultant for theatrical productions and playwrights.

 

Implementation team:
Academic director: Dr. Irene Moundraki
Production manager: Frini Lalas
Secretarial support, Workshop assistant (planning): Eftychia Charalampaki
Workshop assistant: Maya Kyriazi
Photographer: Karol Jarek

 

 

The participants of the 7th International Workshop on Ancient Drama are:

Anagnostopoulos Vasilis
Calfas Caitlyn
Dede Maira
Drakou Maria
Ellina Anais
Galanakis Dimitris
Golois Giannis
Grigoraki Katerina
Grigoraki Stella
Gritsis Antonis
HUANG Yuqing
Kafkoula Katerina
Kakarani Areti
Karra Evi
Klapadaki Aliki
Kolovou Dimitra
Kougioumtzi Anastasia
Koutsoukou Avgoustina
Kyprianidis Andreas
Lally Eloise
Louizaki Natalia
Louvari Aggeliki
Mantzavinos Timos
Midèn Makrià
Niaropetrou Anastasia
Nivorli Rafailia Maria
Pagkalou Myrto
Pitzek Julija
Plantzou Katerina
Polychroniou Silia
Sichonidis Anestis
Stavrou Katerina
Theodoropoulou Evgenia
Thiras Anastasia
Tsairidou Ioanna
Tympanidou Eva
Vlysidou Natassa
Zoulakis Konstantinos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Latest updated: 02/08/2024