The first sketch, Journey to Shatila | The Language of Manifestos, conceived and created by Alexandra Kazazou, is presented from Friday 31 October at Dipylon Theatre.

One step. Going where?
Here is more real than there, because it is adjacent to the death that still lies over everything.

In September 1982, at the height of the civil war in Lebanon, the world learned with horror of the massacres committed by the Phalangists in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. What happens when eight people suddenly find themselves in a place that resembles hell on earth, surrounded by nothing but the suffocating stench of unburied corpses? Can their journey through the narrow backstreets of Shatila raise questions and establish a theatrical manifesto when it meets the gaze of the audience?

This is a production that attempts to combine testimonies about a landscape of ashes with the recollections of a landscape of radiance, and news reports with a manifesto of silent screams. Or alternatively:

 “Today we fall simultaneously

up and down, sideways, in all directions.

Once, we fell vertically.

Today we have become horizontal like a rose exploding

in the air.”*

*From the poem Spadanie, czyli o elementach wertykalnych i horyzontalnych w życiu człowieka współczesnego by Tadeusz Różewicz (from the collection Twarz trzecia, [Czytelnik, Warsaw, 1968]) freely translated into Greek by Alexandra Kazazou.