Secret stories of the women of Thessaly
After a series of shows in different parts of Greece and its enthusiastic welcome by audience and critics, the play “the grannies, who pick the nettle” by Konstantinos Dellas, playwright and director, is travelling to Paxos.
The play is a theatrical approach of an old woman’s body and its connection with old witchcraft, cooking and old rituals. The whole performance is also a work in constant progress based in the dialogue between theater art and social anthropology, based on the social roles and gender dimensions of food and old rural witchcraft-religious rituals.
The actual script evolves and redefines itself constantly, as it gets fed by the ongoing research by Konstantinos Dellas, who continues interviewing elderly in rural areas in parallel with ongoing shows. The audience is invited to participate in the research contributing in the preservation of verbal history in each area, where the theater play is staged.
The research began in Thessaly and the first traditions depicted in the play were the ones of magic rituals in the heart of rural, farming Greece. Three old ladies were the guides to this mystical journey taking us by the hand in a world of everyday life and archetypes, of the harmless granny and the dangerous healer, meanwhile talking to us about their lives, about what they learned from elderly women in their village, about what they had suffered as women and about what they have to hand over to the next generations.
Those women, having remained invisible for decades, even by researchers, who, until then believed that the narrative of a woman about the history of a place, was insignificant – appear on stage in the bodies of three young men, who face the challenge of presenting to us on stage the personal and collective narrative of the familiar elderly female body.
Their acting tools are the primal materials of the ritual procedure: disguise, mask and coordination of body and speech. The three male actors bombard us on stage with endless storytelling that travels us from Ovid’s “Transformations” and Loukanos’s “Farsalia” all the way to contemporary Greek literature by Thomas Psirras and Maroula Kliafa, from 19th century narratives, recipes and dubious healing methods to contemporary interviews taking place during the actual performances in Thessaly.
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE
Research, Direction, Dramaturgic Processing: Κωσταντίνος Ντέλλας
Actors: Michalis Anagnostou,
Manousos Georgopoulos,
Platon Giorgo Perleros
Sound Scapes, orginal music: Alexandros Ktistakis
Movement Curation: Mariza Tsiga
Mask Creation: Martha Foka
Costumes: Konstantina Mardiki
Photo and Video Artists: Charalabos Vlahodimos, Elias Lahanas
Editing: Stylianos Vlahodimos
Production: Experimenta Art Company
In cooperation with: Non Profit Organization “Friends of Paxos”