Europeana
Europeana is a new music and dance theatre play revealing the beauty and tenderness of adolescence with the participation of 60 teenagers from different communities and countries.
At a kindergarten in the centre of a typical Western city, a non place, adults and teenagers from various communities meet with a super-hero. Out of this surrealistic meeting the outline of a dark paradise is created, in which teenagers are liberated to map a new society.
Linked to Henrik Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf, Europeana describes young people’s expectations to explore an “unmapped Eden”. An original work dedicated to the young generation.
Henrik Ibsen’s drama Little Eyolf is a play where human responsibility is questioned, where the parents, Alfred and Rita, refuse to accept the identity of their own child who is crippled. How is identity defined today? Am I accepted? Are my rights defended and exercised? Whose human responsibility are these children? These are the questions who are questioned in the performance. The text and the music score of this new play will partly be based on Little Eyolf by H. Ibsen and partly on interviews with unaccompanied minors in the island of Lesvos in the Aegean Sea. The making of this new piece was developed through art workshops that brought together teenagers from different communities and ethnic backgrounds exploring their identity through new social structures of the future. In this new play the adulthood is represented through the struggle of the Almers but reverses the silence of Little Eyolf to a voiced performance that is consistent with the dreams of the unaccompanied refugee minors and all the teenagers that took part in the art workshops. Their dreams for an open democracy and a true guiltless existence are sung, danced, acted and becoming the messenger for a different society and a new age.
Concept, story, director
Rafika Chawishe
Music composition, orchestration
Stavros Gasparatos
Visual Concept set and costume designer
Michalis Argyrou
Dramaturg
Giota Argyropoulou
Choreographer
Dafin Antoniadou
Libretto
Alexandra Zelman-Doring
Artistic Collaborator
Hilde Guri Bohlin
Lighting designer
Anna Sbokou
Assistant Director
Paraskevi Lypimenou
Chorus director
Ioulia Tzannetoulakou
Casting director
Sophia Dimopoulou
Cast
Paris Alexandropoulos, Daphne Antoniadou, Rafika Chawishe
Choir
Con Anima Children’s Choir
Performers from:
Arsis
Unaccompanied Refugee Minors
First Reception Center
Schisto National Dance School
Europeana Daydreaming Platform
Produced by
Greek National Opera
Co produced by
Ibsen Awards
An international co-production with Ibsen Awards and Lineculture
Collaborated with Arsis – Association for the Social Support of Youth , Greek National Dance School, Boomsatsuma (Bristol, UK), Municipal Theater of Peiraius
Supported by
Arsis, KSOT, EUNIC, Norwegian Embassy and R2C.
