Creative Lenses Final Conference “Culture and Business Models in Challenging Times” is a two-day event that explores how arts and cultural organisations can adapt to changing environments and become more sustainable by rethinking their business models. It brings together the leading cultural practitioners, funders, policymakers and researchers to speculate on organisational sustainability, business model change and cultural value within the sector.
The Conference includes insights, perspectives and tools developed during a four-year collaboration project, Creative Lenses, funded by the Creative Europe programme and connects these with other initiatives, projects and collaborations in Europe and beyond.

Award-winning REVOLT ATHENΣ relates criticism and poetry avoiding radical “in-your-face” political discourse and it is highly interactive. Rejecting the flat, washed out image often painted of Greece’s capital, this is an Athens that’s bursting with life. In REVOLT ATHENΣ, the three-piece, politically-minded cast offer insights into post-crisis Greece. In ODC Ensemble’s unique city guide, activist communities are framed in terms of Greece’s wider history; intertwined with figures of Greek mythology, there are tear gas-choked riots against government austerity cutbacks. Combining actors, video footage and music, it’s a multi-faceted window into the living and breathing reality of a place.

REVOLT ATHENΣ was proudly presented for the European Parliament for Culture in the frame of the Operadagen Festival 2017 and awarded a First Prize Award for the REP, Birmingham at the BE Festival in July 2017.

photo: © Alex Kat Photography, artwork: Pantelis Makkas

THE CAVE is a cyber punk opera on a popular theme Matrix. An oratorical opera in the intersection between opera, cinema and new technologies, this radical performance calls for critical reflection on fake news and post truth. It’s a contemporary reinterpretation of Plato’s famous “cave” allegory. Shadow puppetry, new media, visuals and music are all performed in real time by a cast of four. Nothing is ever still. THE CAVE challenges the boundaries of contemporary opera, drawing from a variety of music genres. In the intersection of reality and fantasy, material & immaterial, with an emphasis on the exploration of self-truth. The staged transcription of the philosophical text is interwoven with intertextual adds – Buddhist sutras, hyperrealistic conversations etc.- and pinholes onto today’s world. Socrates is a robot’s voice and this sarcasm runs through out the piece. while mythological creatures pass as shadows of another world all too close to ours; In Plato’s allegory people are chained in a cave and they are facing the inside of the cave whereupon they see the shadows of the outside world. In so doing, they interpret “reality” through this optic of the shadows. The cave brings out how the two-dimensional vision of the three-dimensional life translates in today’s realities in misconceptions that we may have regarding what’s going on as for example in the domains of politics, of society and of course ethics.

photo: © Elias Moraitis