Credits Performances Gallery Reviews Co-produced by: La Filature, Scene Nationale Mulhouse (FR), Holland Festival (NL), Athens Epidaurus Festival (GR), Festival de Marseille (FR), Romaeuropa Festival (IT), La Strada Festival (AT), Teatro Nazionale di Genova (IT) next performance 10 + 11.06.2023 For this international co-production, Elli Papakonstantinou writes in tandem and directs a new piece after …
Credits Performances Gallery Reviews AMAZONE AWARD 2020 WINNER ITALIAN CRITICS AWARD 2020 NOMINATED A new global Agora for a genderless meta-space. This interactive digital performance, the first of its kind in Greece, addresses the challenges of our times making possible a new way to direct and produce. Written by the contemporary Swedish playwright Christina Ouzounidis, …
Premiered at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Memorial La Manufacture, Festival OFF d’Avignon,2021 Commissioned by the Festival der Regionen 2019 Austria and La Strada Festival, Austria The project “The Kindly Ones”, an international production between Greece, Austria and France (La Chartreuse – Centre national des écritures du spectacle), carried by La Manufacture in France, celebrated its world premiere in …
Oedipus: Sex with Mum was Blinding is a hybrid opera libretto and direction by Elli Papakonstantinou, music composion by Julia Kent and Tilemachos Mousas. The piece draws from cognitive science and the myth of “Oedipus Rex” and was developed during the director’s visit at CCRMA. Originally designed for a cast of seven, this is an abbreviated version featuring a mix of live actors that are folded into an array of surreal cinematic environments. Through a series of scientific experiments, audience engagement plays an essential role in the execution of the piece. Atonal, electroacoustic compositions weave throughout the opera while Grammy nominee, Julia Kent, performs cello on stage in a constant stream of visuals and live action. A full production of the piece will take place in Athens at the Old National Opera House in September 2019 with the participation of cognitive scientists from the Warburg Institute, University of London.
Expected premiere: 4th April 2019, Stanford University, USA
A new opera for four voices, santoor, piano & live electronics. Conceived and directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, this international co-production investigates parallels between today’s virtual reality world, fake news and Plato’s allegory of the Cave.
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.
Immersive and site-specific performance on gaming and tax paradises, held at the majestic Notre Dame Gate in Birgu. This game-like performance will transform the near 400 year old building into a dark and beautiful maze, to open up a myriad of possibilities conjured by real-time video, live music, Baroque choir and robotics. The die is cast, the card is drawn.
Louisette (the title comes from Marat’s pet word for the guillotine), invites viewers to enter the making of a film on the theme of bourgeois democracy and the French revolution. However, during shoot breaks, something is amiss. How do contemporary individuals relate to the tripartite motto “liberty, equality, fraternity”?
The performance drew on texts by Jean-Paul Marat, Heiner Müller, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Nikos Gatsos, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Oliver, Victor Hugo, Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, excerpts from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and contemporaneous legal texts and Travis Stout’s videogame Assasin’s Creed: Unity. It also drew on texts composed during improvisation with the students of special abilities from the special vocational high school of Eleusis. The latter are the true protagonists of this production, working closely together with actors, musicians, and visual artists. This performance of ambulatory theatre, a co-production of the Athens festival and the Eleusis 2021 European capital of culture, is the end product of a fruitful collaboration between the ODC Ensemble and the students of the Special vocational high School of Eleusis and is part of the Europe Grand central project.
Sous l’oiel d’ Oedipe (Under the Eye of Oedipus), from the french director and playwright Joël Jouanneau, an ironic title given that his Oedipus blinds himself with a razor (onstage) just 20 minutes into this three-hour play. Jouanneau borrows from Sophocles and Euripides for his fairly straightforward retelling of the history of Oedipus. Jouanneau’s original contribution to the well-worn tale is a very sympathetic portrait of Oedipus, who comes to regret his eye-gouging.
Award-winning REVOLT ATHENΣ relates criticism and poetry avoiding radical “in-your-face” political discourse. Rejecting the flat, washed out image οf 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 is still on tour
First Prize Award for the REP, Birmingham at the BE Festival 2017
Presented for the European Parliament for Culture in 2017
Presented at Panta Theatre in Caen, France featuring a French cast and subsequently at the International Festival Dimitria (Thessaloniki) and the Piraeus Municipal Theatre featuring a Greek cast
An allegory about the place of women, the relations of the two sexes and the clash between Nature and Civilization in today’s society. The performance draws from the Beauty and the Beast, -only this time the Beast in within the Beauty!- and as the piece evolves you are invited to confront the darkest side on earth: your own Beast.
The spectator floats into visual installations inspired by the world of Francis Bacon and panoramas of a city in tear-gas. What do spectators reserve for their own Richard? Will they lynch the politician? Will they suggest a way out?
Elli Papakonstantinou brings her directorial daring to bear on the Touching the Bottom of the Sea, in which, as she notes, “The lead role is played by the home, a ‘living’ home/ set which is gradually deconstructed to reveal the clash between the reality of survival and the no-place dead-end of the straitened bourgeois world”.
Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck performed by a reduced international cast of five; they form a post -punk band with an operatic approach in original music score inspired by Alban Berg’s ‘Wozzeck’ to challenge the idea of the European Union. Texts in performance: Georg Büchner’s ‘Woyzeck’, a speech on ‘Economy of the housekeeping’ by Angela Merkel, Georg Büchner’s ‘The messenger of Hessen’ (Der Hessische Landbote) etc.
Sous l’oiel d’ Oedipe (Under the Eye of Oedipus), from the french director and playwright Joël Jouanneau, an ironic title given that his Oedipus blinds himself with a razor (onstage) just 20 minutes into this three-hour play. Jouanneau borrows from Sophocles and Euripides for his fairly straightforward retelling of the history of Oedipus. Jouanneau’s original contribution to the well-worn tale is a very sympathetic portrait of Oedipus, who comes to regret his eye-gouging.
Shakespearean Winter’s Tale adapted and directed for the stage for youth and families.
Based on radio-play Three Women by Sylvia Plath the cast of four in a kitchen, where Plath’s most crucial life episodes happened, “trapped” with sensors; live sound composition is interwoven dynamically with cooking, text, dance. The performers cook throughout the performance and at the end, they serve and join their audience for dinner.
Based on Sylvia Plath’s radio-play “Three Women”, the cast performs in a real kitchen that is “trapped” with sensors. Live electroacoustic music composition here unfolds, interwoven dynamically in the body of the performance in real time. The performers cook throughout the show and at the end, they serve dinner and join the audience.
Richard and his wife Corinne have moved to the country to start a new life, but for Richard this also means kicking his crippling drug addiction. It gradually emerges that all is not as it seems, and so begins a chain of events that sees their rural idyll smashed by adultery and alienation.This is the first staging The Country by Martin Crimp in Greece.
This is the first show of the company ODC Ensemble
“I began researching the Odyssey back in 2002. The first phase of my research (2002-2004) resulted in a series of performances presented in Greece and abroad, each of them featuring a different cast and crew. The common denominator in all these performances was the development of a contemporary rhapsodic method.
I focused on the Odyssey because I was intrigued by the fluidity and diversity of the Homeric epics and especially by the fact that in reality there is no ‘original’ text. In effect, we are talking about different versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey and more specifically about each rhapsodist trying a different take on the Iliad and the Odyssey, improvising in situ before a live audience and introducing variations even on the verses themselves.
This ‘open’ dramaturgy opens a channel to the present. Far from distancing herself from the story she tells, the narrator finds herself within two overlapping circles: the real circle of the audience, and the fictional circle of the story.
This largely improvisational performance was built upon the interplay of three bodies of work: The Odyssey, musical improvisation, and the narrator’s free association. The director spins an ad hoc dramaturgy the ‘seams’ of which are visible to the audience; the audience can then choose the Book of Odyssey they want to listen to while having dinner. This project is open to the idea of Randomness: the interplay of words and musical notes; the flow of commentary through free association; songs.
Music and speech are woven together in a single narrative. The performer’s body vibrates, pushed to unprecedented directions, forced to maximise the smallest structural unit of language—word, syllable, phoneme—going against the flow of rhythm, eschewing the production of meaning for what is left unspoken.”
E.P.
[Extracts from the director’s note]
Lettre aux jeunes acteurs as a staged reading in the frame of the Greek ITI.
In 1999, Border Crossings collaborated with Athlon (Greece) to commission a new version of Aeschylus SUPPLIANTS from South African writer Tamantha Hammerschlag, with the support of the Arts Council. Directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, the play showed a powerful engagement with war and refugees, telling the story of the fifty daughters of Danaus who flee from persecution, only to find themselves subjected to enforced marriages. Tamntha Hammerschlag went on to develop the play further in South Africa, working with refugee women there.
bordercrossings.org.uk
In 1999, Border Crossings collaborated with Athlon (Greece) to commission a new version of Aeschylus SUPPLIANTS from South African writer Tamantha Hammerschlag, with the support of the Arts Council. Directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, the play showed a powerful engagement with war and refugees, telling the story of the fifty daughters of Danaus who flee from persecution, only to find themselves subjected to enforced marriages. Tamntha Hammerschlag went on to develop the play further in South Africa, working with refugee women there.
bordercrossings.org.uk
Ken and Lisa after four years of wedding are confronted with their lies and secrets. While their relationship is in danger, they decide to film each other 24hrs a day! Privacy and personal freedom reconsidered for the sake of love?
The show involved new media and real time video.
The performance drew material directly from the workshop of the Fourth Summer Academy of the National Theatre and at the same time was the application and continuation of the operating mechanisms developed in the performances with the general title: ODC… after Homer. Main axis is the pursuit of a new narrative/storytelling operation through the Homeric”Odyssey”. During the workshop has been developed the narrative/storytelling operation in pre-theatre texts interpreted by musicians in parallel route with the actors.
Stratis Minakakis’s Musical Composition “Ta Plia” (“The Ships,” 2005) was commissioned by Princeton’s Program in Hellenic Studies on the occasion of its 25th Anniversary Concert. It is based on the homonymous prose poem by Constantine P. Cavafy, and combines post-serial influences with elements from the Greek tradition, such as heterophony and micro-intervals. Cosponsored by Princeton’s Program in Hellenic Studies and Princeton’s Department of Music.
This piece is a comedy musical for two, ‘a musical theatre in a nutshell’, while even cars come on stage! With today’s New York as a background, this hilarious, but at times touching, story by Neil Simon narrates the birth of a great love between the composer Vernon Gersch and lyricist Sonia Walsk. He is charming, successful, wealthy and he has an Oscar. She is miserable, charming, clumsy, dressed in theater costumes but stubborn and confident of her talent. Sonia’s dream was to work with the famous composer. Proving once again the ancient theory that “The opposites are attracted”, this thrilling story of laughter and music, ends up in the unexpected finale.
The performance drew material directly from the workshop of the Fourth Summer Academy of the National Theatre and at the same time was the application and continuation of the operating mechanisms developed in the performances with the general title: ODC… after Homer. Main axis is the pursuit of a new narrative/storytelling operation through the Homeric”Odyssey”. During the workshop has been developed the narrative/storytelling operation in pre-theatre texts interpreted by musicians in parallel route with the actors.
Rona Munro’s Iron is a psychological drama set in a women’s prison, in which a mother and daughter try to break through the barriers of time, memory and punishment which separate them. The play starts with the first visit by 25-year-old Josie to her mother, Fay, who has served 15 years of a life sentence for killing Josie’s father. Josie, a divorced and lonely career woman, wants to rediscover her past.
A performance that draws directly from the workshop of the Fourth Summer Academy of the National Greek Theatre and from the pursuit of a new media rhapsodic method for the Homeric Odyssey.
Homer’s Odyssey and the first phase (2002-2004) of a series of hybrid performances in Greece, Europe and the USA, each of them featuring a different cast and crew.
The common denominator in all the performances was the search for a new media rhapsodic narrative.
The Decameron of Women/A Piece for Six Performers by Julia Voznesenskaya. Storytelling from the Soviet Union of the 70’s, combining live music and devised scenes by a female cast of six and directed by Elli Papakostantinou. Nominated for the Audience’s Award for Best Performance 2000-2001 at Lakis Lazopoulos, IVI Theatre, Athens and attended by more than 16,000 people.
In 1999, Border Crossings collaborated with Athlon (Greece) to commission a new version of Aeschylus SUPPLIANTS from South African writer Tamantha Hammerschlag, with the support of the Arts Council. Directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, the play showed a powerful engagement with war and refugees, telling the story of the fifty daughters of Danaus who flee from persecution, only to find themselves subjected to enforced marriages. Tamntha Hammerschlag went on to develop the play further in South Africa, working with refugee women there.
bordercrossings.org.uk
Nine Lives Ten Tales by Lil Warren. A new play about the life of a woman in the East End of London, directed by Elli Papakonstantinou. Performed at the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), London, the Edinburgh Festival and other London venues including, The King’s Head, The Studio Theatre (Surrey) and The Knives and Hens.
Choice of the Festival | The Scotsman
Critic’s Choice | The Evening Standard
Nine Lives Ten Tales by Lil Warren. An awarded play about the life of a woman in the East End of London. Performed at the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), London, the Edinburgh Festival and other London venues including, The King’s Head, The Studio Theatre (Surrey) and The Knives and Hens.
Elli is a stage director, writer, visual artist and cultural manager. Founder of ODC Ensemble performing company and of the art space Vyrsodepseio in Athens.
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ODC Ensemble
A Θeatre in Times of Crisis
Nefeli Editions | 2018
Destiny | 2004
Happiness Unlimited | 2016
Streams of Voices | 2003
Elli Papakonstantinou
Performance Director, Activist
A Night of Secrets | 2007
The Sound of the Gun | 2008
The Mysterious Mr Love | 2005
Tree of Happiness | 2017
Faith | 2006
They’re Playing our Song | 2005
Louisette: The Backstage of Revolution | 2017
Viciousness in the Kitchen | 2010
The Cave | 2018
Każin Barokk | 2018
Nine Lives, Ten Tails | 1997
Revolt Athenς | 2015
Debtocrazy Revolutions | 2015
The Suppliants after Aeschylus after Kossovo | 1999
Richard II | 2014
Ajax | 1998
Out Cry | 2016
Out Cry | 2011
Sous l’oiel d’Oedipe | 2010
Skin [Δέρμα] | 2012
Woyzeck Quartet | 2012
From Α to Ω | 2010
The Country | 2009
The Iron | 2004
ODC …After Homer | 2002-04
ODC, after Homer’s Odyssey | 2009
Ma Vie de Chandelles | 2012
Touching the Bottom of the Sea | 2013
Oedipus: Sex with Mum was Blinding | Upcoming
Femme et Loup | 2014
The Decameron of Women | 2000
The Ships | 2005
Mετά [After] | 2011
Lettre aux Jeunes Acteurs | 2008
Vyrsodepseio
Art Space | Athens
A Winter’s Tale | 2021
