Athens Festival International Program 2019

The festival’s international program was starting this year with an impressive Triumfeminat:
Angelica Liddell, Nora Chipaumire and Candice Breitz, three strong artistic positions by three
women based in different artistic backgrounds, but all of them being of the most
outstanding in their specific field:

Spanish director Angelica Liddell - whose work ALL THE SKY ABOVE THE EARTH (THE WENDY
SYNDROME) the audience already could have seen in the 2014 festival’s program -
presented one of her most recent productions: GENESIS 6,6-7 referring to the moment in the
old testament where god is regretting his creation of mankind and deciding to destroy us all
and turn the earth into darkness. How much antiquity is there in each of our births and in
each of our deaths, how much infinity, how much eternity? This work was not an answer to
these questions but a constellation of the symbols that these questions trigger in our
unconscious, as Angelica Liddell is questioning ‘the understandable’ being the general
measurement of our world. As in most of her productions she impressively was raising this
question being on stage herself as well.

Being on stage herself is the case for Nora Chipaumire as well, who presented her live
performance album #PUNK inspired by her formative years in Zimbabwe. The show explored
the sonic ideology of punk and challenged traditional rules of dance performance, crossing
into the realm of live art by refusing to separate the choreographic, sonic, and visual
elements. Having inherited Zimbabwe’s historic and political baggage, Nora Chipaumire used
this work to question how status and power are experienced and presented with the (black
female) body. For her and others born without property, name, or class, the human body
poses a possible salvation – a manifesto or a vehicle for potential self-invention and self-
determination.

South African Artist Candice Breitz presented her seven-channel video installation LOVE
STORY (featuring Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore) for the whole time of the festival: she
interrogates the mechanics of identification and the conditions under which empathy
is produced. The work is based on the personal narratives of six individuals who have
fled their countries in response to a range of oppressive conditions (amongst them
Sara Ezzat Mardini who escaped war-torn Syria to Lesbos (Greece) and from there
made it all the way up to Berlin where she is living right now…). Suspending viewers
between the gritty firsthand accounts of people who would typically remain nameless
and faceless in the media, and an accessible drama featuring two actors who are the
very embodiment of visibility, Love Story raises questions around how and where our
attention is focused. The work deploys the hypervisibility of Moore and Baldwin to
amplify stories that might otherwise fail to elicit mainstream attention or empathy.

After this fulminant start at the festival’s opening weekend the international program
continued with some comebacks from recent years like Mapa Teatro from Columbia
showing LOS INCONTADOS, the third part of their tryptich Anatomy of Violence in Colombia,
examining the different facets of violence in the country. Boris Charmatz who already
presented his masterpiece 10.000 GESTES in 2018 celebrated the world premiere of his new
work INFINI in Athens.

Next to that the international program introduced some strong artistic positions that have
never been to Athens before: Susanne Kennedy with her conceptually and visually
convincing theatre version of Jeffrey Eugenides novel THE SUICIDE SISTERS as well as
Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s heartbreaking show SAIGON on the French-Vietnamese history
and Thom Luz contemporary fairytale GIRL FROM THE FOG MACHINE FACTORY on the
beauty and (almost) infinite potential of theatre fog in capitalist societies.

With théatre du soleil/Robert Lepage’s KANATA EP and Romeo Castellucci’s LA VITA NUOVA
we brought two all-time-favorites to Athens who both convince with their epic storytelling
and remarkable picture language…

Epidaurus: Wilson / van Hove

In this year’s international programme you easily could identify a wide range of perspectives
and various artistic languages that erase from different cultural backgrounds and contexts –
a multitude of stories and images that present a diverse program including more than 50%
female artists. This is not a coincidence but result of our collaboration with Carolin
Hochleichter – co-curator for international program since the beginning of this year.