2nd Low Budget Festival
“Finally here we are, at the same point with our times! Last year, when we were announcing the 1st Low Budget Festival, we just intended to highlight that the arts do not need much in order to tell the truth. Just courage. This year, the 2nd Low Budget Festival keeps on seeking for the courage and the passion in
the fields of arts, since it is not being dismayed at all, by the overall “low” that surrounds us. Ten new productions, 30 dynamic performances. New Company, new forces will break free at the underground garage of the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation and then, like last year, they will embark on a journey away. Follow the young theatre people because those are its future.”
“Sandra in light” – Stamatis Kraounakis
“Sandra in light”, who’s having its maiden appearance on the Low Budget Festival stage, was completed just before this year’s summer end, on the occasion of the meeting of Akis Dimou with Maria Koskina and Stamatis Kraounakis.
It’s the tender, dark and sarcastic young woman’s story , who, if she weren’ t this monologue’s heroine, she could had been any P. J Harvey’s ballad , caught in the trap of her love for an artist, who’s deeper in love with his camera. It’s also a crime story – to be precise: its tailpiece – also the anatomy of the heroine’s despair, who sometimes funny sometimes melancholically, narrates her sentimental way from a Samos’ beach to her questioning in the police office, where we meet her speaking on her defence. A story of mystery in the end, like all our love stories, bloody or bloodless.
«Dig!» – Maximos Moumouris
Starting Point.
An Oedipus alone, timeless, who digs into the world’s foundations, the human’s, in order to discover whatever buried has not already died. The truth about who he really is, without the consolation of the humans surrounding him. A lonely route to knowledge, an immeasurably small speck in the universe which carries the unbearable burden of its existence. At «Dig»!, Oedipus knows, he self-derides, he talks with tragic irony, while at the same time he calls it off. Not a king, nor a tyrant, just human.
In the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation, the opportunity to initiate the study on the Oedipus human shape is offered. The performance «Dig!» lays the foundation as preparatory work and as the first stop at the specially configured space of Garage. Next stop, just a bit later, will be the Reception-Ground Floor Foyer of the Foundation.
There, Oedipus, exposed in a hole with lions, an arena, a death round, will compete with the voracious eyes of the audience, the spectators’ eyes which will let him at his destiny’s mercy looking down upon him. Respectively with his route from “Tyrannous” to “At Colonus”, we will try to elevate him from Garage to the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation’s Reception, from dark to light, from the underground to the surface. To be continued…
“An Earl at Underworld” – Cheek-Βones
“Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau in 2011” – So7
2 G.T.P. A text – manifest. A political position which is not characterized by refusal but by proposal. A visual-arts intervention with exceptional expressive power. These are the performance’s substantial elements which is presented by So7 introducing the subjects of social freedom and the right of thinking, the “scapegoat” authority and the active citizen, the way these survive in all times.
So7 insists on discovering the theatricality much like of the city-state as the human that has chosen to inhabit it.
“The Park” – Art theatre “Aktis Aeliou”
An improvisation for the Four Seasons, a stage narration without words having as a subject the unfulfilled love, the solitude and the comradeship, the theatre and the reality. A park, four seasons, a bench and a lonely wanderer, who’s capable to revive on stage all the imagination of the world.
Having as unique tools the body, the expressiveness, the humor, the game, the music, the inventiveness, the park gets transformed and changes all the hero’s inner sceneries, leading the spectator further and further from reality, closer and closer to the truth.
“Dr. Maybe Darling Version 11.0.5 in process” – Tzeni Argyriou
Different time, different space, new circumstances, old and new facts.
Dr. Maybe Darling returns. The Version 11.0.5 is a new version of the performance, an upcoming experiment. The subject of difficulty to take a decision as well as the even bigger of implementing it is, still, the core of her research.
Dr. Darling once more cannot decide. Will it be performance, presentation, experiment, lecture or all together? Will she make statistic deduces to the questionnaires she collects for so many years or will she compose new questions for the audience? Everything will depend on the new facts, the real circumstances as well as the fictional limitations she will place. Through the digital media she communes with the audience, she evokes its spontaneity, its thoughts and its soul.
Ambivalence is a subject that has concerned for a long time now the artist Tzeni Argyriou. The creation procedure follows the time patterns of scientific research. Through the collection and processing of a fruitful material, she every time introduces different circumstances into her experiments. As a result the work in process presentations arise like «makeupyou?mind 6.0.1 and 7.0.2» and «Dr. Maybe Darling 9.0.3 and 10.0.4».
“A lady hanging in the air” – Sylvia Liouliou
A stage approach of the poems by Kiki Dimoula. Roula Pateraki meets the great poet, Kiki Dimoula in a contest that unveils the poetic as well as the personal.
“One” – MAG
MAG team with its sixth performance continues to investigate the limits of theatrical act. The performance “One”, does not narrate any story. Besides, all stories have been told.
What the team attempts to do is to touch the real core of theatre: a human being (actor) appears before the eyes of other people (audience). In order to make it real, he removes from the theatrical convention all its usual weapons: a text, a story, the acting performance, lights, set props, costumes.
What is what will remain? Is it worth seeing? Is it still called theatre? And after all what kind of relationship does it create with its audience? The performance derives material, as much for content as for its own form, from two basic characteristics of human nature: persistence and repetition.
“The Enemy of the People” – A National Self-Examination, based on the play by Henrik Ibsen “An Enemy of the People” (1882) – Stathis Grafanakis
The doctor Stockmann is a successful specialist of society, creation of the same structures authority. When he discovers that the unique financial core of the city, the public baths, are nothing more but a hearth of corruption for public health, denies to “obey”.
He fights against the irrational tendencies of the liberal cohere majority, the hypocritical and corrupted nature of political system, with which the mass democracy itself “concurs” for the suppression of truth as well as his final banishment from the city.
Paraphrasing its original tile, “The” enemy of the people is an Incision “Enlightenment” of the procedure with which the post-modern authority of bio-politics regulates social life from the inner side, so that the person to be integrated and to reset into implementation its orders, like even with latent way to rising up.
A cross-textual, “plagiarized”, language concerto from the illegal gains of authority: the suppressed public speech.
* With the direction of “The enemy of the people” a trilogy of performances is being inaugurated on the plays by Ibsen: “An Enemy of the People”, Pillars of Society, When We Dead Awaken, For They Know Not What They Do (Ibsen/ S. Žižek) having as subject the financial and post-ideological crisis in Greece.
