Despite Greece’s economic difficulties, theatre keeps getting made. Lyn Gardner explores why many of the country’s artists feel there is nothing left to lose.
The ballroom may be in ruins but the three couples in Blitz Theatre Group’s Late Night can’t stop dancing. A TV flickers at the edge of the dance floor, the dancers must be nimble to avoid the rubble, and the news coming in from Novi Sad to London and from Berlin to Paris is catastrophic. Zurich has fallen; Warsaw is ablaze, other cities are razed. Yet still the dancers keep dancing and performing bad conjuring tricks and even worse cartwheels, as if only by performing will they keep the truth at bay. They are not waving but clowning.
I saw Late Night at LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) back in 2016. Its dreamy sense of a Europe weighed down by history and teetering on the brink of collapse has haunted me since, not least because I saw it just days before the vote in which the people of the UK narrowly voted to leave the EU.
Two years on, festivals and venues still can’t get enough of this contemporary theatre piece made by Blitz, a collective of Greek theatremakers...Keep reading on the British Council website
The ballroom may be in ruins but the three couples in Blitz Theatre Group’s Late Night can’t stop dancing. A TV flickers at the edge of the dance floor, the dancers must be nimble to avoid the rubble, and the news coming in from Novi Sad to London and from Berlin to Paris is catastrophic. Zurich has fallen; Warsaw is ablaze, other cities are razed. Yet still the dancers keep dancing and performing bad conjuring tricks and even worse cartwheels, as if only by performing will they keep the truth at bay. They are not waving but clowning.
I saw Late Night at LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) back in 2016. Its dreamy sense of a Europe weighed down by history and teetering on the brink of collapse has haunted me since, not least because I saw it just days before the vote in which the people of the UK narrowly voted to leave the EU.
Two years on, festivals and venues still can’t get enough of this contemporary theatre piece made by Blitz, a collective of Greek theatremakers...Keep reading on the British Council website