Fireflies – Where Do Performances Go When They End?
Series of Open Lectures and Discussions with Performative Character

PEIRAIOS 260

30 June & 14 July / HALL E
16 June, 8, 9, 26 & 27 July / HALL B
Fireflies

Curation Dimitris Papanikolaou

In collaboration with Isavella-Dimitra Karouti

This year’s series of talks at Athens Epidaurus Festival is introduced at Peiraios 260 with the title “Fireflies.” Drawing inspiration from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s well-known “Article of the Fireflies” as well as Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Survival of the Fireflies, fireflies are seen as a symbol of resilience and precarity, environmental ethics and eco-critical engagement. A symbol, also, of contact, mobility, and perspectival change.

“Fireflies” will be a cycle of open conversations, moving between lecture, performance, and collective inquiry. Speakers from different disciplines will use discourse as a performative and analytical opening; they will revisit issues that span today’s socio-political and artistic horizon. We will focus on political and artistic research, forensic investigation, the gendered aspect of expression, the memory of performance, incarceration, persistence and survival, citizenship and participation.

In this way, the “Fireflies” events will act as small hubs of reflection and exchange that seek to open up multiple readings of contemporary reality. In this flexible presentation format, theoretical argument, direct dialogue with the audience, and the performing arts, coexist and feed into one another.

By offering glimpses into the analytical and artistic practice of the invited participants, including their artistic work and/or research in progress, these encounters invite the audience to follow how an idea, an artwork, or a research question takes shape. They aim to transform the scene of presentation into a shared field of exploration.

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PEIRAIOS 260 – SPACE B
27 July | 21:00
Open Mic Night

Athens Epidaurus Festival Staff
Where Do Performances Go When They End?

An open mic evening featuring members of the Athens Epidaurus Festival team

As this year's Festival programme comes to a close, Peiraios 260 celebrates its Twenty Years (2006–2026) with an evening of short open mic presentations inspired by a question that is deceptively simple: What remains of a performance once it is over?

The many and often unexpected responses that this question can provoke becomes the starting point for this open presentation evening. Featuring images, sounds, and gestures; a complex archive of memories, practices, experiences, and feelings. The people who worked across this year’s festival speak about their own role in the survival of performances: as they are about to start, while they are happening, and, above all, after they have come to an end.

An open mic evening exploring how performances do not stop when the theatre doors close. What might archive and documentation mean in a practice defined by (and often defining us through) its own ephemerality? How does imagination fill the gaps left by what we no longer remember, how does memory cling to a gesture, a breath, an inflection, a scene, an unexpected response from the audience? How do small technical details become tools for thought and affect ? And how does the performative experience continue to function as a laboratory of collectivity?