STARRY SKY – STARRY NIGHTS
Post-midnight screenings about the ephemeral nature of the stage

The new initiative of the Athens Epidaurus Festival, hosted at Hall D of Peiraios 260, is introduced under the title ‘Starry Sky – Starry Nights’. At midnight, in an industrial landscape, in the stillness of a summer night in Athens, and beneath an open roof, films are screened. Where ephemeral performances take place, film documentations are screened, meeting the spectator in a city that has only begun to slow down.

These are works captured through a non-conventional cinematic language – not as mere documentation, but as autonomous translations of the stage experience – retaining their intensity, rhythm, and dramaturgical force.

Contemporary creators compose a polyphonic field in which theatre, dance, and performance enter into dialogue with cinema. In this way, the Festival’s longstanding engagement with contemporary performance and with landmark works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is reintroduced – this time through the lens of film.

At the same time, Peiraios 260 itself, a landmark that celebrates twenty years of continuous presence, acts as an active vessel of this experience: a space that remains alive through the multiplicity of artistic forms it hosts, constantly redefining the relationship between the past of performance and the present of its viewing.

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Programme

16 June
Tadeusz Kantor
The Dead Class
1975 / 85΄

One of the seminal works of contemporary theatre. An iconic synthesis of image and language by one of the defining artists of modern performance. Alongside Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor is widely regarded as one of the great visionaries and innovators of twentieth-century theatre.
In 1971, looking through the window of an abandoned village schoolhouse, Kantor encountered the image that would inspire this legendary work, inviting us into the dark, elusive depths of memory.

English subtitles only

-/-

24 June
Eimuntas Nekrošius
Hamletas
1997 / 190΄

A landmark interpretation of Shakespearean drama, Nekrošius’ Hamletas unfurls like a ritual for a world slowly collapsing under the weight of memory and power. Richly informed by the visual and poetic traditions of the Lithuanian theatre school, it remains one of the most celebrated stagings of Hamlet ever created. Its unforgettable ghost scene has entered the canon of modern theatrical imagery, while the production, as a whole, stands as a pinnacle of Lithuanian theatrical aesthetics.

English subtitles only
Running time exceeds 3 hours and includes two short intervals
Presented in three acts

-/-

28 June
Thierry De Mey
Fase
2002 / 58΄
Based on the work Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Rosas, 1982

A key work in the evolution of contemporary European dance, based on the seminal choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In Thierry De Mey’s hands, choreography, minimalism, and cinema converge in a remarkable act of translation, transforming movement into a language uniquely cinematic. Driven by an unrelenting pulse, Fase distils repetition into ecstasy and the physical body into kinetic music.

-/-

4 July
Michail Marmarinos
Insenso
2012 / 101΄

An “operatic monologue without music” becomes a site-specific performance unfolding across two locations, with space itself emerging as a vital dramaturgical force. One of the most memorable productions in the history of the Athens Epidaurus Festival, originally hosted at Peiraios 260, Insenso returns to its point of origin as part of the venue’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations, stretching across the screen of Hall D and revealing a landscape that once existed alongside the Festival – and has since disappeared.

-/-

8 July
Johan Simons, Paul Koek
The Bacchae
2002 / 150΄

A landmark music-theatre interpretation of Euripides’ myth shaped through the groundbreaking stage language of ZT Hollandia, in which ancient tragedy is reconnected to the ritual and musical traditions of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. A fierce and visceral theatrical experience that probes the limits of reason, power, and human desire.

Greek subtitles

-/-

13 July
Christoph Marthaler
Murx den Europäer! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab!
1993 / 120΄

A watershed production of post-reunification German theatre that established Christoph Marthaler’s distinctive theatrical voice on the international stage. Music, absurdity, political melancholy, and a poetics of waiting come together in a world that has already fallen apart. Yet its characters continue to sing, to wait, and simply to persist.

Greek subtitles

-/-

21 July
Romeo Castellucci
Inferno
2008 / 180΄

One of the most powerful and transcendental stage experiences of the 2000s, Inferno redrew the boundaries between imagery, performance, and metaphysical theatre. Drawing on Dante’s vision of Hell, Romeo Castellucci creates a world of overwhelming beauty, terror, and revelation, where danger itself occupies the limelight of the theatrical event.

-/-

24 July
Béla Tarr
Sátántangó
1994 / 439΄

The holy grail of arthouse cinema. With its hypnotic long takes and uncompromising vision, Béla Tarr’s masterpiece chronicles life, despair, and disintegration in a decaying post-communist Hungarian village. Drawing on the world of László Krasznahorkai, it emerges as a dark allegory for the end of an era and the collapse of every collective utopia.

Greek subtitles
Total running time exceeds 7 hours
Presented in three parts, with two intervals