Brandhaarden 2024: Onassis
Central guest of Brandhaarden 2024 is the Onassis Foundation, one of Greece's most pioneering theatres. During the 12th edition of Brandhaarden, from 30 January to 10 February, we will highlight the importance and influence of the Onassis Foundation within the theatre landscape and the wider social context.
From Athens to Amsterdam
Brandhaarden 2024 invites us to look at 'New Greeks', contemporary makers from the very country where ancient culture is celebrated as the origin of our theatre. We present no fewer than seven productions on contemporary Greek culture, through the eyes of Greece's most challenging and thought-provoking theatre-makers. With new forms, but also often referring back to the well-known figures of Ancient Greece.
The fringe programme of Brandhaarden 2024 is dedicated to 'Modern Myths'. We invite the audience to reflect on the power of shared stories, but together we will also look at how this can turn into widespread ideas that are not necessarily true and thus can further marginalise vulnerable communities.
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ONASSIS FOUNDATION
The Onassis Foundation was founded in 1975 by Aristotle Onassis. The motivating factor underpinning the Foundation’s existence are the words Onassis himself carefully chose, noted down, and passed on as a legacy: aid, progress and development. The foundation's main priorities are culture, education, environment, health, and social achievements. The Onassis Foundation is committed to promoting Greek culture and civilisation around the world. With theatre and dance performances, art exhibitions, talks and lectures, Onassis Stegi is the physical hub of the foundation.
The performances
Earthquake is certainly a bone-shaking, seismic performance, bringing together trans femininities, non-binary people, fat bodies, immigrants, and sex workers on stage so that they can sing the hate speech they’ve suffered just because they are who they are.
A response to the archive of the poet Constantine Cavafy, Constantinopoliad is inspired by the blank and torn out pages in Constantinopoliad, an Epic, the journal the teenage Cavafy began when he and his family fled Alexandria.
Goodbye, Lindita is a poetic farewell, a visual meditation on mourning. A family experiences grief in a muted, wordless manner, stupefied by their loss, until a series of uncanny events seems to suspend the boundaries between their world and that of the departed Lindita.
With The House, Dimitris Karantzas presents a performance-parable about violence, addiction to images and the abolition of illusions or, in other words, about a reality that, no matter how much you try to avoid it, will catch up to you sooner or later.
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Giannis Aggelakas, musician, poet and creator of the Greek rock scene, collaborates with established choreographer Christos Papadopoulos on Nekyia, a unique viewing and listening experience of the most arresting rhapsody of the Homeric epic.
What, after all, are Roma? And what are they not? Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris explore this in Romáland - Once upon a time, between real and unreal, a production that walks the line between documentary and fiction about the life of Greek Roma.
Explore the history of Rebetiko, a genre that originated in the cities and ports of Greece, reflecting the lives of refugees and evolving from pre-war tales of delinquency to post-war themes of love and social phenomena.