READERS’ THEATRE is a core project of Elliniko Theatro that encompasses staged readings and audience-participation multi-media offerings of prose, poetic, and dramatic Hellenic texts, classical and contemporary.
HOMERIC READINGS
CAVAFY: The Poet of the City SMYRNE MEMOIRS OF MAKRIYANNIS
At its inception three decades ago, the Greek Theatre of New York (GTNY) stated as its mission to be a bi-lingual performing arts company, presenting classical and modern Greek and Greek American plays to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. Not wanting to make its case with verbal pronouncements but rather through deeds, it chose to mount samples of the entire range of its intended repertory in an inaugural two-week long festival of staged readings and workshop performances at LaMaMa ETC in 1980. The sold-out run of THEATRICA set GTNY on a firm foundation and established its yet unbroken tradition of experimentation, frequency, and range, with sparse, mobile yet engaging productions.
In this context, dramatic readings of old and new theatre works, and of literary texts, have reigned supreme during our 32 year history, and are at the core of our current and future repertory, offering audiences worldwide the opportunity to experience large numbers of established works, while inviting them to participate in the development of new ones. ‘Art with the people, rather than for the people’ may be our defining motto, along with our unswerving commitment to pro-active cultural diplomacy.
Our current productions of Cavafy: Poet of the City, Memoirs of Makriyannis, and Smyrne, along with our inspired collaborations with the renowned international organization The Readers of Homer, are perfect examples of this kind of literary/theatrical exercise—enhanced as they are with music, dance, text projection and digital effects, and often enriched with the active involvement of hundreds of participants of all ages and backgrounds.
In the foreseeable future, and within the framework of our READERS’ THEATRE, we look forward to partnering with likely minded organizations worldwide, and establishing laboratories where courageous artists and audiences can examine old and new Greek and Greek-inspired theatre works, with license to experiment and to fail, to rejoice or to dislike, always to learn and to develop, themselves and their craft. In addition, we anticipate the continued privilege of working with The Readers of Homer, exploring with them ever expanding frontiers in the deeply satisfying exercise of participatory public reading of the great works of poetry, prose and drama that constitute our shared world heritage.