Feature: Athens and Epidaurus Festival kicks off eyeing clos

By Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, June 2 (Xinhua) -- The Athens and Epidaurus Festival, the largest and most prestigious annual cultural event in Greece over the past six decades and one of the oldest in Europe, kicked off this week, eyeing to forge closer links to Greek society and the world, organizers told Xinhua.

The program started on May 31 with the Greek National Opera (GNO) staging the opera "Madama Butterfly" by Puccini at the Herodus Atticus Odeon at the foot of the Acropolis hill in Athens and ends on Aug. 19.

It includes dozens of performances of ancient and modern theater and dance, music concerts and exhibitions of visual arts, featuring works of acclaimed Greek and foreign artists.

"The year 2017 will go down in history as one of new beginnings as far as the festival is concerned. We are launching a series of new sections, collaborations, and openings, which will hopefully revitalize the Greek performing scene and over time bear fruit and become established parts of the Festival," Vangelis Theodoropoulos, the festival's artistic director since 2016, wrote in a message to the audience.

This year the Athens and Epidaurus Festival launches the Epidaurus Lyceum, an international summer school of ancient Greek drama intended for drama school students and young actors from all over the world, he explained.

It will be hosted at the 2,500-year-old marble theater of Epidaurus in Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, where the second leg of the festival unfolds each summer.

In the Athens leg, the organizers are launching this year another section: the Opening to the City, Theodoropoulos noted.

"Encompassing performances and events at non-theatrical spaces, interventions in run-down areas of the city, this section seeks to counteract the increasingly withdrawn and introspective stance of society, responding to the fear of diversity and taking a stand against parochial, insular, and racist attitudes at large," he stressed.

"This year 2017 we have more than 100 events in different venues in Athens. Our main venue is Herodus Atticus Odeon, but our artistic director Vangelis Theodoropoulos has decided to expand the festival throughout Athens in different little venues... It is like a big feast for culture," Maria Panagiotopoulou, the festival's press officer told Xinhua on Thursday night at 260 Peiraios Street, an industrial building which in recent years has been turned into a venue for cultural performances.

The venue at 260 Peiraios Street currently hosts a photographic exhibition of the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography about the migrant and refugee crisis and a 13-channel film installation by German artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt which pays homage to the 20th century artistic manifestos with celebrated actress Cate Blanchett portraying thirteen roles.

Panagiotopoulou calls on tourists who will visit Greece this summer to explore along the Greek crowds what the Greek festival has to offer in Athens and Epidaurus, at a two hour drive from the Greek capital, where mostly ancient Greek drama performances are hosted.

"It is a very unique experience to just take the trip to Peloponnese and give yourself this excellent experience of attending theater in the place where ancient Greeks used to do it," she said.

In order to ensure that recession-hit Greeks will continue flooding the festival's venues in recent years, organizers have tried to keep the prices of tickets low and provide opportunities to members of the most vulnerable groups of Greek society to join the feast.

On Tuesday this week, some 1,500 unemployed Greeks were able to watch the dress rehearsal of "Madama Butterfly" free of charge.

In the past five years, the GNO in coordination with the Athens and Epidaurus Festival offers free tickets to the jobless as part of its social policy program.

"The National Opera firmly believes in social aid... For us it is the least we can do, to provide a few seats to the unemployed. We hope that we can do more," Yorgos Koumentakis, GNO's artistic director told Xinhua at Herodus Atticus Odeon.

"People's reaction was warm. The tickets were snapped up very quickly. This gives us strength to see what else we can do," he said.