The play is based on The Button (To Koubi), written by Tassoula Tsilimeni (Kastaniotis Editions, 2017), which has also been published in French.

Description

The characters of the play emerge from the untamed paths of memory. They recall childhood, loss and trauma — the Greece of the past and the women of the countryside. Women who are mothers, women of quiet endurance, living on the slopes of Mount Olympus and in the neighbourhoods of provincial towns during the 1960s. Before they become mothers, mothers are girls — girls who play at growing up. Through their innocent games, they encounter and ultimately clash with the paradoxical adult world.
These are nostalgic and accusatory narratives, reflecting on what they lived through and what they never had the chance to live. The work is a dramatised narrative guided by the emotional landscapes of rural imagery and the free associations of memory. It is a work about the funeral rite of memory.


Excerpt

D. Mother, look around the bend. Look… a handful of lights across the plain. Sykourio… Evangelismos… look.
M. There it comes at last… The mist. That’s been the ruin of us.
D. What are we to do now?
M. Don’t be afraid. Keep walking. It’ll lift further on.
D. It won’t lift, Mother. It’s closing in. The whole world is vanishing!
M. Walk on, I said. Don’t let fear take hold of you.
D. We’ll be swallowed by it, Mother. The child, you, me… We’ll go over a cliff and no one will ever find us.
M. Do you hear them, daughter? Do you hear? Those are Dapos’s dogs. Do you hear them? (Far away, the sound of dogs barking.)

Creative Team

Written by: Tassoula Tsilimeni
Dramaturgy / Direction: Filia Dendrinou
Performed by: Maria Damasioti, Filia Dendrinou
Video / Sound processing: Vangelis Katsigiannis
Music curation: Filia Dendrinou