«angeliafóros»
Akropoditi Dancetheatre

«angeliafóros»
Akropoditi Dancetheatre

July 05-14, 2025

Tarsanas Shipyard - Syros Island

Akropoditi Dancetheatre

After the end of a battle, a group of survivors returns to their homeland, burdened with the task of announcing what they have witnessed and endured. Their journey spans an entire night of marching, exhaustion, reflection, inner monologue, intentions, attempts, and questionings—regarding both the message they must deliver and the way in which it should be announced.

Their speech, initially resembling that of a war messenger—bearing news of defeat and destruction—gradually becomes distorted, blending with the content of their announcements, truth and falsehood intertwining, and their very identities dissolving.

The site of the announcement becomes a new battlefield where past and present meet and clash. Through this confrontation, the messengers take on shifting roles: at times, they are soldiers, at others, agents of power, angels, or birds.

The announcement itself shifts between past and present, moving through crimes, wars, uncanny acts, curses, punishments, and misinterpreted truths. Eventually, it reaches the future as prophecy, articulating destiny in an incomprehensible language. Likewise, those delivering the message transform into messengers of ancient tragedies, modern journalists, and ultimately, prophets.

The piece explores the concept and significance of the announcement — from the universally resonant and weighty speeches of messengers in ancient Greek tragedy, to the sensationalism, exaggeration, and indiscretion of contemporary journalistic discourse, and beyond human language, to the mysterious and incomprehensible voices of prophets and angels.

Credits

Concept, direction, choreography: Angeliki Sigourou
ChoreographerΆs/directorΆs assistant: Dimitris Baltas

Performers: Angeliki Aggeletaki, Evi Aresti, Timothy Ashplant, Dimitris Baltas, Antigoni Choundri, Josephine Gray, Afedia Kanellopoulou, Ariadni Kitsou, Christos Kollias, Sofia Koktsidou, Xeni Kottaki, Manti Papandreou, Vivi Sklia, Anmar Taha, Konstantina Thanasouli

Music: Fotis Mylonas
Set design: Akropoditi Dancetheatre
Costumes: Matina Megla
Sketch: Evi Aresti
Graphic design, program and poster design: Vivi Sklia

Texts: Adapted excerpts from monologues of ancient Greek tragedies, excerpts of headlines and news articles, excerpts from the book of Revelation and the Quran, references to the book Fractured Loyalties (Ashplant, Timothy 2007), and texts composed by the company.

Adaptation of ancient Greek tragedies: Angeliki Sigourou, Timothy Ashplant, Christos Kollias

The performance is a collaboration between Akropoditi Dancetheatre, British historian and writer Timothy Ashplant, and the company ibodies.

Akropoditi Dancetheatre

The Akropoditi Dancetheatre was founded on the island of Syros in 2004 by Angeliki Sigourou. Since its inception, the company has remained a diverse ensemble, featuring dancers and actors from Greece and abroad, as well as community artists from various disciplines.

akropoditi.com/dancetheatre

ibodies company

The impetus for the work of ibodies is based on the fundamental insight that theatre – as an arena in which performance takes place – demands a unique and radical language that is useless and in the disservice of any agenda other than its own primacy as a form of language. As such, the poetics of awareness is an absolute given in their continued search for a radical scenic language.

ibodies are based in Gothenburg, Sweden, led by Anmar Taha and Josephine Gray. Their work has been presented at venues and festivals across Europe, Middle East, North Africa and Asia.

www.i-bodies.com

Timothy G. Ashplant

Timothy Ashplant is a historian and writer. He taught for 25 years at Liverpool John Moores University, ending his career as Professor of Social and Cultural History. Since 2013, he has been a Visiting Professor at KingΆs College London, attached to the Centre for Life-Writing Research.  His research has focussed on the use of life stories by ordinary (non-elite) people to defend their interests and promote their claims for social justice.

His book Fractured Loyalties: Masculinity, Class and Politics in Britain, 1900-30 (2007) examined how men who fought on the Western Front in the First World War tried, through poetry and autobiography, to grasp the enormity of the war, which had fractured the religious and political values in which they had been brought up.  They became messengers to their society, struggling to put into words their – sometimes revelatory, sometimes traumatic – experience of industrialised warfare. He has also had a long involvement with photography. In the 1980s, he was a member of a community arts group in Oxford, for which he took part in several photo projects.  In the 1990s, he was one of the directors of  Oxford Photography, an Arts Council-funded organisation which promoted photography in the Oxford region by organising exhibitions and lecture series.  He also contributed, through one-person and group photo shows, to the annual Oxford Artweeks festivals.  In 2018, with the support of the Municipality of Syros-Hermoupolis and the Syros Photographic & Film Club, he held a one-person show, “Σύρος – Ερμούπολη, η ματιά ενός επισκέπτη 2009-2017”.

Since 2014, he has attended Akropoditi DanceFest and taken part in dance and dance-improvisation workshops.