ASIPKA THEATER GROUP

ASIPKA Theatre Group was founded by director Dimitris Bitos in collaboration with actress Irini Drakou in 2007.

 

‘ASIPKA’ means ‘MISTAKE’ in Russian – inspired by our first lab work.

 

The need that lead us to do theatre is the same that lead us to live.

 

We believe in a theatre of senses, doubt and invention.

 

Our proposal for each performance is closely related to the way we work as a performance group, a work focused on our selves.

 

The main focus of our work is on the work of the performer as a human being. We also perceive performer,  as “ethopios” (the greek word for “actor”). The word “ethopios” signifies the person who creates moral qualities, that is to say, behaviour and consequently, character.

 

In our work, we investigate a space between representation and presence that leads to a “people specific” type of performance.

 

Usually, this type of work includes rehearsals and performances that are being created in residencies in small towns or small islands in Greece. We stay in these places for at least two weeks, during which we are working as a laboratory that investigates certain drama roles by given contemporary, classic or ancient drama works (i.e. Antigone). Each performer undertakes the task of inventing a character. When we are ready, all performers go out in the town and perform their roles one – to – one in people of the town, who we just happened to meet on the street, in the market, in a cafeteria, on the beach etc. In most cases, the people who we perform for don’t realize we are performers; rather they think of us as people they met and started to chat with.

 

What is more, they share with us personal stories of their own. The performance is always an one-to-one, face-to-face performance. This approach gives us the opportunity to investigate the relation between the dramatic and the non-dramatic, between theatre and reality, the “validity” that dramatic or theatre characters can have today face-to-face to each person of the “audience”.

 

What is even more important is that this approach leads the audience to unconsciously become the director of the performance. This happens because each time the performer has to perform for a different person, he is obliged to adjust his interpretation of the same character to the person he has in front of him.

 

So, in this way, the person we are addressing to every time, his mood and his condition, become for us instructions on how to approach and deliver our role.

 

In the end of the residency, we invite the public to an open performance in a specific place,  that has the form of a meeting, where we reveal ourselves and at the same time, present a composition made of our characters and stories that we have collected from our face-to-face performances from the people we have performed for.

 

An example of recent lab work in Nisyros (an isolated island – volcano) :

 

In the rehearsal we don’t work with theoretical analysis of text. We start with the principle (aftheresia) that ‘there is no text’.

 

In Summer 2011 we worked in a Greek island called Nisyros where we were isolated for two weeks in lab conditions. In the morning we all met somewhere close to nature in silence and worked there. During the daytime we were preparing for the evening rehearsal which was on two poems of A.Sikelianos and G. Pentzikis book ‘The Dead Man and the Resurrection’ and on the Bucolic drama ‘Golfo’. In the evening the rehearsals were sometimes open and later on we were going (‘to meet the text at the road’) to use the text  in contact with local people. At the end of our stay there we offered a performance to local people based on this material. This is an example of our summer work in lab conditions.

 

In summer of 2012 we worked in ‘ANTIGONE by Sophocles’ in Nisyros again. A work that presented in Little Theater of Ancient Epidaurous in ‘Athens & Epidaurus Festival of 2012

 

In the past we have also work and present our work in other remoted islands like Astypalaia (on Triptych of Heiner Muller) where after the rehearsals two performances took place. One on Heiner Muller'  text in a Church Yard and another one on the main road of Chora where 40 people that lived in Astypalaia' s Camping, took part in a performance on 'The Hollow Men' of T.S. Elliot.