Programme

The festival opens not with words but with music. Valentini Loizou, a Greek-Cypriot pianist and composer, carries in her own biography the very triangle this festival is built on: Greece, Cyprus, Berlin. She performs her own compositions in a continuous flow of one piece leading into the next, and welcomes the audience into the rooms of the Greek Embassy, setting the tone of the upcoming three days.

The moment when a festival ceases being a project and becomes a reality. The organising team welcomes the audience, the writers and everyone who supported this first venture, and officially opens the Greek Theater Festival Berlin.

Immediately after the performance, the playwright of “Me, Her Servant” talks openly with the audience. How is a voice like the Servant's born? What does it mean to give a voice to a person whom history has left anonymous? What keeps a text alive when it travels into another language and another city? The conversation takes its course from the questions of those in the room.

The first day concludes as is fitting and proper for any Greek event: around a table. Writers, artists, and the audience come together informally, in the kind of setting where the most interesting collaborations usually begin.

It is often said that in Berlin it is very easy to meet new people, but hard to stay in touch with them. Much the same applies to connecting with other artists: meeting fellow artists is one thing, but actually working with them is something else entirely! With the networking event “show me yours, I’ll show you mine” we hope to bring together selected theater professionals from Berlin’s independent arts scene, Greek and non-Greek alike.

Following the performance, the playwright of “My Beloved Washing Machine” talks openly with the audience. Three monologues: a Jocasta who refuses to mourn, a Nitsa who remembers, and a man who pours his heart out to a household appliance. How are these voices connected? What does it mean to write about love despite the age conventions? And how does the first play of a lawyer who writes both poetry and prose look like? The conversation takes its course from the questions of those present.

Born in Patmos and based in Berlin, Yiannis Pappas is a visual artist and performer who works with video, photography and installation, often with his own body at the centre. His practice explores visible and invisible boundaries, its central question being the limits set by our own skin. Marina Abramović has repeatedly selected him for her programmes and has described him as one of the most significant performers of the future.

Sophocles is being staged somewhere in the world tonight. Most likely Euripides as well. Contemporary Greek and Cypriot playwrights, however, rarely reach a foreign stage. What blocks the road between the original text and the stage of another country? The market, the institutions, the language itself, or simply the fact that no one asked for it? The question runs through all three days of the festival, and here it is put openly, by translators, scholars and theater practitioners, with the playwrights in the room.

Born in Sparta and living in Berlin since 2012, Panos Voulgaris is a guitarist and composer whose studies in classical guitar and harmony later met jazz and improvisation. In Berlin, he founded the world jazz band FUSAK. He also writes prose, with two books to his credit. He left Greece as so many others did; all he took with him were his notes and a language. Tonight he comes alone: a guitar in the foyer, between two performances, where music needs no stage to be heard.

Following the performance, the playwright of “N–EURO–SE” talks openly with the audience. A mother, a father and a teenager around a kitchen table. How far can parental care go before it turns into something else? How relevant is today, in 2026 Europe, a play about obedience, authoritarianism and the limits of tolerance? What does it mean to write, in the middle of the 2012 economic crisis, in such a way that the title cannot be translated, when what matters most is hidden in the middle of the word? The conversation takes its course from the questions of those present.

Jamchat is a group of Berlin musicians who come together to play traditional music, mainly from Greece but also from the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Eight musicians, violin, two ouds, lavta, clarinet, kanonaki, bass clarinet and voice, from various corners of this neighbourhood of the world. Erase the lines on the map and hear how the music stays the same! The borders drawn across this region never crossed the music of Jamchat, and tonight they will not cross the TAK either.

Right after the performance, the playwright of “Manoli...!” talks openly with the audience. A text written in 1986 about the 1974 coup, speaking of memory in a community that has chosen to forget. What does it mean to write about something while the silence around it still holds? How does a monologue survive forty years, and what does an audience in Berlin hear in it today? Its playwright calls it a dialogue, even though the cat never answers. The conversation takes its course from the questions of those in the room.

Les Chats Manouches are a gypsy jazz and swing band based in Berlin. Their repertoire draws on the style of Django Reinhardt, with traditional swing and French chanson. A Sunday afternoon, between two performances, where the only thing asked of you is to listen to a little music born of people in constant motion, without a homeland and perhaps without a residence permit, and played today all over the world.

Immediately after the performance, the playwright of «Hotel Éternité» talks openly with the audience. A hotel where every mention of old age and death is strictly forbidden. How do you build a world that rests on silence and comforting lies? And if it reminds you less of a fictional hotel and more of our own reality, you may not be the only one. The conversation takes its course from the questions of those in the room.

A screening of an audiovisual project by the musician and music developer Achilleas Sourlas with the Italian composer and media artist Riccardo Castagnola: a passage through the fragmented sonic and visual landscape of the present, an archaeology of interrupted signals and disintegrating forms, in which perception assembles a fleeting coherence out of the debris of an age of saturation.

The festival’s final discussion brings the writers together on the same stage. Three days, five plays, five very different voices: a servant called to account, a family whose meal ends in something unexpected, a mother who talks to her cat because no one else is listening, a hotel that has abolished time, three monologues about love. What links them, if anything? These plays were written over a span of almost forty years. What has changed in Greek-language theater in that time, and what has stayed the same? And what have the writers themselves taken away from these three days in Berlin? The conversation takes its course from the questions of those in the room.

A DJ set for laughter and tears, for all aspects of life. Music in minor keys, songs steeped in nostalgia and stories of people who lived through colonialism, from Cape Verde to Tunis, meet festive rhythms and songs of life from Serbia to Colombia. From darkness into light, from melancholy into dance. Cumbia, wild beats, traditional melodies, and contemporary sounds weave into a set that does not try to choose between sorrow and joy. Because life contains it all.