During the workshop's last day the team moved to Olympia Theatre, a hall designed in 1910, renovated in 1950 to host the Greek National Opera. The day was split in three parts: building the set, dress rehearsal, open tryout & discussion.
Working in a theatre hall with an entirely mechanical fly system was an interesting challenge for the team's scenographer, Roleof Pothuis. The stage's control machine was a real antique. Roelof pointed out that besides the restrictions, the way the fly bars move with stage hands and the large experience of the stage crew can give results that someone cannot achieve with automated systems. The stage technicians the RE-FUSE team worked with in Olympia Theatre were more than helpful.
All artists took part in the buildup, getting to know better the stage and solving practical and dramaturgical issues of how to put together the tryout that would follow later in the day. There was not a clear narrative running the draft performance, however, the theme of the stranger was a common thread. Besides the rather fixed structure, there was still space for micro-improvisations. The way the stage was divided into rooms was based on Workshop A: observation room, music room, text room, movement room. The text fragments used were taken from the selected material during the previous online roundtable: Grandad’s Island, Cantata, The Suppliants, Swiss news, Visit, The Stranger.
Even though the tryout became an hour-long draft performance, because of the very nature of exploring all together something on stage, along with the invited audience, kept a focus on the combined approaches, the attitude of artistic research, the collaborative way of working and the very practices that were brought together and shared among the artists.
The full video of the open tryout:
After the tryout a discussion took place together with the invited artists. The RE-FUSE platform would like to thank for their presence and feedback: Antonis Antonopoulos, Evi Nakou, Euripides Laskaridis, Stella Angeletou, Eva Karterou, Kristin Sofroniou, Petros Touloudis, Kornilios Selamsis, Georgina Chryskioti, Eleni Vergeti, Jason Ioannou, Danai Giannakopoulou, Felicia van den End, Mislav Rezic.
A short fast-forward video of the cleanup:
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