Hello everybody,
What if you would be able to take
something simple and transform it in to imagination? What if you would raise
your hand and sparkles will follow, as from a magic wand? What do you need to
dream? What do you need to imagine? What if we could run covered by drops of
rain in a hot summer day? What do we need to feel happy? What do we need to be
us? To let our mind fly on the hills or swim in the blue sea water?
We live in an era where we have no time
to create... to dream. We are to busy with the deadlines... to busy living...
so busy that we forget about us, about our time spend on living between life.
Eidekanou Theatre give us the possibility
to reply at all these questions .... give us the possibility to learn how to
answer these questions and to change something where maybe you believed there
is nothing left to change.
Two girls met on the same road in Nicosia, at Eidekanou
Theatre ...to open paths in our lifes... in our children lifes. They are Nikoletta Verykiou, MA in
Performance Research
Bristol University,
Archi Drama School Athens, Communication and Mass Media University of Athens
and Elena Pavlidou MA Advanced Theatre
Practice, University of London, Athens
Odeon Drama
School, International and European
Studies, Panteion
University .
Definitely they were speaking with the
Gods when they decided to implement in Cyprus the most interesting theater
workshops for kids and adults alike.
They will convince us, about how you and
your kids can live dreaming, how you can perform, how you can become an
Artist... how to feed your imagination ...to open your mind.
“Play is your route to mastery.”
Sara
Genn
Eidekanou Theatre: An artist could be found anywhere. Not just in the fields of art.
Dedicating oneself in his or her craft/work/technique/job, getting deeper and
deeper in the “how” of one’s making, in the “what” of one’s material, is
essentially art. The choice for us to become theatre makers, was actually a
conscious decision to continue what had been giving us the possibility to play,
structuring time in our everyday lives for the potentials arising through play.
“You've always lived a life of pretense,
not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything
about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never
real.”
Thomas Bernhard,Woodcutters
Eidekanou Theatre: We don’t believe in the pre-existence of a real, genuine self that
reality and society converts it into something less real or true. We see
ourselves as a continuum, in constant change. We try to incorporate
difficulties in our artistic world, we try to get inspired by everyday routines
and duties because for us this is exactly the reason of art: to highlight the
common, and even more to bestow a different meaning to the everyday, to the
trivial. Of course now that we are both living the era of Motherhood the need
to be inventive and communicative outside home has become a big challenge.
“All true artists, whether they know it
or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”
Eckhart Tolle
Eidekanou Theatre: No-mind and inner stillness is a hard task to accomplish each time
we begin a workshop, and is a skill mastered in the long term. It is vital for
us and for the workshops’ participants in order to create awareness of the
“here-ness” and the “now-ness”, which are necessary in theatre. Being in a
theatre workshop requires openness to any relationship created within this
time; relation with the others, with the space, with the environment. What is
apparent, mostly in the adults’ workshops, is that it is harder to find this
state of inner stillness immediately. Our bodies and minds are most of the
times preoccupied, with stress, anxieties, worries, and this means we need to
dedicate time to prepare the ‘state of inner stillness’. With the children this
doesn’t usually need so much effort. Once we have created a common place of
concentration in each workshop, we find it important to offer few guidelines
and simple frameworks to the participants, so that they explore each given
subject freely. Our effort is not to impose, not to pre-plan or expect certain
results.
The workshops.
Eidekanou Theatre organizes workshops for
children and adults, on a weekly basis. We have groups for theatre (adults and
children), polyphonic songs (adults) and documentary (adults).
In relation to theatre, our approach and
the way we design our workshops isn’t differentiated by the participants’ ages.
On the contrary, many of our principles/tools/games/exercises are the same for
both groups, only our demands are different according to the ages. We try to
create a safe and happy environment for theatre to emerge. Our interest is mainly
on the process of theatre making, rather than rehearsing and staging an already
written theatre play. Our material is each participant’s personality, their way
of working, their possibilities and difficulties, their interests, the way they
see life.
We
work with exercises and tools often used in devised and physical
theatre.
Our aim is to prepare the participants
physically through games for awareness and focus, breathing exercises and to
find ways to explore the group rhythm and to build trust amongst the
participants in order to enhance collaborative creative work. Equally important
for Theatre Eidekanou, is to cultivate individual and group imagination through
physical and verbal improvisations, creative use of objects and mask theatre,
innovative play with space, building original characters. As artists we are
very much influenced by theatre practitioners such as Jaques Lecoq, Eugenio
Barba and Agosto Boal, not only for their perspective of theatre, but also for
their way of making theatre.
As previously said, Eidekanou Theatre has
been offering since last year a practical workshop in documentary making
addressed to adults, regardless of their previous experience in film-making .
The workshop is designed by Michalis Theodorou (filmmaker, journalist) and its
aim is for each participant to complete by June 2015 a short documentary on a
subject of their choice.
For those interested in group singing,
the workshop of Polyphonic songs is continued too this year. The main area of
research is songs from Epirus
and Southern Italy, which are sung without
instrumental support or microphones. The workshop leader is Pavlina
Konstantopoulou (musician, composer).
Apart from the workshops organised on a
weekly basis, Eidekanou offers one-day workshops in a specific subject each
time, both for adults and children. These are announced through the Press,
Facebook Page and the e-newsletter. The current workshop “Theatre Kitchen” (on
the 25th October) is addressed to children aged 6-11 and will be held in
English. Through games and theatre activities, we will experiment with culinary
objects and materials in order to create an imaginary kitchen where anything
can happen.
Lastly, Eidekanou Theatre is interested
in creating interdisciplinary theatre and is planning to present a new
performance and a short movie in 2015. “Snow Queen” is our last performance for
children, which was presented in Kastelliotissa and a number of public schools
in 2013 and is included in the Pop-Up Festival 2014 of Nicosia Muncipality.
"Happy is he who still loves
something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is
not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life."
G.K. Chesterton
Eidekanou Theatre: As we grow we forget to play, something that when we are small we
couldn’t live without. Nowadays, for young children this might even start as
early as the age of six when their everyday routine, basically their time, is
divided in two: time for school and activities from one side and time for play
from the other side. In the school environment most of the time, play is
outside classes because the capitalistic education paradigm has expelled it
from the learning process as a waste of time, energy, focus and seriousness.
When we meet young children during our
workshops, we immediately understand that it is a matter of couple of games for
them to re-member, re-find, get in touch with the core of childhood, the play.
Children are anyway mostly ready to receive and get involved in what
constitutes the vital idea of play. On the contrary, the adults because of
their constant preoccupation with everyday duties and social expectations are
more resistant to play again.
The most important thing about play is
its connection with the idea of time. When we are young the time counts in a
different way because we live through playing and not through restrictions,
duties and predefined social schemes. When children play they can concentrate
even to a diminutive stimulus highlighting and expanding the value of present
time. Through play they live the moment, the now. What we believe we do through
the workshops is to enrich their moments of present time with qualitative
opportunities to co-exist with others in a free context.
As Heraclitus said “time is a game played
beautifully by children’’ .
"Grown-ups never understand anything for
themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining
things to them."
Saint-Exupéry,
The Little Prince
Eidekanou Theatre: From a different perspective, one could say that grown ups need to be
reminded of their “hidden child”.
In every man there is a
hidden child which is called the urge to create and he prefers as play things
and serious things not the miniature ships, recreated in the minutest detail,
but the walnutshell with a bird feather as mast and sail and a pebble as the
captain. The hidden child wants to be able to participate and to co-create in
art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. For this 'child in man' is
the immortal creator within him. (Christian Morgenstern)
"The end of childhood is when things
cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to
existence, one has become an adult."
Eugene Ionesco
Eidekanou Theatre: Sometimes it seems inevitable not to get used to everyday life, to
get drowned in dullness. To surprise ourselves could be a task in order to
overcome adult-ness, to remind ourselves of the surreal, of the simplicity of
existence. We are never sure but we certainly hope that the workshops do have a
positive impact on children. Our main goal is for children to create
experiences that could possibly follow them through their next steps in life.
Offering them a platform to play freely, improvise, try and fail, create in
collaboration, find joy in accuracy and rhythm, are all priorities of our
workshops for children. Performing, both
as a child and as an adult, is for as an opportunity to share experiences with
sincerity, which means sharing our process without the anxiety of presenting a
“final product”.
The Story
Once upon a time there was a child and a face and they were a happy
couple.
One day the rains started in the forest and disasters came and the
couple got scared and left. On that day, a horrible old man made magical tricks
and the couple had to separate for ever. But the evil wizard couldn’t keep them
apart because a wild and canning witch wanted to take revenge on the wizard
because the wizard had once stolen her jewellery and her magical secret,
without which she couldn’t do anything. And so she did. When the wizard was
deeply asleep, she found a way into his brain and she turned him into a good
person. The couple was again together and they lived happily ever after.
We sit in a circle. We improvise a story
together. Each one of us adds one word each time. No-one can impose an idea to
the group, our only empowerment is to add just one word each time. No-one knows
where the story takes us, when or how it will end. The above story is an
example of this game and was created in Greek during a workshop with children
last spring.
Thank you very much for this fantastic
opportunity Eidekanou Theatre,
Lots of sunny days from
Izzy the Cypriot lizard!
Theater Eidekanou
Workshop schedule
(meetings on a weekly basis):
● Theatre and Play (for children
6-11)
Saturday, 10:30 - 12:00
contribution per month: 45€
● Documentary (for adults)
Tuesday, 19:00 - 21:30
contribution per month: 30€
● Theatre Workshop (for adults)
Wednesday, 18:30 - 20:30
contribution per month: 45€
● Polyphonic Songs (for 16yrs
plus)
Thursday, 19:30 - 21:00
contribution per month: 40€
Eidekanou also organizes
one-day workshops for children and adults, performances and invites artists to
present their work at Praktoreio. In order to receive information on upcoming
events, you can join our mailing list at eidekanou@gmail.com or like our page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/eidekanou
Address:
To Praktoreio, Nikitara 19, Ay. Omoloyites, Nicosia, Cyprus
Contact persons: Elena Pavlidou, Nikoletta Verykiou
Phone no: +357 99849598 ;
+357 96670490
Map Location:
