The show, which is held in collaboration with the Foundation with the Italian Educational Institute of Athens, the Italian School of Athens and S.E.P.I. (Association of Italian University Scientists), is a recital of songs, music and speech that unfolds along the lines of Yiannis Ritsos.
“Romiosyn” by Yannis Ritsos it is one of those texts of world literature, which, having managed to merge the national with the universal, manage to rise beyond the narrow limits of an era and the literature of a country and acquire a universal reach and timelessness.
In its pairing with the imposing music of Mikis Theodorakis, this great text has risen even higher and arouses all peoples, not only with its national tone, but also with the existential affirmation it exudes. The Italian dialect creator Moni Ovantia was also inspired by this ridiculous text of Ritsos and created a show, which he will present in Greece on October 11 at the Kakogianni Foundation.
The show, which is held in collaboration with the Foundation with the Italian Educational Institute of Athens, the Italian School of Athens and S.E.P.I. (Association of Italian University Scientists), is a recital of songs, music and speech that unfolds along the lines of Yiannis Ritsos. Ovandia, a sensitive and original musician, who is always inspired and expresses with his music and recitatives the universality of culture, which, although it always develops in a local and historical layer, overcomes every narrow limit and constitutes a common cradle, from which they are drawn influences that powerfully enrich the peoples they come into contact with.
Ritsou’s Romiosyni is such an example: if the purely Greek characteristics are transferred to some other national identity, they manage to express the same pain and the same expectations. Secular pietas and living humanism, as aptly identified in Ritsu’s text by this special Italian creator, are the common property of all the great traditions and their aesthetic products, be it texts, music, visual and architectural tradition. The Mediterranean, a basin from which Ovantia himself derives his material, is an outstanding example of such a fusion and convergence of cultures.
The text of “Romiosynis” is musically framed by a repertoire that moves from contemporary production and rebetiko, sounds that match the eternal mobility and evolution of Greek culture with the dramatic history of a place that has experienced greatness and disasters, national-historical vivid and violent moments, from which he has always managed to emerge stronger and more alive.
In this performance, Ovantia is flanked by the musicians Roberta Carrieri (voice and guitar) and Dimitris Kotsiuro (bouzouki and oud).
The Sephardic Jew Ovantia, with two grandparents from Thessaloniki and a great-grandfather from Smyrna, born in Bulgaria in 1946 and raised in Milan, is not the first time he has staged a work inspired by the poetry of Yannis Ritsos. In 2015, he again presented in our country the exquisite “Cantata Greca”, a performance based on the poems “Delphi” and “Moonlight Sonata” by the great Greek poet.
Ovandia can be freely described as a multicultural creator. With an intense, personal, idiom, Ovandia creates performances where music, poetry, philosophical discourse and often political intervention come together. As he himself states, the thread that holds them together is precisely this tradition of “cultural and geographical wandering” of the Jewish people・especially in the Mediterranean. A people, of which he feels born and representative and as such always seeks the material offered by memory, the past, but also the need for the simultaneous enrichment of tradition and language, the two components of the individual and collective identity of each people.
The performance will be entirely in Greek, as Ovantia has studied and speaks the language and declares himself enchanted by its richness and potential. And as he himself emphasizes in his earlier interviews, the Greek vernacular contains within it like no other language the sufferings, the glories, the beauty of a people. It is a language, he adds, that has within it four languages, the ancient Greek, the common, the clear and the vernacular and all the languages ​​of the conquerors, Turkish, Venetian, is more than a language. It is a state of mind.
RES-EMP
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With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
