Two months (and something) of performing and musical events unfold in a few hours as a panorama of proposals by Athens Festival. With the exception of the two Festivals within the Festival – Grape, the platform for the promotion of Greek producers abroad, and Subset, an ensemble of new music writing – which seem to function as more compact organizations, this year’s festival event holds important voices from the international and domestic theater, dance, performance and music scene.

A first selection between the ones that are worth seeing and others that you definitely shouldn’t miss, add up to 22 options at Piraeus 260 and Herodionin this year’s programming.

  • “Madama Butterfly” by the National Opera at the Herodes Atticus Conservatory

Three years after “Wojcek”, the leading French director Olivier Pi and former director of the Avignon Festival returns to the Lyric Stage. This time to direct, on the Herodian stage, one of Puccini’s most popular masterpieces, with the elements from the Japanese musical tradition, the scales and qualities of chamber music.
When: June 1, 4, 7 and 10

  • “Bii” at Piraeus 260

For the first time in Greece, the pioneering Russian theater and cinema director Kirill Serebrennikov is coming. Former artistic director of Moscow’s famous Gogol Center, activist for the LGBTI community, opponent of Putin and self-exiled in Germany, Serebrennikov presents an anti-war anthem. Based on a fictional horror novel written in 1835 by Nikolai Gogol, featuring a terrifying creature called Vii, Serebrennikov creates an unbearably cruel as well as poetically powerful performance of the invasion of Ukraine.
When: June 7 & 8

  • “The dreamers” in Piraeus 260

Performance

It’s been four years since their last monumental performance at the Athens Festival with “Horses in Love” and the team of “In Potential” are now back under the directorial guidance of Viennese choreographer Michael Klien. Together they present a project of social choreography, the field of action of both the group and Klien. The idea is inspired by the play “Die Schwärmer” by Robert Musil, which talks about the possibility of the coexistence of reason and dream: In an empty industrial space, within an environment composed of an electro-acoustic soundscape, a group of 50 people with mixed abilities they move in the space in personal paths that they themselves create.
When: June 7, 8 and 9

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