Hello to Emptiness by Mavroidi, šeš 16 bal 2022, Nuo (2022/2022), Dirigentas Martha Mavroidi, Alternative Stage, Athens, Greece

In a time of normalisation of loss and of the void it leaves behind, the performance Hello to Emptiness explores intercultural ways of managing grief and dares to envision a more grounded and human future. How do we confront the emptiness when fellow humans, landscapes, species and populations disappear or die? How do we see, feel and reflect the void and how do we resonate with the hole their disappearance leaves with us? Most Western societies give little time and space to the experience of death and mourning. The new interdisciplinary research and performance-concert Hello to Emptiness focuses on re-inventing lost strategies to cope with the void. It is a performative reflection on social vulnerability and questions how to deal with grief, currently charged by the pandemic crisis. Hello to Emptiness is performed with hybrid artist bodies, singing dancers and dancing singers, to emphasize the deep relation between body, voice and breath. At the beginning of the research conducted by the creators lies the Greek tradition of moiroloi (Greek: speech of fate), an age-old pagan tradition that is not only devoted to dialogue with the deceased, but also applied to communication with nature, employing sounds that imitate animals and natural elements. Five international artists with an interdisciplinary background, led by director Stephanie Thiersch (whose work is intensely involved with questions of social responsibility and utopian designs of future societies) and well-known, versatile composer, singer and performer Martha Mavroidi, put together their personal and subjective knowledge about cultural techniques rooted in different cultural backgrounds (Greece, France, Germany, South Africa, Spain). At the same time, the 65+ Chorus of the GNO Learning & Participation Department acts as a resonance body of the past (and the future), spinning cultural-historical threads and contextualizing the acting of the performers. Starting from the recovery of historical, diverse practices, the production strives to give birth to possibilities for future application, rededication and contextualization of the existing funeral songs and traditional rituals that inform it, putting their meaning, impact and form into a perspective both artistic and utopian.