Translation: Eleni Bakopoulou
Performers: Katya Gerou, Natalia Georgosopoulou
Aritstic direction: Savvas Stroumpos
Dramaturgy: Pantelis Boukalas
Sound landscape: Leonidas Maridakis
Scenography: Elias Papanikolaou
Costumes: Katerina Papasotiriou
Video/trailier: Stefanos Kosmidis/ ORKI
Communication: Marianna Papaki, Nontas Douzinas

 “The lost was not lost,
the heart is a fortress place.”
Paul Celan

The theatrical performance is based on the book of Svetlana Alexievich “War does not have a woman’s face”.

In our project the two female figures on stage are two women who narrate the tragic story of femininity through the destruction of humanity during the period of WWII. Narrating their contradictory experiences they reveal the unsaid depth of their emotions and their hidden dreams and desires. They “sing” for the Women of all times, reconnecting us with the fundamental need of human coexistence, which can only be developed through the surpassing of the dark patriarchal lust for war and power. In the core of their revealed femininity the human being in front of us is not anymore a permanent enemy, is not someone who threatens our existence. Between war and love, history and memory, these women try to reclaim their lives, their feelings, their bodies, themselves.

Svetlana Alexievich refers to her work as a polyphonic song of human stories – tragedies. Through this material, we create a theatre of Voices with fragments of stories which spring from the innermost sides of memory. There are no dramatic characters, no dialogue in the traditional sense of the term. Two Women are on stage in a place of battles and ruins embodying paradigms of different people who create a space – and – time of emotional revolt against the official heroic narration of history. Memory explodes, challenging us to make a journey till the deep conflictive core of the human being. The present and the past come together in a poetic dimension, where historical time is there to allow memory to remember, to live.

About the book

Svetlana Alexievich( Ukrania, 1948)  is a Belarusian journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature of 2015. The book “War does not have a Woman’s face” is a polyphonic document, a confession of women’s memory from the World War II.

Human is gifted with memory. Memory makes us vulnerable, sensitive to pain.Time, full of cracks and gaps, creates the place where the human soul survives. This place is retrieved and awakened in “The war does not have a woman’s face”. Women who courageously defended their history, their feelings, present a modern testimony about the participation of Soviet women in World War II.

Over 500,000 women took part in the war as nurses, snipers, aviators, riflemen, guerrillas. Women who wanted to stand by their brothers, their loved ones, their fathers and who did everything possible to go to the front. Women who made beautiful braids and wore their favorite dresses to present themselves, and who when they crossed the shore of the war were already short haired, dressed in military clothes. Women who gave their lives for freedom, who fell in love, who kept their humanity in the midst of war, who overcame death and protected the human within them.

The traces left by these women return to the present, where youth has passed and the war is over. The victory remained in history, but the history of the war is different. Words replace feelings, but feelings are the middle ground between reality and the self, the whole scale: anger, dispair, tenderness, agressiveness,  hope, love for life, generosity and dignity.

The author of the book, Svetlana Alexievich, says: “I feel the pain.. as an indication of a life that has passed.. There is no other evidence of a life that has passed.. I see pain as the highest form of information that is directly related to mystery. The mystery of life.”

photos by Dimitris Maofis

Photos from rehearsal by Dimitris Maofis