Melisma: A participatory & interdisciplinary project for the fire-ravaged community of Northern Evia island

Presentation

Melisma is an ongoing educational and artistic program launched by the Learning & Participation Department of the Greek National Opera (GNO) in the wider area of Northern Evia in 2022, following one of the largest wildfires (2021) ever recorded in the EU.

Acknowledging the crucial role of arts and culture to all three dimensions of resilience (economic, social, environmental), GNO inaugurated Melisma aiming to present interdisciplinary art and research, focusing on cultural knowledge and practices, linking them with intangible and natural heritage, while sharing with the community the necessary tools with the intention of creating an even broader local sustainable artistic and education community able to create and host significant cultural events, thus contributing to the decentralization of cultural production in Greece.

Melisma’s creative team consists of interdisciplinary artists, researchers and educators, multiply engaging with the local community for almost a year and a half, via extended research, regular workshops and everyday living, resulting in a collective artistic endeavour based in co-creation methods and practises.

Building from the program’s first season (2022 – 2023) that focused primarily on the ambiguous relation between man and nature, Melisma’s continuation focuses on local traditions and history (environmental, social, etc) and on co-documenting traditional knowledge and cultural practices via artistic and theoretical research, and yearly open, educative and participatory multidisciplinary workshops. In addition, throughout the year GNO will host several opera and dance performances in the area, so that the local community further cultivates its relationship with those arts and practices that are usually staged in the big cities of Greece.

The program will be launched in June 2024 and climax with a site-specific music theatre performance in Northern Evia Island & with two more performances in GNO Alternative Stage in SNFCC (Sept.-Dec.2025)

Artistic Team

The artistic team of the project consists of four members, all of which are Greeks. Music Supervision and Composition: Stamatis Pasopoulos Movement Training, Performance Composition: Anna Tzakou Theatre Pedagogy, Processwork: Maria Olga Athinaiou Art: Anna Housiada. Artistic Director: Anna Tzakou The artistic group applied for an open call that was carried out by the Learning & Participation Department of the Greek National Opera. They sent a complete proposal about all phases of the project that means Artistic Research - Educational Workshops- Musical Performance including bibliographical references and many other details. Their artistic vision was clear, as well as their experience in community projects. The concepts of the workshops and the music theater performance they proposed were very interesting and innovative. The group proposed an interdisciplinary site-specific performance, based on the embodied experience of the space, its investigation as an interrelationship between the human and the beyond-human element and the performance of a contemporary "togetherness" in the landscape of Evia.

Partners