Staging 21st Century Tragedies

Avra Sidiropoulou is Associate Professor at the M.A. in Theatre Studies Programme at the Open University of Cyprus and Artistic Director of Athens-based Persona Theatre Company. She is the author of Directions for Directing. Theatre and Method (Routledge 2018) and Authoring Performance: The Director in Contemporary Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan 2011). She was Visiting Researcher at MIT and the Graduate Centre at CUNY, the Freie University, the Universities of Surrey, Leeds, and Tokyo (Japan Foundation Fellow). Avra has lectured, directed, and conducted theatre workshops in many parts of the globe. Recent directing works include Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (Cyprus Theatre Organization 2022), Bryony Lavery’s Frozen (Skala Theatre 2020), Phaedra I— (text: Sidiropoulou—Tristan Bates Theatre, London 2019), and A Doll’s House (Technochoros Ethal 2019). She was nominated for the League of Professional Theatre Women Gilder/Goigney International Award 2020. https://persona.gr/en/people/avra-sidiropoulou/.

• Part 1: Crisis as Tragedy and Judgment1. Tragedy and Crisis: Staging Forced Displacement and Its Reluctant HeroYana Meerzon2. Beyond Suffering or Resolution: Tragedy and the Twenty-First Century Collective ExperienceAvra Sidiropoulou3. Prophets Needed: Five Easy Pieces and La Reprise: Histoire(s) du théâtre (I) by Milo Rau Carol MartinΤestimony 1.1. Avra Sidiropoulou in Conversation with Daniel Wetzel of Rimini ProtokollΤestimony 1.2. Cards of Identities (Poetic luxury)Hanane Hajj AliΤestimony 1.3. Chorus and Crisis in the Contemporary United StatesPeter CampbellPart 2: Texts and Contexts of Crisis: Power/lessness, Precarity and Identity Politics4. Caesar Must (Not) Die. Italian Political ‘Caesars’ in the New MillenniumSilvia Bigliazzi5. Leaving the world good or leaving a better world? Theatre and crisis through the lenses of Bertolt BrechtAldo Milohnic6. Tragic and Post-tragic Representations of Precarity in Twenty-First-Century U.S. Drama: Fractured Togetherness in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Annie Baker’s The FlickAna Fernandez Caparrós 7. Modern African Drama in Crisis? Two African Authors in Search of IdentityTaiwo Afolabi, Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah and Ogah Mark OnwePart 3: Stage Narratives of Failure or Visions of a Better World? Bankrupt States, Violent Cities, Global Resistance Civic Consciousness and the Poetics of Participation 8. "Theatre remains traditionalist and Eurocentric." About Milo Rau’s "theatre of crisis"Freddy Decreus9. "How Many More Thousands of Years?": Dystopia, Otherness, and the Greek Crisis in the Work of Three Contemporary Greek DramatistsConstantina Ziropoulou10. Theatre as Assembly: ‘Theatre Commons’ Radical Dramaturgy Tadashi Uchino11. Marca España. Making Theatre from Precarity, State Violence and FiestaAna Contreras ElviraΤestimony 3.1. Aoidoi of a Country’s Living HistoryLupe GehrenbechPart 4: Reflections on the Covid 19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Anthropocene12. For the theatre of the AnthropoceneFrank RaddatzTestimony 4.1. Theatre in Covid Τimes: A Report from GreeceAnestis AzasTestimony 4.2. All is related to MeSu XiaogangTestimony 4.3. Plays (we never staged) to surviveMiguel Rojo and Javier Hernando (Los Barbaros)Testimony 4.4. Troy Too [Original playscript]Karen Malpede (Theatre Three Collaborative)