Celebrating Sophocles at Delphi
Nobel Literature Prize-winner Seamus Heaney and poet-director Tony Harrison will be among the participants at this year’s international meeting on ancient drama at Delphi. Dedicated to Sophocles 2,500 years after his birth and organized by the European Cultural Center of Delphi (ECCD), the meeting runs from June 26-July 3. Academics, researchers, critics, directors, playwrights and actors from Greece and abroad will attend the symposium, performances of plays, theater workshops and other cultural events. The plays include the seven surviving tragedies of Sophocles and most will be performed in the ancient stadium of Delphi, ECCD’s president, Helene Ahrweiler, told the press yesterday. Apart from its historical significance, the stadium is far more spacious than the center’s own attractive, but small, theater, which barely accommodated audiences last year. The productions, nearly all premieres or new stagings, are: «Trachinies» (State Theater of Northern Greece); excerpts from «Ajax» (ECCD-Theatro Attis); «Oedipus Exiled,» based on «Oedipus at Colonus» (ECCD-Istanbul International Foundation of Art and Culture); «Philoctete,» (Meyerhold Center of Moscow); «Antigone» (Ku’Nauka Theater Company); «Electra’s Wait,» based on «Electra» (Oasis Theater Company); «Electra’s Land» based on Electra (ECCD-Watt Theater Company); and «Oedipus,» based on texts by Sophocles and Beckett. There will also be readings of excerpts from Iakovos Kambanellis’s «Letter to Orestes,» Yiannis Ritsos’s «Ismene,» Andre Gide’s «Philoctete,» Heiner Muller’s «Ajax, For Instance» and Jean Anouihl’s «Antigone,» and a performance of Marios Pontikas’s two monologues based on the Oedipus myth: «The Murderer of Laius» and «The Crows.» European Cultural Center of Delphi, tel 210.331.2781-5; e-mail: eccd-cul@otenet. gr
