British Council shows off its latest array of wares
The British Council presented its array of events for the coming year – all blending British and Greek input – during an upbeat press conference at the Frame restaurant at the St George Lycabettus Hotel yesterday. Fringe theater is one of many fields featured in the program. In April, six exciting acts from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe will visit Thessaloniki. The BC is organizing the event in conjunction with the Principal Club. The visiting performers will also run workshops for young Greek actors, an exchange which is proving highly successful in Athens at the Comedy Club, where leading British stand-up comedians have been performing and holding popular workshops for their Greek counterparts. Random Dance, an innovative company from Sadler’s Wells that uses modern technology to have two teams of ballet dancers perform simultaneously, will also run workshops in March, jointly run by the BC and ACS Arts Center. Film figures large on the agenda, with the OneDotZero competition for digital shorts run jointly with Bios culture center (March-September), and a tribute to Derek Jarman that includes screening and an interactive audiovisual installation at the Athens School of Fine Arts. There’s Metropolis, a year-long tribute to the city in collaboration with Megaron Plus, a computer games festival (December), and hot topics in science at the Cafe Scientifique (February-March). In «Narratives of the Unseen,» six Greek postgraduate students at the Athens School of Fine Arts will redesign their city as a hybrid of Athens, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Belgrade, Belfast and Glasgow by teleconferencing and the Internet, with the end result recorded in a documentary. Add to that conferences on skill sharing, medical specialization and careers as well as long-established services such as examinations (with online registration now available) and English-language teaching, and the British Council has an active year ahead.
