Lola Arias

Lola Arias is a writer, theatre and film director and performer. She collaborates with people from different backgrounds (war veterans, former communists, etc.) in theatre, literature, music, film and art projects. Her productions play with the overlap zones between reality and fiction. Her most recent theatre plays are Futureland (2019), What they want to hear (2018), Atlas des Kommunismus (2016) and Minefield (2016), which brings together British and Argentinian veterans of the Falkland / Malvinas war to share their experience of the conflict and life since.
 
She also created the exhibition Stunt Double (2016), in which four different installations rebuilt the last 40 years of Argentinian social and political history through documents, reenactments, interviews and popular songs; the durational performance Audition for a Demonstration (2014), which was presented in Berlin, Prague, Athens and Buenos Aires; and Ways of walking with a book in the hand (2017), a site specific project for readers in libraries and public spaces.
 
Her feature film Theatre of war (2018) was selected for the 68th Forum of the Berlinale Film Festival and screened in numerous film festivals all around the world and awarded with several prizes like the CICAE Art Cinema Award, the prize of the International Confederation of Art House Cinemas and the Ecumenical Jury Award. Arias was also rewarded as Best Director in 20th BAFICI Festival in Buenos Aires.
 
Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music and released the albums Love is a sniper (2007) and Those who do not sleep (2011), and together with Stefan Kaegi, she developed the projects Chácara Paraíso (2007), Airport Kids (2008) and Ciudades Paralelas (2010), a Festival of urban interventions in multiple cities.
 
She also published poetry, fiction and plays. Her works have been performed at the most prestigious venues in the world, such as: Festival d'Avignon, Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Royal Court Theatre.

Eleni Efthymiou works as a director, performer, soprano and theatre composer. She studied theatre direction and acting at the Department of Theatre of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and lyric singing as a student of mezzo soprano Rositza Troeva.
 
She is in favour of an idea of theatre as an ongoing, everlasting investigation of the connection between human condition and society. Interested in creating acoustic environments that evoke the principal themes of each play, she works primarily with the medium of sound. Moving between the aesthetics of art, cinema, documentary and fiction, she imaginatively invents a new language of theatre. She is very active both in classic forms of theatre and community based theatre and has collaborated with many different groups of people. In 2014 she became a permanent collaborator of En Dynamei Theatre Ensemble, a mixed group of artists with and without disabilities and so far created with them new dramaturges while directing them in the Trilogy “The Other Normal”.
 
As a director she has cooperated with several Greek and international theatre organisations  and festivals (indicatively): Greek National Theatre, National Theatre of Northern Greece,  Greek National Opera - Αlternative Stage, Onassis Cultural Centre, Thessalikon Theatre, Regional Theatre of Ioannina, Regional Theatre of Kozani, Elevsis 2023, Athens Festival, Dimitria Festival of Thessaloniki, Chios Music Festival, Mind The F/act Festival, Volkstheater Karlsruhe, Die sieben Leben des Maximilian - Festival für aktuelles Musiktheater - Land Tyrol, Our Stage – 4. Europäisches Bürgerbühnenfestival of Dresden, Instalakcje 7 - Nowy Teatre of Warsaw, Créarc - Rencontres du Jeune Théâtre Européen - Grenoble, Muffatwerk - New Music Theatre Biennale of Munich, Universität Mozarteum of Salzburg, Dramaten - Bergman Festival of Stockholm, MFST ITSelF Festival of Warsaw and others.