«In the month of Athyr»

Athyr: in the Egyptian calendar,
month of love and death

By the Dance Theater "Roes"

The drama performance titled "In the month of Athyr" is based on ancient Greek epigrams, which constitute the archetypes of European civilization. Those archetypes are met in all traditions to nowadays. This is already apparent in the poetry of Homer, the ancient epigrams, the tragic choral lamentations to traditional mourns and the Modern Greek poetry. Perhaps the best example of archetypes is the poem "In the month of Athyr", by the famous Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis.

In 2006 the play premiered at the Roman Agora, Athens, to highly positive reviews and it was later that year presented at major greek festivals and at the Benaki Museum.

The play

Ten dancers, seven actors and six musician-performers are acting out the performance which has the form of Dance Theatre with live music*, parallel dramatic action and recite of ancient texts.
The performance lies on epigrams founded in tombstones - the highest form of Lyrical Poetry- steles and pots, such as the stele of Hegissos or the picture of "Sleep and Death raising the body of a dead soldier". Epigrams like the one found in Keramikos ancient cemetery: «δακρυόεν πολυπενθές Ανασχίλα εδ' ολοφυνδόν / λάινον έστεκα μνέμα καταφθι (με) - μένο», "so lachrymose, so mourning, so much lamented the tombstone of dead Anaschilas, here I have been set", can be compared to Konstantinos Kavafis' poem "In the month of Athyr": "though I can pick out a few words, like "our tea[r]s", "grief", then "tears" again, and "sorrow to [us] his [f]riends", that the poet reads upon Lefkios' stele, who has "been greatly loved".
A further epigram says: "Τέκον εμης θυγατρός τοδ' έχω φίλον, όμπερ οτ' αυγάς/ όμμασιν η ε΄λιο ζώντες εδερκόμεθα / έχον εμοίς γόνασιν και νυν φθίμενον φθιμένη 'χω", "my daughter's beloved child that I hold now, I' ve nursed on my knees when alive we' were watching the sunlight, now, I hold him dead, I myself a dead woman". This epigram, a masterpiece of elegiac art, is connected to the mourn of Ekavi for Astyanax and can be compared to traditional songs which represent a great number of similarities to ancient forms of Greek laments: "Birds are weeping your loss and springs' shallows too/ Great Mountains are weeping (your loss) and rivers too/ Only, my mother cries for me, nobody else on earth.
The performance's structure consists of "choral lamentations", funeral cortege and choreography inspired from dance motives found in pottery's patterns.

According to ancient tradition, a group of singers sings the choral; an actor recites the episodes, while ancient epigrams are performed in monody (arias).

What we want to hold is that this continuity rests not upon the static conservation of all the motives passed on to us from our ancestors but upon the creative reformulation of the traditional views and customs that have survived until today.