The « National Garden » by Thodoris Gonis
Inside the center of a city that is constantly moving, there is a place that seems to be out of time: the National Garden. Planted with memory and silence, full of history and poetry, it hosts forms and shadows that rescue a Greece of enlightened faces and noble visions. There, among the 500 herbal species and marble statues, Thodoris Gonis invites us to a different, experiential tour of the Athens Municipality Festival on 11, 12, 18 and 19 May. The « National Garden » as he called it is a walking performance that brings to life faces, words, decisions and dreams, through poetry, documents and theater.
« This performance is a repetition of a successful work in co -production with the Athens Festival, played two summers, 2017 and 2018. Now, we were asked by the Municipality of Athens and Mrs. Buyer to repeat her and we were very pleased to receive it, » said Thodoris.
The director, being a regular visitor to the National, former Royal Garden, is inspired by his environment and history to make a tour of material, texts and documents of poets, politicians, agronomists and engineers who contributed to his creation. « Maybe I’m one of the people living in the garden. They still walk in the garden. As a young student, I have spent several hours there when I finished work and until I went to a lesson at the Katseli Theater School in Nea Smyrna, I couldn’t get home because I was out quite away from the center. So, I spent the two hours I had a gap in the National Garden, reading, walking and making a personal relationship with the garden. I always wanted to chat with the busts, statues and garden history, « he recalls and adds.
« With Eleni Stroulia, especially when we worked on the texts, we started to tell perhaps the romantic story of the garden. His proximity to the House is fatal and all the adventures of our national and political life have a direct impact on the garden. So I also understood what they say that only in paradise do roses have no thorns. The garden roses definitely have thorns. «
With their performers Eleni Ouzounidou, Thanassis Dimou, Roxani Kafi and Christina Halkias, the people and stories of the garden come to life in a wandering in its most important points. « It’s a 21-stop walk, starting with the Wasyigonians, the palm trees planted by Queen Amalia so that after 200-300 years the Athenians are walking in the garden and thinking about it. But there is not a single statue of Amalia in the garden and I think this is a lack because we really owe it to her. Now, you are lost among the 500 species of trees and plants brought by Queen Amalia and her herbalists and escape the city of the city. There is still the rock of Amalia, where he was sitting and watching the poles of Olympian Zeus, Faliro, Piraeus, Aegina, as opposed to the Peloponnese, ”says Thodoris Gonis and continues. « All this is not a literary tour but a theatrical performance. That is, we tried to have the dramatic part, to speak through our art. We are not guides but we also set up a small theatrical performance at every stop. We did it because we went from the street of the theater and not from the path of literature and texts. There was a slight dramatization of all this material and I think he was very much loved in his first presentation. «
Except, however, from the poetic tour, Thodoris Gonis during this period also prepared his new book « At some point you will find out who I am » released by AGRA.
« This book was fortunate enough. Because while it is a novel, Maria Zorba took it in her hands and with Myrto Alikaki made a performance from what was played November and December at the Station Theater. The book, however, has another end. The play is quite different and will be played again from May 24th to 26th. The book is a text that the sea really brought. In the summer of 2023 I was in Nafplio and I was going to swim in Arvanitia very much in the morning. One morning, there were three women in the sea that were talking. One of them had a round and happy face with big eyes and was very extroverted. This one was telling a story to the other two and it looked as if they were ironic, as if it were the naive of the company. She was telling them that for 10 years, a man was calling her and she was talking to her, but when she was asking who she was, she was saying the phrase « at some point you will find out who I am ». However, in the last two years this man has stopped calling her and her life changed. When I heard this, I left running like the dog that gets from the slaughterhouses a piece of meat to note. At that time I was writing something else and I gave up and started writing this story on the occasion of this fact that the sea brought me. The book is dedicated to the unknown morning swimmer of Arvanitia. Although I went a few other days, I never found it, never saw it again. The sea took it too, « Thodoris Gonis recalls for the birth of his book.
Using this story he heard in the sea, he ended up in a text that affects everything that concerns him, with the backdrop of Nafplio that is not named but released behind the words. On his pages, Thodoris Gonis gives the floor to this unknown woman who met that morning to get out of her all that she wanted and may not want to say, eventually telling a story of the sea, their people and their relationships.
