Onassis Stegi: the ‘New World’ oasis that’s helping Greek artists to flourish

But at Stegi’s impressive, six-floor building in Athens, which opened in 2010, contemporary Greek theatre is thriving under the leadership of the foundation’s director of culture Afroditi Panagiotakou. The vast complex comprises an 880-seat main theatre, a 220-seat secondary auditorium and a sprawling underground exhibition hall, as well as numerous other spaces, which together host a range of theatre and dance productions, concerts, film screenings and art shows – an output not dissimilar from London’s Barbican Centre.

Its theatre programme includes visiting performances from leading contemporary theatremakers – the 2023/24 season includes Complcité’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Miet Warlop’s One Song – as well as in-house shows. Recently, these have included The House by Dimitris Karantzas, and Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris’ Romáland.

Stegi may be a leading producer of new theatre in Greece, but its mission transcends the creation of new work, says Dimadi. “We’re interested in more than creating just products. We want to turn our gaze to the theatre situation in Athens. Every season, just in the capital of Greece, there are more than 1,500 theatre performances premiering. We are not here to add even more performances to this amount. We are here to enable restless and daring artists to showcase unexpected works that otherwise could not be staged."

 “We don’t want to act as a substitute for any lack of public cultural policies," she adds.

‘We don’t just create theatre, we’re striving to use words as tools to flip the world around us ’ – Head of dramaturgy Iliana Dimadi

Emblazoned on the outside of Stegi’s building is an installation by the British artist Tim Etchells, which reads: “All we have is words, all we have is worlds” – an invitation, Dimadi says, for artists and audiences to use theatre as a way to address urgent, sometimes uncomfortable, topics. “We don’t work just to create theatre and dance and performance projects. We’re striving to use words as tools to decode the fragile [issues] and flip the world around us,” she says. 

Karantzas’ performance-parable The House follows two people who share a house going about their daily life, as the world and society outside becomes darker. Gradually, their normal life unfolds into chaos. Writer and director Karantzas sought to use the piece to comment on violence, the effects of politics on citizens’ lives and the inevitability of confronting reality.

“The directors of older generations don’t usually do these kinds of works,” Karantzas says. “They do classical plays or contemporary Greek theatre, but they don’t have such a political impact. On stage, taking risks is something that the most famous Greek directors don’t often do.”

Appealing to a younger, forward-thinking audience is also important, Karantzas says. “I believe in the younger generation because somehow they don’t have this conservative theory of what theatre is,” he says. “Even if we have theories and knowledge about classical texts, we are always trying to find out something new, something more to revive the old ideas, not to cancel them but to find a way to reproduce them.”

Stegi is the only place Karantzas could have staged The House, he thinks. “It’s the only place where you have the safety to take risks,” the playwright says. “Somehow you feel protected because they know that everything will work and you’re in a place that is synonymous with freedom and risk.”

‘You feel protected here because you’re in a place synonymous with freedom and risk’ – Theatremaker Dimitris Karantzas

This attitude is evident, too, in its development and staging of Romáland, a piece rooted in the experiences of Greek Roma, a vulnerable and often persecuted community. As Tsinikoris, who created the production with his frequent collaborator Azas, explains: “Without Stegi, I don’t think there is an institution that would be supporting this kind of production in Greece or elsewhere. It’s the only theatre where it makes sense to do this piece. There’s no filtering – people can make their own artistic choices and aren’t punished for it.”

Dimadi adds: “We have Roma people on stage in a country that still has racism for Roma people at its epicentre. We wanted to collaborate with other cultural organisations in Greece to create Romáland and they didn’t want to support it, saying it isn’t easy for the Greek audience to come to see Roma on stage. They’re vulnerable and they’re burning the stigma of being thieves, of being burglars. We wanted to break down the public image of Roma people.” 

The theatre’s activities also incorporate much of the Onassis Foundation’s wider work, most notably its engagement with the Neos Kosmos neighbourhood and its inhabitants. It also offers residencies, fellowships, field trips and research and development opportunities for young people and theatre students, a mission that gained extra relevance last year when a presidential decree downgraded the status of performing arts degrees. Students, staff and artists across Greece protested by occupying theatres and boycotting rehearsals, while the entire faculty at the drama school of the National Theatre of Greece resigned. It is a complicated, and ongoing, issue.

“There was a rallying cry, [people were] saying theatre was dying in its birthplace,” Dimadi recalls. “When I say we’re not just a production house, I really mean it because we’re not just presenting shows. We work with artists from phase one, we don’t seek just the result.”

As Greece grapples with challenges within its theatre landscape, Onassis Stegi is determined to be a driving force for change, on stage and off.

onassis.org/onassis-stegi