Requiem for the End of Love by Dimitris Papaioannou with music composed by Giorgos Koumendakis, is being performed for the first time with a live orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis. The work is a personal memorial to his circle of friends and acquaintances who died of AIDS in the 1990s. In this conversation Papaioannou delves into the personal connections and hidden stories that shaped Requiem—the fundamental elements that define human life: pleasure, the body, exclusion and death.
The work captures the Papaioannou’s mental and emotional labor in his quest for self-knowledge and exploration of mourning, uncertainty, and the body. Above all, Papaioannou is a visual artist and a deeply emotional disruptor. With extraordinary empathy, precision and creativity he has reworked the movement and use of the body of the original piece. His artistic references—from Joseph Beuys’s bed to the religious exaltation and pain of the Pietà—form a passionate understanding and reflection of contemporary human suffering. A world experienced in uncertainty, in free fall.
This is a multilayered monologue on death, resistance, the joy of friendship, love, companionship, and devotion. Devotion to the unknown lover, to the friend, to the partner who died in the AIDS epidemic, to the millions of individual lives cut short, to endless nights of loneliness and to dying on a bed, alone.
The work is a requiem for the countless members of the gay community who were lost to AIDS—victims not only of the disease itself, but also of the stigma and persecution experienced by gay men.
With immersive intensity, Papaioannou recounts that era, the friendships he shared and lost, the beginning of a journey, and the risk of being the first creator in Greece in the 1990s to speak openly about AIDS.
The action begins with a handshake: a pact sealed in blood. The hand that greets, welcomes, and then bids farewell. This handshake—known as the dexiosis and found in ancient funerary reliefs—is a gesture that connects the living with the dead.
Emotion is directly linked to corporeality, and Papaioannou employs bodies in free fall as a politicized gesture that reflects on events and times when bodies were reduced to mere numbers and statistics. During rehearsals, directing performers who are not old enough to remember the AIDS epidemic tells them: “Statistics intertwining with emotion.”
Papaioannou’s imagination is interwoven with his deep engagement with reality. In presenting this work, he reclaims identities—his own and those of others—in a world that sought, through violence, ignorance, and silence, to erase them.
With immersive intensity, Papaioannou recounts that era, the friendships he shared and lost, the beginning of a journey, and the risk of being the first creator in Greece in the 1990s to speak openly about AIDS. One particular phrase of his remains with me: ‘There is fellowship in humanity’.
Elina Kountouri: In our conversations, the theme of friendship often comes up—the idea of creating a circle of people who coexist and participate in the enjoyment and pursuit of creation. Your first such friendship was with your school friend, later film director, Alexis Bistikas, who died young from complications related to HIV. How did that early friendship affect you?
Dimitris Papaioannou: During third grade at Athens College, I became friends with a boy named Alexis. By chance, we were in the same classes for many years and became inseparable and were close throughout our adolescence. Alexis, always more perceptive than I was, began introducing homosexual references into our conversations—such as the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy. He was instrumental in I had in helping me to decode what I was feeling—at a time when there were no mobile phones and no internet.
I had no way of picturing, no images of how to live what I was feeling—I didn’t even know whether it was possible. Alexis, mainly through references in art, brought me those first images. I remember very clearly realizing for the first time that I belonged to a “group” within humanity—that I was not alone.
When I finished school and ran away from home, Alexis and I rented a house together. He went to study at the London School of Economics and had one of the two rooms whenever he came back to Athens. Those were the wildest years of our coming of age. At a time of intense political unrest, we walked the sidewalks together. We leaned toward an anarchic, punk worldview and lived our homosexuality at the society’s margins.
Those wild and wonderful years on the street—the sidewalk—were years of raw sexuality. We conveyed that same atmosphere through the magazine we published together (another initiative of Alexis’s) titled Kontrosol sto Chaos. In kaliarda, the queer slang of the time, kontrosol sto chaos means “a kiss on the mouth.”
Young people today don’t know this language anymore because, thankfully, there is no longer a need to speak in code. Back then, there was no way you could risk being open, so an entire language emerged, a subculture. Alexis was always sharper than me in his political and social observations, in decoding reality, and in activism. And so, by association, I too took part in radical ventures like this fanzine.
EK: The creation of a language—of a personal form of expression—is very strong in your comics, both visually and linguistically. We’re talking about the early 1990s. Throughout your work, as you’ve often said, there is a strong sense of freedom, a stance in life that I would describe as “I will never apologize for who I am.” Did that self-esteem push you to take risks and create without limits?
DP: There was something developing below the surface of society, and we knew it, we lived it, and we supported it. I finished school at 18, ignorant about the world, ran away from home, and swore never to hide who I was or what I felt. I was burning to become an artist and to live my sexuality freely. Apparently, this unapologetic stance was in my nature.
So, when I began making comics, my artistic expression was absolutely honest, treating homoeroticism as a given. I wasn’t fighting for it—I was simply talking about the feelings of a boy growing up in the city center, on the social periphery of that era.
EK: I assume you enjoyed reading comics. But with Kontrosol sto Chaos you initiated a new era of expression.
DP: That era inspired me to create comics because there were two magazines—Vavel and Para Pente—publishing creative comics for the first time, mostly European graphic novel stories. They were platforms for communicating with a restless audience, and that interested me intensely.
At that time, painting and icon painting, which had been my livelihood until then, did not offer that kind of dynamic communication. Their audience consisted of people from another social class, those who could buy artworks or commission portraits. I felt my creativity wasn’t circulating within my generation: I wasn’t communicating with my tribe.
Although I had been drawing comics since childhood, when I saw Vavel at sixteen or seventeen, I was filled with envy—in a positive way. I began my first stories, and Vavel accepted them without any reservations about the homoerotic content. They were open-minded. That’s why I published so many stories during that period.
At the same time, Kontrosol sto Chaos existed as a magazine of personal expression. Alexis was able to express his concerns about the marginalized, migrants, the army. I brought my harsh black-and-white aesthetic and unapologetic eroticism. Pavlos Avouris wrote about vegetarianism and his own concerns. It was a queer, punk, vegetarian, slightly anarchist, independent magazine, which we distributed ourselves at kiosks.
At that time, we were friends with Paola who published Kraximo, an anarchist gay newspaper. We never imagined that what we were doing would later be remembered or discussed as part of Athens’s social history. We were simply doing what we loved.
EK: How did you meet Giorgos Koumendakis?
DP: I was already close friends with Alexis before I ran away from home and, one afternoon, I went to his house in Kefalari where he introduced me to someone he’d just met. That person was Giorgos Koumendakis.
I was seventeen; Giorgos was a few years older. He was striking—short-haired, intense, strange—and immediately caught my attention. Before I even finished school, without my parents knowing, he took me on a one-day trip to Delphi to attend a concert of Iannis Xenakis. We stood for three hours on the bus.
It was the first time in my life I saw Delphi and its museum, and my first encounter with contemporary music. The work was Psappha—after Sappho—performed in the ancient stadium. The percussionist was in dialogue with the echo of the landscape. For me, it was a total experience of art, emotion, and sacredness—a complete escape from home.
Through Giorgos Koumendakis I met Mary Tsouti who introduced me to contemporary dance and inspired me to begin theater. Our relationship was creatively explosive and that’s how my engagement with the performing arts began.
Later, in 1986, I founded Edafos Dance Group with Angeliki Stellatou. A year afterwards, Stavros Zalmas joined us, and we entered the famous squat where Stavros, with his bare hands, transformed the ground floor into a small, illegal theater. There, in collaboration with Nikos Alexiou, we created The Song of Sin.
Melina Mercouri came to a performance and commissioned Medea. Around the same time, Koumendakis suggested a collaboration: Moons (Feggaria), a two-part performance. The first part, Sappho, was a piece he had already written.
It was wildly bold. Aris Christofellis, a counter-tenor, sang; I played Sappho. A man playing a woman who is a lesbian; her servant—played by Stavros Zalmas—was in love with her and wished to become her. It was extreme gender-bending, theatrical and queer. One of the most daring things I’ve ever done.
One day I heard on my answering machine:
“Good evening, this is Manos Hadjidakis. I would like two tickets for Saturday’s performance.”
He came. The next day he called and asked to meet me. He said: “I was told I would see a dancer. I wanted to present a song cycle with poetry by Dinos Christianopoulos. But now that I’ve seen what you can do, take my songs and do whatever you want. I will produce it.”
I was flying. A few days later, I told him:
“Mr. Hadjidakis, it’s impossible to speak about male desire and not speak about the plague that is killing us.”
He replied:
“You are absolutely right. I will write something about it.”
But he never got the chance because he died shortly afterwards.
A year later, I asked Giorgos Koumendakis to write the Requiem, and he agreed.
EK: After Moons, the great success of Medea, and then the Requiem in A Moment’s Silence.
DP: Our next collaboration, then, with Giorgos dealt with the tragedy of AIDS, at a time when our generation was being decimated, before the HIV medication became available. Alexis had been infected, fell ill, and passed away before we could complete the work. In the performance program I wrote: “…dedicated to my beloved Alexis, with whom I grew up and learned the ways of the world together.” That is how things unfolded. From the illegal squat building, we managed to get permission from Ms. Sofia Albani—to whom I am ever grateful —to set up a makeshift theater in the spectacular, almost science-fiction-like, deserted power plant belonging to the Public Power Corporation, and perform there.
EK: Yet through this “unapologetic stance,” you were also designing Kalymnos, a comic about the scourge of AIDS.
DP: My comics have a confessional character, as does Kalymnos; they refer to the epidemic that terrified us so deeply, at a time when we were losing our friends and living in constant fear. At that time in Greece, I was the only openly gay comic creator, and in the same way, I happened to be the first to address this tragedy of our era. The only comic I’ve ever made based on someone else’s script was written by Alexis: The Red Spots on Your Skin describes an outcast who finds another outcast in a paradoxically happy ending. And these two outcasts say: “Fuck them all, we will live in our bath of blood.” In the end, the HIV virus becomes an animal that perhaps also wants to live. The hero is called “hot eitzoni”: hot, junkie, HIV—it’s perfect.
Alexis and I shared a Pasolinian sensitivity, a Tsarouchian gaze: we loved the masculine beauty of the body, the face, the marginalized souls. It is The Red Spots on Your Skin—written by Alexis before his diagnosis—and Kalymnos that are being republished in this issue.
Alexis was a striking personality. He took photographs, sang, played the guitar, studied cinema, and his experimental films—such as Clearing, Staring, Kiss—are truly very interesting. In Clearing, the legendary Derek Jarman makes his final appearance— an iconic artist of the London queer scene and also one of the early victims of AIDS. At the squat, after my first performance, the audience could watch three of Alexis’s short films in a makeshift open-air cinema in the courtyard.
Melina Mercouri knew Alexis. She came to the squat, saw the performance, came backstage and said: “This is a wine for export! I want you to make Medea for the Cultural Capital.” Melina had founded the European Capital of Culture institution together with Jack Lang (who recently came to a performance of mine in Paris and reminded me that Melina used to talk to him about me).
EK: These coincidences—or convergences—often give us the courage to continue.
DP: Sometimes life feels pre-ordained. I mention various names because you are interested in the concept of the group.
EK: Yes, and how coexistence, friendship, and exchange lead, over time, to creative upheavals.
DP: I was friends with Alexis, and he introduced me to Koumentakis. By being friends with Koumentakis, I met Mary Tsouti and we began working together. I was also a friend and classmate of Zafo Xagoraris: he gave the name to the Edafous Group. Nikos Alexiou was also part of our circle. Alexis and I were a bit more street-punk, while Nikos was already more established in the museum and gallery world.
Our first collaboration was very successful. Everyone who knew Nikos Alexiou suddenly discovered his works as stage sets. Koumentakis, a child of the avant-garde, was fascinated by us because we were more “hooked into reality”, not out of an ignorance of art history — we deeply loved art— but anchored in a dirtier, underground existence that we brought to the surface.
When the Edafos Dance Group began, one of the first to assist us was an institution called the Biennale of Young Artists of Mediterranean Countries, at the time represented in Greece by the General Secretariat for Youth. A group of modern, forward-thinking people worked there; like Valiannatos and Polina Pantzou. Polina was a psychotherapist who later specialized in AIDS organizations and social support programs, in collaboration with Demosthenis Agraphiotis, within a social sciences foundation.
EK: It was at her house in Santorini that you began working with Giorgos.
DP: Yes, in the cave house in Oia! That’s where we went and began our collaboration on the Requiem. We stayed there and imagined it; I told him how I envisioned it, my plans for the staircase. A continuous fall, I told him. Giorgos then chose a poem by Dimitris Kapetanakis and composed the Requiem, produced by the Edafos Dance Group. We recorded it, released it on CD, and launched it at the performance. I was—and still am—extremely proud of it.
EK: I understand that Polina Pantzou became very close to the Edafous Group.
DP: For Polina’s sake, I created a leaflet that was distributed through her initiative, aimed at helping people living with AIDS to cope better with daily life. Polina and I connected because, at that time, the first organizations, like ACT UP, were starting to appear to address the issue.
It’s worth remembering that families were throwing their own children out onto the streets, many doctors were afraid to come into contact with patients, and even within the gay community there was prejudice and cold-blooded gossip—“He has it, the other one doesn’t”—and, confronted by so much grief, you didn’t know where to turn. Fear and darkness were everywhere.
EK: Were there reactions to the performance at the time?
DP: One day during the time we were staging the performance, which spoke so cruel about the epidemic, we found graffiti outside on the factory wall. It said: “Dimitraki, AIDS sells.” and was accusing me of exploiting the situation, which—if anyone had looked at the Edafos Dance Group’s finances—was laughable. (I remember my brother removing the graffiti before the audience arrived.)
But there are always small civil wars, and success breeds suspicion, especially when terror and silence are overwhelming. A Moment’s Silence had, in its second part, The Song of Sin by Hadjidakis, and in its first part, the Requiem. The concept was to build a staircase directly opposite the audience’s tiered seating, with the same incline and dimensions. In this way, it was as if the performers were mirroring the audience, who then were essentially watching themselves fall. Between the two was a long table, like the Last Supper, which acted as a breakwater for the falling bodies.
In the second part, this table housed all the “songs of sin.” First death, then the droplets of life: men, boys, the need for contact, through Hadjidakis’s music and the rough lyrics of Christianopoulos. Christianopoulos himself was sceptical; he didn’t particularly like Manos’s lyricism—he was more of a rebetiko type. When he came to the dress rehearsal and saw it, he said ironically: “I see many wreaths…” I had crowned youths, Tsarouchian influences. I bit my tongue. He was right, of course.
Today we don’t perform the second part. Even back then there was something strange about those lyrics set to Manos’s music, and something even stranger about visualizing them in dance-theater. The sensitivities of that time were different, and I was proud of it then but I wouldn’t bring it back in that form today. Fortunately, years later, when I went to Thessaloniki with Primal Matter, Christianopoulos came, saw my work, and gave me his approval—which I so deeply yearned for. He acknowledged me and we shook hands like two streetwise men—and the sadness I’d felt about this poet, whom I admired so much but who’d previously mocked my work, was immediately lifted. He was right though. That’s how relationships should be: unapologetically honest.
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Facebook Twitter EK: Those who saw Requiem back then certainly remember it, but in 2026 the wider public will see a work at the Greek National Opera that I believe pays a new tribute to the victims of the AIDS epidemic. This version captures one of the most electrifying moments of that era, but today it gains a more essential character. Because although decades have passed since the peak of the epidemic in Greece, the disease has not disappeared, and society often remains indifferent or unprepared to face it directly. Art, however, has the power to bring this reality back to the forefront—to remind, to re-sensitize, and to create a space for reflection, memory, and public dialogue. Through music, comics, or performance, the experiences of that time find a voice and meaning for younger generations. Art thus becomes a means of resistance, but also a bridge between memory and current social reality, reminding us that the need for solidarity, care, and awareness is ongoing. Still, there is a neo-conservatism today. Society retreats into small groups where it feels safe—whether related to identity, sexuality, origin, or skin color.
DP: I’m not sure exactly where this new conservatism lies. To me, even then, the echo chambers of minorities seemed conservative. If I can claim—or accept—credit for activism during that era, it’s for one reason: I was always interested in the popular platform, the one addressing everyone. That’s where I wanted my distinct voice to be heard. That’s what interested me. I was never attracted to the limitation of a specialized platform. Vavel was not a gay magazine. The Edafos Dance Group, from squats to theaters, did not participate in gay festivals.
That, to me, is what’s progressive: not categorizing people, and allowing all different voices to be heard on platforms accessible to everyone. What you say about conservatism isn’t a priori bad. We won’t forbid people from living conservatively if that’s what they want. Prejudice, fears, and exclusions simply must be defeated. People who believe in traditional values should exist, but they must be updated so they don’t exclude others. It’s beautiful for everyone to coexist, for each person’s way of life to question another’s—but with tenderness, without demanding that we all become the same. That’s what frightens me: the inability of different worlds to coexist. And uniformity, too—I adore biodiversity.
Photo: Nikos Dragonas
EK: What transcends this work—and your work in general—is that there’s not a trace of guilt. On the contrary, it fills us with freedom. And that takes immense courage.
DP: For me, it’s natural. Love for the human body—and by extension human eroticism—as well as a compassionate gaze toward the suffering body, are the most natural things in the world to me. The reason we must emphasize it—why it’s good we’re discussing it—is because it’s useful for our time.
Requiem is one of the few works I would disseminate to younger generations—and I’m very happy to have the chance to do so, especially with this great artist as conductor, with whom we’ve been chasing a collaboration for years. And the reason I’m doing it is simply because I like the work. As an artistic expression, I like it—independently of its social impact, which also satisfies me. Even with mature eyes, there are still some past works I am happy with. Those are the ones that I want today’s audiences and younger generations to see.
It gave me immense satisfaction during ten years of touring the world that theaters were flooded with young people—that’s who I work for. There are many things that fill me with joy at this moment. I’m incredibly happy that LiFO is republishing both of these comics in full.
EK: What is your most precious memory from the 1995 presentation—not only artistically, but on a human level?
DP: The truth is there was such overwhelming fear of getting infected. Publicly confronting this topic struck a very basic fear: social stigma. I knew that as an openly gay man and an artist speaking about the epidemic, people would automatically assume I was HIV-positive, and I would face prejudice myself. I felt that I was pushing myself into an honesty that would cost me socially and romantically. The only thing that sweetened it for me was a dancer who moved me deeply at the time. I felt my heart come alive.
EK: The anxiety isn’t the same now.
DP: No, it’s not the same. So many of us from my generation did not survive. Now, the people I work with don’t even know how big an issue AIDS was back then. I had to explain that the disease was lethal, and that we lived in an atmosphere of fear and exclusion. Polina Pantzou—the one I mentioned—helped me enormously throughout all this.
When I realized that one of my lovers was HIV-positive, I was forced to confront my fear. I panicked. Polina gave me four psychotherapy sessions to rationalize that fear, and then I went and got tested and felt relief. After that, I began taking all my friends—by the hand—who, like me, were afraid to get tested. Some even used my name to avoid stigma. We were a group of terrified people. Even small bodily changes, like losing two kilos, frightened us, because early symptoms were so easily noticeable.
We didn’t know for sure what was contagious and what wasn’t, or how to protect ourselves. There were exaggerations, just like with COVID: overprotection, panic, the sense that every movement was dangerous. Of course, we don’t mind remembering it now, because it’s over. And with that in mind, we see how ridiculous humans can be when an issue is burning hot—how much real prejudice and inhumanity emerges. If we remember that, maybe next time it will be reduced a little.
EK: That’s why the work is important—it doesn’t speak only about AIDS, but also about prejudice, violence, love, and the decay of the body that concern us deeply.
DP: It speaks about falling, about the gravity-like pull towards death, about the perishable nature of matter. The acceptance of gravity - the fundamental influence on human existence and, at the same time the possibility of defying gravity through spirituality and hope—the lightness of a piece of foil lifted by a breath in the finale of The Great Tamer—is a dialectic that runs through my work from the beginning until today.
When I first saw the staircase scene in Battleship Potemkin, I was truly struck by how the shadows of people are formed and by the contrast between the organic body and the absolute rhythm of the parallel light-and-shadow patterns of space. The drama of when bodies interrupt that parallel thrills me. This absolute form and the fluidity of bodies—the “mud” of bodies—I’ve incorporated into many of my works. In Nowhere there are images that, if they have been inverted, are identical to Requiem. In Since She, 2, and This That Keeps On, the bodies melting toward gravity come from Requiem.
EK: The empathy of one body observing another body falling is characteristic of your work—bodies that connect, intertwine. It’s fear, loss, but also healing through the anger that art generates.
DP: Art—especially performing art—dramatizes things you experience, but in a safe environment. You experience emotion, pain, empathy, without being in danger. That’s how the soul heals. I remember a critic who wrote, “Why only male bodies, since women also die of AIDS?” And I thought: I see my work from my own perspective. I am a man, and I speak about things that touch me.
EK: The performance has no gender limit.
DP: For me, it doesn’t. I understand those who want representation everywhere, but I can’t think about what the audience wants. I prefer to take responsibility for my work, to take the risk of my personal interpretation, in the hope of moving people.
EK: This fluidity unites.
DP: Yes—it’s characteristic of gay men in the history of art.
EK: And that’s why you don’t speak about assimilation?
DP: As a gay man back then, you had to walk through dangerous places to find your erotic companionship. That fact—that you had to see not only straight but also upside down—opened your eyes. You saw other classes, lived in unprotected zones, created marginal spaces. Now it’s no longer necessary—at least not in major global centers. In the provinces, of course, the margins are still necessary for survival.
Our era has nothing to do with then. The issue isn’t the liberation of homosexuality, but tolerance toward all kinds of people. Back then, Alexis and I used to say: we’re fighting for the liberation of homosexual desire.
EK: And for recognized desire. Why was it so clear to you?
DP: Do you know where it comes from? From my inability to repress myself. From a psychological claustrophobia toward restrictions, and from my proven inability to carry out things that don’t interest me. Every time I take on a project, I wait for the moment when it keeps me awake at night—not out of obligation, but because it has creatively turned me on. I can’t work any other way. I think my character protects me in that sense.
That’s why I give Alexis so much credit for my social sensitivity—it was as if, on my own, I wouldn’t have looked around. I think that’s my narrative. That’s how historical positioning works: how Alexis, Giorgos, Polina, the comics, Kontrosol, our work, and the Requiem connect. It’s thirty-five years later, and the arrow of time has reached the present. It has arrived at this part of the story.
A Lexicon of Belonging
This edition Lifo contains two comics by Dimitris Papaioannou: Kalymnos and Δύο κηλίδες. These graphic storytellings of the loneliness of the AIDS epidemic are being republished for the first time in 30 years.
Originally appearing in the 1990s in Κοντροσόλ στο Χάος, the comics served as platforms for solidarity and remembrance, and as a way of confronting life’s fragility. Fear is present but so too are love, humor, and a sense of belonging. When first published they were profoundly radical works, openly focusing on the lives and experiences of gay men.
At that time, Papaioannou and his friend Alexis Bistikas were speaking from the margins. Their comics represented an era of underground publishing in the 1990s, with a network of connections across different parts of the world—particularly in New York where Diane di Massa told her hilarious story of a “homicidal lesbian terrorist.” Comics like Kalymnos and Δύο κηλίδες played a crucial role in understanding different communities and in shaping a shared lexicon of belonging. In 1989, American photographer and activist Nan Goldin curated the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space in New York, which examined the devastating impact of AIDS on the artistic community.
Much like Goldin’s public diary of color photographs—formed through her work of the late 1970s and 1980s and eventually culminating in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (a sequence of approximately 700 colour photographs spanning from 1979 to 2004) Papaioannou’s personal narration offers an essential cartography of an era, that’s both traumatic and uplifting. Informed by a deep intellectual devotion to art history, his work also interweaves visual references to ancient tragedy and rich storytelling traditions with hidden narratives of exclusion, eroticism, cruelty, and the formation of social and personal identities.
Thirty years later, the comics, sketches, photographs and documentation of his life and performances continue to serve as vehicles of communal understanding. In a world where the ethos of solidarity is under threat, these works—alongside the photos published in this paper—act as an important reminder of our need to embrace, love and accept one another. They form a living archive, at once personal and communal, frank and riveting.
With the republishing of the comics and the performance of Requiem for the End of Love, which will be staged in Athens in January 2026, a vision continues quietly to unfold- a political and poetic project shared through time. From the stark black-and-white pen strokes of the comics to the relentless falling of bodies on stage, Papaioannou imagines a future born from injustice yet ultimately belonging to humanity.
Thank you, Dimitris, for safeguarding this archive over the years: a collection of love, friendship, hidden histories, artistic creation, and shared heritage that bind us together.
E.K.
REQUIEM FOR THE END OF LOVE
Performance-installation
Music: Giorgos Koumendakis
Comissioned by Edafos Dance Theatre, based on the poem “Lazarus” by Dimitris Kapetanakis, premiered in 1995.
Conductor: Teodor Currentzis
Concept, direction, choreography, art direction: Dimitris Papaioannou
The set of the 1995 performance was designed by Lili Pezanou. The 2026 version is designed by Dimitris Papaioannou and Loukas Bakas.
Lighting Design: Dimitris Papaioannou – Stephanos Droussiotis
Costumes: Vassilis Papatsarouchas
MEIZON Ensemble direction: Agathangelos Georgakatos
With:
Angel of Death: Diana Nosyreva, Ksenia Dorodova
Iosif Ali, Orestis Alexiadis, Gian Angelos Apostolidis Isaak, Spyridon Christakis, Costas Chrysafidis, Nael Chrysafidis, Georgios Dereskos, Tasos Dedes, Damianos Efstathiou, Nikos Englezos, Georgios Gkiokas, Dimitris Goulios, Nikoforos Kalafatis, Panagiotis Kaoukis, Yiannis Karababas, Makis Katsaneas, Panagiotis Laganas, Dimitris Lagos, Dimitris Lagoutis, Fanouris Larentzakis, Ektor Liatsos, Nikos Manolas, Dimitris Matsoukas, Vasilis Mihas, Dionisis Nikolopoulos, Alexandros Nouskas Varelas, Spyros Ntogas, Christos Ntoulas, Dimitris, Oikonomidis, Aidi Ormeni, Stavros Papadopoulos, Timoleon Papadopoulos, Yoryis Partalidis, Lukasz Przytarski, Gal Robissa, Diogenis Skaltsas, Thanos, Stasinos, Dimitris Stavrianopoulos, Christos Strinopoulos, Benjamin Stroman, Paschalis Terzis, Stelios Theodorou, Michalis Theophanous, Vasilis Tryfoultsanis, George Tsiggos, Christos Tzovaras, Stefanos Vlachos, Giannis Volonakis
Soloist musicians of the GNO Orchestra
Violins I: Iordanis Santos-Mastralexis, Ioannis Margaziotis, Charalambos Karasavvidis, Kostas Anastasopoulos
Violins II: Argyro Seira, Konstantinos Panagiotidis, Stella Karytinou
Violas: Elias Sdoukos, Angela Giannaki, Marios Dapergolas
Cellos: Nikolas Prevezianos, Vangelis Nina, Marina Kolovou, Maria Skandali
Double basses: Christos Komisopoulos, Stavros Makris
Clarinets: Spyros Tzekos, Ioannis Karagiannidis, Panagiotis Sioras
Trombones: Spyros Farougias, Ioannis Kokkoris
Percussion: Marinos Tranoudakis
Organ: Markellos Chryssicos
MEIZON Ensemble
Tenors I Michalis Platanias, Konstantinos Zambounis, Nikos Maraziotis,
Alexandros Komnas, Babis Velissarios, Nikolai Basov*, Igor Gorban*, Aleksandr Somov, Sergei Godin
Tenors II Panagiotis Priftis, Stavros Zouliatis, Manos Bourikas, Nikos Katsigiannis
Creative, executive producer, assistant director: Tina Papanikolaou
Photos, filming, international relations: Julian Mommert
Assistant conductor: Ektoras Tartanis
Rehearsal director - Assistant director: Pavlina Andriopoulou
Associate rehearsal directors: Ector Liatsos, Christos Strinopoulos, Michalis Theophanous
Assistant set designer: Evangelos Xenodochidis
Assistant costume designer: Orestis Lazouras
Filming associate: Alexandra Makri
Hair styling: Lemon Poppy Seed
Executive production assistants: Kali Kavvatha Alexandra Makri, Martha Kapazoglou, Danae Tzanou
A GNO production• This production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros
Niarchos Foundation (SNF) [www.SNF.org] to enhance the GNO’s artistic
outreach.
Dimitris Papaioannou’s work is supported by Megaron – The Athens Concert Hall
The article was published in the print edition of LiFO.
