UKRAINE / 2021
Evangelos Kosmidis – Alaska
The text proposed by Dakh Theatre – Centre of Contemporary Arts / Ukraine was selected by the ETC Drama Committee in 2022
Alaska, by Greek stage director and author Evangelos Kosmidis, is a play and work in progress performance created as part of Dakh Theatre/Gogolfest’s Marathon of International Residencies in Mariupol (Ukraine) in 2021. While the play’s idea originated in Greece, it is only after arriving in Mariupol that the author managed to realise it, through research, interviews and devising work with his actors, members of the first theatre school-studio of Mariupol. While written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mariupol has been a city marked by war, near the front zone since 2014.
The play includes real thoughts and comments from the children and teenagers who faced the war, who went through all the horror, the children who lost their relatives and lost the opportunity to see them. Their monologues about love, friendship, loneliness, war… are combined with texts by Roland Bart, John Green, Sibylle Berg, Elise Wilk, Jorge Bucay, Maria Polidouri, Kostas Kariotakis, Pinelopi Delta and Evangelos Kosmidis himself. The author adds: “Alaska can be a message of peace and a warning to the world”.
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