NOITI GRAMMI was founded in 1999 by director/actress Olga Pozeli. Its first production was the double-bill "Her Big Chance" by Alan Bennett and "A Sermon" by David Mamet (Technohoros Ypo Skian, May 1999). It was followed by "Do you Love me?" which was based on the life and work of the famous psychiatrist R. Laing (Piramatiki Skini, National Theatre of Greece, June 2001 & Fournos, October – Decembe
r 2001). In 2003 NOITI GRAMMI staged "Kvetch" by Steven Berkoff and in 2004 "The Bird of Pleasure", a performance based on Peter’s Carey short story, “Exotic Pleasures”. In October 2007 NOITI GRAMMI created "Is everything I have ever forgotten as big as a house?", a devised piece inspired by the installation “Questions” by Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Argo Studio. In 2008-9 NOITI GRAMMI created another devised piece, "Never take the stairs", exploring the flighty topic of coincidences. In 2010, we mounted a performance inspired by an Ilya Kabakov installation, "Don’ t judge a man by his tail", in Theatro FOURNOS. In 2012-13 we attempted our first devised monodrama, inspired by a true and painful real life event, "When the Red Toyota Went off the Road and Sank in Black Water". We successfully toured the show in festivals all over the world:
Fundamental Monodrama Festival, Luxembourg (27/6-7/7/2012)
Global Forum of the Arts – To the Stars, Varna, Bulgaria (1-7/8/2012)
Between the Seas Festival of Mediterranean Performing Arts, New York, USA (20-26/8/2012)
Aspindys International Festival of Monoperformances, Visaginas, Lithuania (10-13/10/2012)
Thespis International Monodrama Festival, Kiel, Germany (9-16/9/2012)
International Festival of Monoperformances “Vidlunnja”, Kiev, Ukraine (12-17/7/2013) | Festival Directors’ Award
NOITI GRAMMI is in the league of avant-garde theatre groups in Athens, one of the first to create Devised Theatre and it is funded by the Greek Ministry of Culture since 2001, the Ioannis F. Kostopoulos Foundation (ALPHA Bank), and the Greek Equity. "Do you Love me?" was nominated for two awards, at the Athinorama awards ceremony and "Kvetch" for six awards including best performance and best director. Olga Pozeli was nominated for the most promising newcomer in the theatre scene at the Critics Association Awards in 2001. Artistic Goals
Over the last few years we have been actively engaged in producing devised theatre and trying to develop our own individual method – a method which mainly aims at creating images rather than words. We have been moving away from traditional theatre, maintaining that the clear distinction between the audience and the actor hinders the growth of the feeling that we all belong to a community and we are all troubled by the same worries. We do not wish to keep the spectator in the dark, we do not expect him to totally forget himself and immerse in the world of fiction. We do not want the spectator to lose sense of time and place. On stage, the actor plays a role, or multiple ones, without losing his identity. At the same time, the spectator, through his emotional participation, remains fully conscious of his being actively in communion with the event. The process of creating a performance of devised theatre inevitably draws on personal experience as well as on the ability to give new form to already existing material, in the framework of a collectively designed structure. Therefore, we, in NOITI GRAMMI, choose issues that concern us all and we relate our personal experiences, each of us in our own way, in an effort to talk about what it means to live this particular time and space.
