After the successful presentation of the melodrama Frosyne in 2017, the Rafi Music Theatre Group returns to the Athens Concert Hall with the first Athenian presentation of the work Koutalians or The Weight of History, an exciting musical and visual cantata in collaboration with the Oros Ensemble, the composer Apostolis Koutsogiannis, the poet Marios Hatziprokopiou and the visual artist Petros Touloudis.
The performance The Koutalianoi or The Weight of History” y illuminates moments from the life of the Koutalianoi, as the Asia Minor massisti were called in various historical periods: the mythical Panagis Koutalianos and his descendant Dimitris, Charis Karpozilos and Yannis Keskelidis or Samson, the giant of the Greek cachet “Attilio” or “Asian” (sic). The Greek masisisti still intersect the Greeks’historical memory as a reminder: in the fields, in the squares, in their well-polished muscles and chains Greeks projected their desires for their collective victories – and their defeats.
Through the legendary lives of these individuals, the transition from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century, with its successive deportations, the Asia Minor catastrophe and the now suffocating borders of the modern Greek state, emerges in an allegorical way. And if the destiny of heroes is the constant struggle until the final victory, for these Asia Minor “giants with feet of clay” the fate was, more or less, predetermined, like the fallen empire that washed them away. From the prime of youth and world fame to the frail body of old age: to a dyed beard of a former superhuman waiting for coins before being buried in oblivion.
Co-production: Megaron the Athens Concert Hall & Greek National Opera
The work ” The Koutalianoi or The Weight of History” was presented for the first time at the archaeological site of Anaktoroupolis in the framework of the Ministry of Culture’s institution “All Greece is one culture” in 2022.
