# Elli Papakonstantinou

Elli Papakonstantinou (Greek: Έλλη Παπακωνσταντίνου, born 1973), is a Greek stage director, librettist, translator, cultural manager, and activist. Her theatre combines music, new media, and philosophical discourse within the range of music theatre, new opera, and social engagement.
Papakonstantinou has been commissioned by European Capitals of Culture, as well as 2015's Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, while her work has been presented for the European Parliament for Culture and toured internationally. She is the founder of the international company ODC Ensemble. Named a Visiting CCRMA Scholar at Stanford University and a visiting scholar at Princeton University, she has been awarded the Fulbright Artist’s Award twice.

## Education and early career (1995–2004)

Papakonstantinou was born and raised in Athens. She holds a BA degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. In 1995, she moved to the United Kingdom, and completed an M.A. at the Royal Holloway, University of London.
During that period, Papakonstantinou was associated with playwrights of the 'In-yer-face’ movement like Sarah Kane, Tamatha Hammerschlag, and Lil Warren, and made her directorial debut with Lil Warren's Nine Lives, Ten Tales, which won the First prize Award at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 1999, she directed The Suppliants After Aeschylus After Kosovo, a reimagined version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliants written by the South African playwright Tamantha Hammerschlag, at the Gilded Balloon during that year's edition of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Papakonstantinou collaborated with directors Matthias Langhoff (as an assistant on The Bacchae, presented at the Athens & Epidaurus Festival in 1997) and V. Papavasiliou (Oedipus Rex, presented at the Rome Colosseum for the Sophocles 2000 Colosseum Festival).
Her staging of the Odyssey, titled ODC after Homer, was presented at the 2002 edition of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The production was praised by the online Greek Section of the BBC, while also being invited to the official Inauguration Ceremony of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria.
Papakonstantinou's Greek directorial debut was the Decameron of Women by Julia Voznesenskaya, an adaptation of Vocace's Decameron about six women in the 1970s Soviet Union.
Other collaborations of hers in the field of new writing include the direction of Destiny and A Night of Secrets by Akis Dimou at the National Theatre of Greece, The Sound of the Gun by Loula Anagnostaki, The Country by Martin Crimp, the radio play Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices by Sylvia Plath, and The Iron by Rona Munro.
In 2005, she was a visiting fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.

## Founding of Vyrsodepseio (2011–2012)

In 2011, Papakonstantinou, in her capacity as artistic director of the theatre company ODC Ensemble, founded "Vyrsodepseio" (Βυρσοδεψείο = Tannery), a cultural venue for theatre performances, concerts and exhibitions housed at a defunct tannery of 3000 m$^2$ in Athens, which she directed until 2016. A short documentary by Maria Chatzigianni on Vyrsodepseio, featuring interviews with Elli Papakonstantinou and other artists, was released in 2014.
Papakonstantinou directed an adaptation of A Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare at the National Theatre of Cyprus. In 2012, she directed Woyzeck Quartet, based on Alban Berg's Wozzeck as well as Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, which premiered at the Athens & Epidaurus Festival. Scholar Xenia Georgopoulou, commenting on a version of William Shakespeare's Richard II that Papakonstantinou presented at Vyrsodepseio, remarked on "the similarities between the play and the political context" with the director stating "that her production [was] intended for a popular audience, not for the small social elite, which [had long been] the targeted audience".
Papakonstantinou introduced the term "Theatre of the Polis" while describing and advocating for socially engaged art like "META [AFTER]" and "ΔΕΡΜΑ [SKIN]".

## Later work (2014–)

In May 2014, Papakonstantinou participated at a tribute to contemporary Greek theatre that was held at the Panta Théâtre in Caen, France, where she directed Elena Penga's play Femme et Loup (Woman and Wolf). Revolτ Aτhenς, which Papakonstantinou wrote and directed, was inspired by contemporary Greek reality and the ongoing Greek crisis, and has been her most widely toured and acclaimed performance to date. The production premiered at the Antic Theatre in Barcelona in February 2015 under the title Re-final Countdown, 2004, Athens. It was followed by performances at the Musiktheatertage Festival in Vienna, the Neukoellner Oper in Berlin, the BE Festival in Birmingham (where it won the First Prize Award for the REP), and was invited back for its 2018 edition. Revolτ Aτhenς additionally opened the Athens & Epidaurus Festival in June 2016 and was also presented at the Acco Festival in September 2017, in Israel. The show was selected to perform for the European Cultural Parliament during Rotterdam's Operadagen Festival (O. Festival), in 2017.
In May 2017, Papakonstantinou presented The Backstage of Revolution, a site-specific performance inspired by the French Revolution, as part of the official programme of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival. Later that year, her newest piece, Stabat Parthenope was staged at the Altofest in Naples.
Każin Barokk, an opera conceived, written and directed by Papakonstantinou and commissioned by Valletta, was held at the Notre Dame Gate in Birgu, Malta, in September 2018.
In 2018, Papakonstantinou toured Europe with The Cave, based on Plato's allegory. The Cave was presented amongst other places at the Repertory theatre, Birmingham (BE Festival), the Aalborg Opera Festival, the Copenhagen Opera Festival and the Megaron (Athens Concert Hall). In December 2018, The Cave was awarded the international Music Theatre Now Award for first productions of new works.
In 2018, she received a Fulbright Artist's Award a second time, and was invited to serve as a visiting scholar for six months (October 2018 - April 2019) at the CCRMA – Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University, US. The new media cinematic opera Oedipus, Sex with Mum was Blinding, written and directed by Papakonstantinou, was performed in the USA in 2019.
In 2019, after completing a special writing residency at Avignon's La Chartreuse-Centre National des écritures du Spectacle, she wrote and directed the anti-fascist play The Kindly Ones (based on Aechylus’s The Eumenides) for the Austrian Festival der Regionen, which was presented at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and at the 2021 edition of Avigon's Festival Off.
The COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 led her to experiment with a new form of digital theatre, specifically designed for the ZOOM platform, which she called “theatre of seclusion”. In 2020, she presented Traces of Antigone, written by Christina Ouzounidis, one of the first live digital performances. The performance won the AMAZONE 2020 award and was nominated for the Italian Critics Award, and continues its international tour both in digital and physical form. Her digital works Aède of the Ocean and Land and Hotel AntiOedipus were presented at festivals and organizations around the world, such as the Paris Centre Pompidou's IRCAM or Rome's Romaeuropa Festival, to critical acclaim.
Papakonstantinou's ALKESTIS, a commission of the Royal Theatre of Sweden in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Opera, premiered on December 2, 2021, in Stockholm. She developed EROS, an international co-production with Ukraine's Nova Opera supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Ukrainian House Of Europe, which premiered in the spring of 2022 at Rotterdam's O. Festival.
She has also partnered with three Creative Europe projects (Polart Circle, Creative Lenses, Europe Grand Central), as well as international networks Trans Europe Halles and IETM – International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts.
Papakonstantinou additionally sat at the board of directors of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ΕΡΤ: Ελληνική Ραδιοφωνία Τηλεόραση) and was President of its Funding Board for film for two years.
She has been invited to teach courses and workshops at universities and schools such as the University of Princeton, the University of London, the Stanford University, the University of Peloponnese, the Summer Academy of the National Theatre of Greece, or the Valletta University. She has also attended conferences around the world, and has translated for the stage.

## Curation and production

Between 2011 and 2017, Papakonstantinou produced and/or curated most of Vyrsodepseio Art Space's platforms and programs - in total, more than 100 music and dance festivals, performances, and international collaborations:
* Partnerships between Vyrsodepseio and institutions like the Antic Teatre, Barcelona, the Institut Français, Greece, as well as the Panta Théâtre and the Maison Antoine Vitez, France;
* The site-specific Festival I, II and III, three-day festivals with more than 300 participant artists;
* The month of Greek Theatre in France and month of French Theatre in Greece, in June 2014 (co-curated with D. Kondylaki and G. Kakoudaki);
* Performance Art Workshops (co-curated with K. Diapouli) and Dramaturgy Workshops (co-curated with D. Kondylaki and G. Kakoudaki).

## Awards and distinctions

| Year | AWARDS |
| 1997 | First Prize Award, Edinburgh Festival, UΚ |
| 2004–05 | Fulbright Artist's Award for conducting research at the Music & Advanced Media Lab of the Princeton University, USA |
| 2005 | Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Fellowship, Princeton University, USA |
| 2017 | First Prize Award for BE Festival 2017 at the Repertory Theatre of Birmingham for the performance REVOLT ATHENΣ |
| 2018–19 | Fulbright Artist's Award and visiting scholarship at CCRMA, Stanford University, USA |
| 2019 | Music Theatre Now, International competition Operadagen Festival (NL), Benjin Opera (CN), Prototype Festival, NY (USA) and Shanghai Festival (CN) for the performance The Cave |
| Year | DISTINCTIONS / GRANTS |
| 1993–95 | IKY State Scholarship Foundation |
| 1995 | IKY State Scholarship Foundation, Socrates Erasmus, Greece |
| 2011 | Subsidized by Hellenic National Center of Theatre and Dance, Hellenic Ministry of Culture |
| 2015 | Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Hellenic pavilion participation with performances ΜΕΤΑ [AFTER] and ΔΕΡΜΑ [SKIN] and commissioned new creation |
| 2015 | Appointed President at the Board of 1.5% for sponsoring Greek Film Industry for two years |
| 2015 | Sits at the board of directors of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ΕΡΤ: Ελληνική Ραδιοφωνία Τηλεόραση) |
| 2016 | Swedish Arts Council |
| 2017 | Danish Arts Foundation |
| 2017 | Performance REVOLT ATHENΣ was presented at the European Parliament of Culture |
| 2017 | Subsidized by Hellenic National Center of Theater and Dance, Hellenic Ministry of Culture |
| 2017 | Commissioned to direct big scale performance by Valletta 2018, European Capital of Culture |
| 2018 | Subsidized by Hellenic National Center of Theater and Dance, Hellenic Ministry of Culture |

## Publications

* The Actor and the Target by Decklan Donnelan (translation), Nefeli Editions, 2010
* The Outcry by Tennessee Williams, Sokoli-Kouledaki Editions, 2011 (co-translator with Athina Maximou)
* Greek Art in a State of Emergency, ACAR – ITI Action Committee For Artists Rights, 2015
* The Manifest, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Vol.3, Issue 2, Eds. F. Hager, M. Fragkou, 2017
* Models to Manifestos, A conceptual Toolkit for Arts and Culture, Olivearte Cultural Agency, 2019
* A θeatre in Times of Crisis, NEFELI Editions, 2018