Metaδραματικό

A projection flickers across a cinema screen and a woman steps into the light, already mid-gesture. The seats face forward but the performance refuses to stay in one place — it spills across the screen, the stage, and the gap between them. Fifty-seven minutes. One performer. Forty scenes.

Thekla Gaiti trained at the Veaki Drama School and the National Conservatory of Athens, holds a master's in Theatre and Society, and is a founding member of Experimenta, a collective dedicated to performance and education. She premiered Metadramatiko in 2022 as an exploration of her academic research into postdramatic theater — the form that dismantles narrative structure and rebuilds it from fragments. The work won the OffFest Award at the Off-West End Awards in London in 2025, and in 2026 was selected from among 1,870 productions worldwide for the Peru Bienal, where it received a nomination for best performance. This run at Newman Cinema presents a new multimedia version designed specifically for a cinema space.

The piece unfolds as forty brief scenes — each lasting one to five minutes, each deliberately left incomplete. The central figure is a woman swimming through an urban landscape, searching for the sea. Gaiti shifts between dance, singing, spoken poetry, improvisation, physical theater, and something that resembles an academic lecture, sometimes within the same scene. The work blends personal and political registers, playful moments and unsettling ones, and offers no predetermined conclusions.

The Newman Cinema audience for this kind of work trends toward theater people who follow the independent performance circuit, film students drawn by the venue's hybrid programming, and anyone who saw Gaiti's name in the Off-West End Awards coverage and tracked her back to Athens. The room seats people accustomed to watching closely and sitting with discomfort.

| Aspect | Details | |--------|---------| | **Setting** | Newman Cinema, Sevastoupoleos 117, Ampelokipoi — a renovated former cinema with stage and projection | | **Vibe** | Intimate, experimental, multimedia — performance art in a cinema shell | | **Sound** | Live performance with projected elements, original music by Stratos Sterianos | | **Door** | Ticketed — eight euros general, six euros reduced |

The forty scenes arrive in rapid succession, each one a self-contained fragment: a gesture, a song, a sudden stillness, a burst of movement. The zapping rhythm mirrors how attention works now — channel-surfing through realities. Some scenes hit immediately; others accumulate meaning retroactively, once the next fragment reframes what came before. The final minutes pull the fragments into a shape you did not see coming.

If you need a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and resolution, Metadramatiko will frustrate you — it is built from ruptures, not continuity. But if you are drawn to solo performance that trusts the body more than the script, and you want to see what postdramatic theory looks like when an award-winning performer puts it on a cinema screen, this is fifty-seven minutes that justify the trip to Ampelokipoi.

Newman Cinema sits at Sevastoupoleos 117, near Panormos metro station — a five-minute walk. Tickets are available through more.com or at the venue box office. The show runs just under an hour with no intermission, so arrive on time. The venue also operates as a cinema with a cafe, so you can settle in beforehand. Additional performances run on March 3, 9, and 10 at the same time.

An Off-West End Award, a Peru Bienal selection, and a cinema-specific restaging — Gaiti keeps reworking this piece for each new space, and the format earns new dimensions every time it moves.