The last year’s fiancée | Elephas Tiliensis

The “last year’s fiancée”, the first story of the first book of the very important novelist Zyranna Zateli is repeated for only ten performances at the ‘Neos Kosmos’ Theatre from 09 March 2015, from the Elephas Tiliensis group, directed by Dimitris Agartzidi and Despina Anastasogloy, with Anthi Efstratiadis, Sirmo Kekes, Tatiana Anna Pitta.
A girl gets engaged to Marcows the evening of the New Year 1961. As a woman now she goes back over in memory and revives the fact that ratifies the entrance in the period she calls “first loneliness of her life.” The first love for the child will become an old pain for the adult.
Zateli’s writing associates us with the tradition, by freeing it from the folk, and reveals a poetic tale that talks not only in an allusive , but also a raw way, for female sexuality, the innermost thoughts, the hidden desires, the fear and the attraction of death, the connection of everyday reality and the metaphysical, fantasy and magic.

The “last year’s fiancée”, motivated by restless curiosity, penetrates quietly and effectively to the different and the wonderful world of the other, invents a new language secret and incomprehensible, stands still for hours in front of her fiancé to “free herself from the burden and the vagueness of a world full of contrasts that surrounds her, scares her and not let her calm.”

The “last year’s fiancée” is published by Kastaniotis publications.

Direction :
Music:
Set designing – Costumes:
Lighting :
Choreography :
Assistant:
Actors:

Dimitris Agartzidis, Despina Anastasoglou
costinho
Magdalene Avgerinou
Melina Mascha
Xenia Themeli
Vicky Katsika
Xenia Themeli, Anthi Efstratiadou, Syrmo Keke, Tatiana Anna Pitta

The directors’ note

Childhood is the place where the first feelings were experienced, pure, overwhelming and dangerous feelings. Humans are “endowed” by nature to adapt even to indescribable cruel conditions in order to survive. “Our soul, however, remembers everything that we have lost or forgotten as conscious beings”*. These fallacious memories that run our childhood and are experienced clandestinely and unconsciously by the adult is what we seek in our work.
By following the dreamy Zyranna Zateli’s writing we approached the stage condition of the three actresses. Three women. “As a figure which is multiplied to three. Whoever look them for the first time doubts whether he sees them in reality and not in a dream or a trick and that incredibly amuses them. “**
One can discern many variations of himself, looking back in the past. Obviously, the child we were once is the most distant figure. In an imaginary picture of the child in front of us we instinctively recognize ourselves. We have a common perception of this human that now has grown, has changed, has differentiated and has become an adult. The child, who once we were, experienced the most dramatic feelings in full and came in contact with pain for the first time, a pain that will inevitably become an ‘old’ pain for the adult. In the play we seek the threads of the thought and the associations which lead us to the field of “old pain” and the mechanisms that keep us away from this in order to continue to live, or otherwise to survive. By staying away we manage to remove the burden from the fact that we no longer bear and that fact does not correspond to our current self, we employ humor or we lose it completely. This search brings up to the surface deep and forgotten senses, incomprehensible gestures and bizarre dreams composing the figure of the innocent, imaginative and brave human we once were. The “last year’s fiancée” listens carefully to every nerve of this route, softly “sticks her fingers” in the inscrutable and mysteriously intimate world of ourselves.

A few words about the Author

Zyranna Zateli was born in 1951 in Thessaloniki Sohos. She studied theater in Athens, but does not deal with anything else than writing. The “last year’s fiancée” is her first book of short stories (1984). The” desert with grace” (1986) followed, also with short stories. In 1993 she released her novel “And with the light of the wolf they return” (National Novel Award, 1994), and in 2001 she published her novel “Death came last”, the first part of the trilogy “With the strange name Ramanthis Erebus” (National Novel Award 2002). In 2005, the novel “Her own air” was published by Ianos and in 2006 the narrative “The Magic rods of my brother” was published by Kastaniotis Publications. In 2009, her novel “The passion of thousands of times”, the second part of the trilogy “with the strange name Ramanthis Erebus”, was released. In 2010 she was awarded with the Novel Award of the Athens’ Academy for her entire work. The following year, the book “Pleasure of the temple” was released. Her books have been translated and released in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia and Lithuania.