Phaëton

Alternative Stage Founding Donor   

GNO Alternative Stage – SNFCC

The GNO Alternative Stage is extending its partnership with the Municipal & Regional Theatre of Kavala for a second consecutive year, aiming to showcase contemporary artistic works and strengthen the connection between the periphery and the Athenian audience. Five original productions from this year’s 69th Philippi Festival – organized by the Municipal & Regional Theatre of Kavala – will be showcased at the GNO Alternative Stage at the SNFCC on 18, 19, and 20 September 2026. These performances will introduce audiences to works commissioned by the Festival that, for the first time, transcend the narrow confines of theatre and engage in dialogue with music, opera, shadow puppet theatre, and visual installations.

One of the most important works by the Italian-French Baroque composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, Phaëton (1683), with a libretto by Philippe Quinault, has been adapted by composer Vasiliki Legaki through a fruitful conversation with the original.

The “tragédie en musique” Phaëton, as this genre of Lully’s original work was described at the time, draws its theme from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, generously offering its contemporary audience stage effects that depict the transformations of the main heroes into animals, birds, and sea monsters – a kaleidoscopic universe of music-theater wealth that thrilled audiences, ultimately leading to the work being nicknamed “the people’s opera.” Above all, Phaëton remains a distorting mirror that reflects the power, arrogance, and greed of the privileged, sweeping everything away in their wake: the lives of ordinary people and the fate of our world.

This new version of the opera Phaëton is the fruit of a creative relationship developed over recent years between the two institutions – the Greek National Opera and the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Kavala – marking their first complete collaboration and co-production to result in a performance.