nerό_una puta historia de AMOR

Alternative Stage Founding Donor

Major Sponsor of the Greek National Opera

Following its world premiere at Comédie de Genève (January 2026), Anna Lemonaki’s new work nerό_una puta historia de AMOR, a theatre and dance performance about the end of love and its potential revival, debuts in Greece with the GNO Alternative Stage at the SNFCC, featuring three unique performances on 13, 14, and 15 March 2026. The work is a co-production between the GNO Alternative Stage and the Swish Theatre Company, Cie Bleu en Haut Bleu en Bas.

How can we revive love? How can we survive the fear of a global collapse? The new work, nerό – a pun combining the Italian word for the colour black and the Greek word for “water” –  is the fifth and final part of a chromatic pentalogy by Greek director Anna Lemonaki. The piece serves as a crossroads of languages, cultures, and artistic landscapes while blending personal storytelling with the collective power of fairs. Anna Lemonaki collaborates with author Julie Gilbert to cast away the impoverishment of our relationships and our broken connection to the environment. Immersing us into an endless night, neró seeks a way to uplift us against alienation and global deregulation.

Along the height of a towering vertical structure, representing the steep slope of a massive rock, performers, climbers, and musicians perform a choreography of tenderness and the unexpected: they hold each other, climb up, fly, fall down, catch one another, slide, kiss, and fall down all over again… The setting was inspired by Kokkinovrahos (meaning “red rock”) in Leonidio, in the Peloponnese. Along these hovering movements, the journals written by Julie Gilbert and Anna Lemonaki during their joint trips in Greece and Mexico, together with the fair’s inebriation, create a lively ritual that aims to rekindle our desire to love and build community.

Synopsis
The collapse of romantic love.

Two Western women, aged 40 and 50.

Divorced.

One has two children, who have just moved out of the house.

The other doesn’t have children. She can’t have children. She can’t find the right person to build a family with. She decides to freeze her eggs.

Society might say that both of them, having lost their fertility, no longer have a place in the “arena” of love and life itself. Both women wonder: Is the collapse of romantic love connected to environmental collapse? Or to the broader state of the world? Could it be that the rationalization of romantic relationships is related to the depletion of natural resources?

Through a journal fueled by the people and places Anna and Julie encountered over the past two years, the work explores how modern representations of romantic love in Western societies (associated with the pursuit of instant personal gratification, the classification of potential partners on dating apps, incessant notifications, and the imperative of efficiency) affect our ability to create a story where shared coexistence is possible. It also examines how, ultimately, collective strategies emerging from life’s cracks – like traditional dances at fairs – can bring the idea of coexisting in a different way back to the foreground.

The work nerό is a never-ending night, an everlasting, surreal night. Beautiful and harsh. It consists of three parts, or three acts:

1. The first part features the dialogues from Anna and Julie’s journal.
2. The second act showcases the climbing choreography.
3. The third act is the festive and musical part of a fair that takes place on stage.

The work neró_una puta historia de AMOR is a performance about the end of love and its potential revival; a performance without a clear ending, where we would like audience members to become a community and join the fair. It is a communism of dance. Because dance is a way to outsmart death.

neró: the crossing between fear and love
Following the works Bleu, Fuchsia Saignant, Blanc, and G.O.L.D, Anna Lemonaki completes her chromatic pentalogy with neró. The piece nerό_una puta historia de AMOR is a journey that began more than a year ago, when the director invited author Julie Gilbert to join her. It is a journey that took them to Greece and Mexico, where they met climbers, love stories, springs, rivers, words, trees, and people with incredible destinies, thereby creating this small community that will be introduced to the audience and the GNO Alternative Stage. Neró – a performance featuring French, Greek, Spanish, English, and Italian – made its debut on 14 January 2026 at the Comédie de Genève, and then set out on a tour to Switzerland, Greece, and France.

Anna Lemonaki notes about the creation of her work: “When I began thinking about this work, I wanted to explore the theme of collapse; I had envisioned a monologue about the loneliness of the modern individual as a starting point for the text— a monologue that would also explore “no,” this word and attitude created by humans that seems to fit them exclusively, as much as laughter. But what if we imagine the opposite for a moment: What if trees suddenly refused to give us shade on a hot summer day? What if they stopped producing oxygen altogether? And what if animals could also say “no”? What if they stopped reproducing? What if the sun and the moon said “no”? And what if day and night ceased to exist, and no longer alternated?

In nerό_una puta historia de AMOR I seek this crossing between immobility and action, between fear and love. I seek what sets us in a collective motion. I seek how we can bring back, in an irrational and immeasurable way, love into our lives. I seek poetry.”

Co-productions : Comédie de Genève, Centre culturel suisse. Paris, Théâtre du Jura Delémont 

Supported by: Société Suisse des Auteurs – SSA, République et Canton de Genève, Pro Helvetia, Fondation Jan Michalski, Fondation Ernst Göhner, Fonds Mécénat SIG.

Warm thanks are extended to Βächli Bergsport