A Wish That May Come True

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor

Educational programme sponsor

The Greek National Opera Learning & Participation  presents the music theatre performance A Wish That May Come True, which is the artistic outcome of a months-long educational process conducted as part of Co-OPERAtive, the first intercultural youth opera hub in Europe. The work was created by the young people who participated in the workshops and will be showcased on Sunday, 31 May 2026, with two performances at the GNO Alternative Stage at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultura Center at 18.00 and 20.30. Admission will be free to the public.

The performance, featuring a score by Nikos Galenianos, text and dramaturgy by Julia Diamantopoulou, and direction by Sofia Vgenopoulou, with Eleni Zachopoulou as associate director, was born out of a collaborative creative process that drew on theater, music, and movement and highlighted the participants’ voices, desires, and personal stories. Antigone Gyra served as movement coach, and Pavlos Thanopoulos designed the sets and costumes.

Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, the performance explores what it means to be a foreigner and different, not understood or trusted, as well as the meaning of acceptance, solidarity, wishing, and anticipation. On a rainy night, a winged creature falls from the sky. Nobody knows where it came from, what it is, or what it wants. Nobody knows whether it will stay, whether it is friendly or dangerous, or what language it speaks. The residents in the area treat it according to what each of them carries within them: fear, hope, curiosity, hostility, compassion, and need. They approach it and avoid it; they fear it and frighten it; until, little by little, they realize that this creature serves as a kind of mirror for them, and that the questions it raises in them, about loneliness, pain, memory, and the sense of belonging, concern them most of all.

Julia Diamantopoulou’s text and dramaturgy emerged from rehearsals and the children’s creative contributions: personal stories, words in different languages, improvisations, songs, questions, and experiences gradually shaped the performance’s world. Onstage, participants talk, sing, move, and co-exist in many languages simultaneously, creating a common ground for communication beyond words.

Sofia Vgenopoulou’s stage direction treats theatre as a space for coming together and coexisting, a place where different experiences and languages can creatively intertwine. As she remarks: “Behind every exercise, every game, every improvisation, the goal has always been the same: to create a group of young people from different backgrounds and experiences who have discovered that, beyond all their differences, they have something very powerful in common: the ability to approach and listen to each other and to connect. Because bodies remember. They know how to tell stories faster than anyone can imagine; they connect; they align with each other; and they meet in an entirely new world, one that has made room for all of them because it was made by all of them. A world that belongs to everyone and nobody at the same time.

Nikos Galenianos’ music, also composed in close connection with the rehearsals, combines an instrumental ensemble with electronic sounds and rhythmically processed vocal parts that interact with the participants. As he notes, “The foundation of the musical material emerged during the rehearsals. It is music that, after all these months, I have realized can speak on behalf of the children, without any attempt to aesthetically 'upgrade' it or intellectually refine it to serve my personal goals.”

The Co-OPERAtive educational programme was launched in 2019, and that same year it received an award from the European Organization FEDORA. Since then, it has continued to cultivate the power of art as a bridge to communication and coexistence, hosting teenagers from various schools and neighbourhoods in Attica, Athenians, and minor asylum-seekers, who attend weekly workshops led by distinguished artists in music, theater, and dance. The goal of this months-long trajectory is for the teenagers themselves to create and present an original music-theatre work to the wider public.

The programme is sponsored by Piraeus Bank and is part of Piraeus Bank’s EQUALL Corporate Responsibility initiatives aimed at increasing the Young Generation's access to Culture.

Co-OPERAtive was conducted in close collaboration with Kinoniko EKAV, European Expression (Evropaiki Ekfrasi), Zefxis, and KEAN.