The GNO Learning & Participation Department continues for one more year its music, dance, and movement workshops in even more penitentiaries across Greece. These workshops are organized with the goal of promoting the importance of artistic education and contact with the arts in penitentiaries and enhancing the participants’ creativity and free expression. In this season, the workshops will be realized with the support of the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation in the Female Penitentiary of Eleonas in Thebes, the Male Wing of Korydallos Penitentiary I, the Special Youth Detention Centers in Avlonas and Volos and the Penitentiary of Chania. After a series of weekly meetings, each of these workshops will come complete with the presentation of the artistic result of each creative trajectory.

Music Workshops in the Male Wing of Korydallos Penitentiary I

Through improvisation, participants will experiment with sound and music, develop performance skills and co-create new compositions. The workshop’s main goal is to cultivate creativity, group spirit and free expression. It will come complete with a concert, in which participants themselves will perform their own music pieces.

Planning / Implementation: Maria-Christina Harper (composer/music therapist), Andreas Gyftakis (musician)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Music Workshop in the Penitentiary of Chania

Using strings and percussion, participants will embark on a journey across the traditional folk music of the wider Mediterranean region. Through a melodic wandering across their homelands they will remember, converse and work collectively. The workshop’s main goal is to cultivate communication, creativity, team spirit and free expression, as well as to enhance the contact with the participants’ roots. It will come complete with a concert given with the participation of the workshop’s members.

Planning/Implementation: Giannis Papatzanis (musician), Stelios Sykakis (musician)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Movement and Dance Workshop in the Female Penitentiary of Eleonas in Thebes

Participants will be invited to activate their bodies and develop their creativity, work as a team and interact with each other, but also to explore dance as a way to bring joy and well-being, and unleash expression. The workshop will come complete with the presentation of a single dance-theatre performance, which will result from the blend of the original choreographies that will be co-created by the participants through guided physical exercises.  

Planning/Implementation: Katerina Spyropoulou (dancer, choreographer), Margarita Trikka (dancer)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Movement and Dance Workshop in the Special Youth Detention Center in Avlonas

Through hip hop and break dance techniques, participants will explore movement improvisation, learn how to express themselves through dance, and improve their musical motor skills. The workshop’s primary goal is to become a space of fertile discussion and exchange of ideas, knowledge and inspiration, in an effort to promote collaborative culture, meaningful communication among the prisoners, and free expression. The workshop will come complete with a presentation, in which prisoners will synchronize their moves to the rhythm and perform their own choreographies.

Planning / Implementation: Elias Hadjigeorgiou (dancer, choreographer), Aidi Ormeni (dancer)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Movement and Dance Workshop in the Special Youth Detention Center in Volos

Participants will be taught movement motifs of modern dance and break dance and will work as a team to express themselves freely and co-create their own material. Through a collaborative creation process, they will cultivate mutual respect, regardless of their differences, develop creative thinking and individual skills, and boost their own confidence. Moreover, they will discover their body’s movement limitations and acquire a better perception of space through different movement levels and directions.

Planning / Implementation:  Dimokritos Sifakis (dancer), Dimitris-Evangelos Dokouzis (dancer)

Final performance date: T.B.A.

Donor to the educational programme in penitentiaries

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor 

Intercultural opera hub for a mixed group of 30 Athenians and unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors aged 14-18 from across Attica

In collaboration with Kinoniko EKAV and European Expression

The established intercultural opera hub for teenagers Co-OPERAtive returns for a fourth year. The programme, awarded the 2019 Fedora Education Prize, draws inspiration from opera and foregrounds the importance of interculturalism in art as a factor that facilitates artistic creation and bridges cultural differences. The participants in the mixed group of the 30 young Athenians and unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors aged 14 to 18 will be urged to produce their own ideas, express themselves artistically, and pit themselves against the creative process of making a music theatre work, which they will then be called upon to present on the GNO Alternative Stage in May 2024.

Creative team

Score: Panos Iliopoulos

Direction: Argyro Chioti

Sets, costumes: Pavlos Thanopoulos

Music workshops leader: Nikos Ziaziaris

Theatre workshops leader: Eleni Moleski

Dance workshops leader: Katerina Gevetzi

Starts on: Monday 16 October 2023

Day & hour: Mondays, 17.30-20.30

Age group: 14 to 18 year-olds

Performance date: Friday 31 May 2024

In collaboration with

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor 

This year, for a seventh consecutive year, the Intercultural Choir will continue expanding its repertoire by combining songs from the world’s folk traditions with modern vocal music. The connection of the voice with the body, movement and improvisation, will become for yet another year the basic tools for musical co-creation and free expression. For the Intercultural Choir’s new season, the GNO Learning & Participation Department has programmed new partnerships, as well as concerts within and outside Athens. The first of them will be given on Saturday 2 December in Vamvakou (Laconia) in collaboration with the Vamvakou Revival project, as part of the Christmas Celebration Events organized with the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

Choir mistress: Anna Linardou

Assistant to the maestro / Piano accompaniment: Dimitra Kokkinopoulou

Orchestrations: Vasso Dimitriou

Rehearsals start on: Monday 25 September 2023

Day & hours of rehearsals: Mondays, 18.30-20.30

The concert in Vamvakou (Laconia) is realized in collaboration with

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor 

A cycle of interdisciplinary music, speech, and animation workshops for Junior High School children  

In co-production with the Olympia International Film Festival for Children & Young People

Opera Filmmakers returns renewed for a third year. In the current season, the programme will take the form of an intensive cycle of interdisciplinary music, speech, and animation workshops focusing its creative energy on Pyrgos (Elis). During the workshops, local students will be creatively introduced into the world of opera and cinema and will try their hand at making their own mini opera performance, which they will then attempt to turn into a short film (video clip).

The programme will be conducted in two phases: the first will be realized in Pyrgos (Elis), on 3,4 and 5 November 2023, where the young opera filmmakers, guided by the workshop leaders Dimitra Trypani (music score) and Iro Bezou (script writing), will create a hybrid mini opera of short duration, based both on modern music and the thematic, musical and textual conventions of the genre.

In the second phase, on 24, 25 and 26 November, the young artists will visit the premises of the Greek National Opera in the Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center. There, they will record the mini opera, and through the director Alexandros Voulgaris’ eye, they will transform it into a short film. Moreover, during the filming, they will have the chance to wander across the impressive facilities of the Greek National Opera in the SNFCC, enter the Orchestra Rehearsal Hall and the costume and props departments, slip behind the scenes and find themselves next to professional singers.

Throughout the whole process, under the guidance of the programme managers, participants will explore the chosen subject matter and get familiarized with the language, expressive means and techniques of opera and cinema, as well as with the basic principles of composition, writing and filming a music theatre work, with the goal of creating their own original audiovisual material.

The short opera will be screened as part of the 25th Olympia International Film Festival for Children & Young People (2-9 December 2023).

Planning / Implementation: Dimitra Trypani, Iro-Eleni Bezou, Alexandros Voulgaris

Age groups: students of all three grades of Junior High School

Dates: 3, 4, 5 November (workshops in Pyrgos, Elis) and 24, 25, 26 November 2023 (sound recording, filming and editing the opera into a short film at the GNO facilities in the SNFCC)

In coproduction with

GNO Learning & Participation Lead Donor