An invitation on the island

Guest post
Dear traveler,

The old boat will take you there. Will guide you towards the peaceful island, where people smile every time, where, the sun tells you Good Morning almost every morning in a year. Even Gods decided that this is such a beautiful place to be born, that they choose it to be Aphrodite Birth's Island. Since then some things change, others remain untouched, for every peaceful traveler, to breath it trough each sense.




See

Open your eyes, dear traveler and enjoy every sight, the sparkle blue sea water, the light of the sun, every day of the year, the white hills, the most beautiful flowers. Choose to walk  or to ride a bicycle or a ride on the horse, next to the sea on the most spectacular newly build promenade. Search for Aphrodite's traces with your loved ones, follow her white veil, flying in the wind, towards  Aphrodite Birth Place next to Pissouri village or to her private baths in Latchi. An eternal embrace will give you a memory for life. Dear traveler, take the route of the old villages, to look at the small old houses. Imagine the simple life in the past, the walk on the narrow streets, notice the customs, the smile on the old people's faces. You will feel welcomed, wherever you go. Follow the Romans, the Greeks and the Christians at Kourion or Paphos to be amazed by the history, by the vestiges, by the fantastic views of the island. Keep quiet when you will find the turtles nest on an deserted beach. It is a hidden treasure, where only the waves are allowed to make noise.
And only if…. Only if you love to let thoughts drown in the faith don’t forget to visit The Unesco World Heritage The Painted Churches.







 Hear

Listen to the birds, up on the mountains, unique sounds that you will be able to hear only here. Listen to the sound of the water, when you choose to visit such wild and beautiful locations like Caledonia Waterfall or the Venetian Bridges.  Close your eyes when you are on the beach and listen for the waves, listen for the tranquility. Let your kids run free in the sand and listen to their happy voices in a wonderful holiday. And when you get tired my dear traveler take a seat in a traditional tavern where you will be able to listen the traditional music: beautiful collection of instruments, voices and melody. You will dance even if you do not know how, or you will just smile, watching the others happy faces.







Smell

Dear traveler, try to fly with your eyes closed trough the wonderful garden  at Cyherbia. If  you are lucky the lavender fields will be purple and their smell will take you to heaven. If not, do not worry as Miranda will take you trough her aromatic plants paradise or will make you feel lost in her amazing Maze.
The salty smell of Mediterranean Sea will guide you through the thousands of traditional fish taverns. Close your eyes …. Smell and relax.





Touch


The island is maybe small, but the choices are so many only if you know, only if you try to discover the pleasures. Maybe small, but unique feelings will make you feel the real satisfaction of a true holiday. Don’t stop dear traveler… just don’t stop.
Take your shoes off… and put your bare feet in the sand. Walk on each beach. Run in the sunset bathing in the warm of the sun shine. The water will be warm enough every day of the year to dive your tired feet. Let you kids play in the warm sand. Touch your lover hand and enjoy the most romantic day in paradise!




Taste

The olives, the oranges, the cheese, the natural olive oils, the mixtures of Mediterranean healthy dishes wherever you go. The Meze. Wherever you go, wherever you stop, the traditional cuisine will embrace your tastes of pleasures, your smells, your happiness. There is nothing more sweet …more delicious as the traditional sweets. A spoon full with the most tasteful jams and marmalade with a glass of fresh water… end with a delightful traditional coffee.











Fun

Just have fun dear traveler and enjoy your holiday, enjoy your time spend on one of the most beautiful island. You can choose between one of the most beautiful hotels with First Choice holiday company.Choose the hotel with biggest swimming pool, the largest water park, the best playgrounds, the most spectacular view, the most beautiful beach, with the most luxurious rooms, with the most romantic location. Enjoy the best clubbing in Agia Napa, get married, renew your vows, spend a wonderful family vacation.







Take the boat that will take you to the most beautiful island… Cyprus.


Lots of sunny days from Izzy the Cypriot Lizard!




Learn to dream with Eidekanou Theatre - Nicosia


Hello everybody,

What if you would be able to take something simple and transform it in to imagination? What if you would raise your hand and sparkles will follow, as from a magic wand? What do you need to dream? What do you need to imagine? What if we could run covered by drops of rain in a hot summer day? What do we need to feel happy? What do we need to be us? To let our mind fly on the hills or swim in the blue sea water?
We live in an era where we have no time to create... to dream. We are to busy with the deadlines... to busy living... so busy that we forget about us, about our time spend on living between life.




Eidekanou Theatre give us the possibility to reply at all these questions .... give us the possibility to learn how to answer these questions and to change something where maybe you believed there is nothing left to change.
Two girls met on the same road in Nicosia, at Eidekanou Theatre ...to open paths in our lifes... in our children lifes. They are Nikoletta Verykiou, MA in Performance Research Bristol University, Archi Drama School Athens, Communication and Mass Media University of Athens and  Elena Pavlidou MA Advanced Theatre Practice, University of London, Athens Odeon Drama School, International and European Studies, Panteion University .
Definitely they were speaking with the Gods when they decided to implement in Cyprus the most interesting theater workshops for kids and adults alike.
They will convince us, about how you and your kids can live dreaming, how you can perform, how you can become an Artist... how to feed your imagination ...to open your mind.





 “Play is your route to mastery.”
 Sara Genn

Eidekanou Theatre: An artist could be found anywhere. Not just in the fields of art. Dedicating oneself in his or her craft/work/technique/job, getting deeper and deeper in the “how” of one’s making, in the “what” of one’s material, is essentially art. The choice for us to become theatre makers, was actually a conscious decision to continue what had been giving us the possibility to play, structuring time in our everyday lives for the potentials arising through play.




“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”
Thomas Bernhard,Woodcutters

Eidekanou Theatre: We don’t believe in the pre-existence of a real, genuine self that reality and society converts it into something less real or true. We see ourselves as a continuum, in constant change. We try to incorporate difficulties in our artistic world, we try to get inspired by everyday routines and duties because for us this is exactly the reason of art: to highlight the common, and even more to bestow a different meaning to the everyday, to the trivial. Of course now that we are both living the era of Motherhood the need to be inventive and communicative outside home has become a big challenge.




“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”
Eckhart Tolle

Eidekanou Theatre: No-mind and inner stillness is a hard task to accomplish each time we begin a workshop, and is a skill mastered in the long term. It is vital for us and for the workshops’ participants in order to create awareness of the “here-ness” and the “now-ness”, which are necessary in theatre. Being in a theatre workshop requires openness to any relationship created within this time; relation with the others, with the space, with the environment. What is apparent, mostly in the adults’ workshops, is that it is harder to find this state of inner stillness immediately. Our bodies and minds are most of the times preoccupied, with stress, anxieties, worries, and this means we need to dedicate time to prepare the ‘state of inner stillness’. With the children this doesn’t usually need so much effort. Once we have created a common place of concentration in each workshop, we find it important to offer few guidelines and simple frameworks to the participants, so that they explore each given subject freely. Our effort is not to impose, not to pre-plan or expect certain results.




The workshops.


Eidekanou Theatre organizes workshops for children and adults, on a weekly basis. We have groups for theatre (adults and children), polyphonic songs (adults) and documentary (adults).

In relation to theatre, our approach and the way we design our workshops isn’t differentiated by the participants’ ages. On the contrary, many of our principles/tools/games/exercises are the same for both groups, only our demands are different according to the ages. We try to create a safe and happy environment for theatre to emerge. Our interest is mainly on the process of theatre making, rather than rehearsing and staging an already written theatre play. Our material is each participant’s personality, their way of working, their possibilities and difficulties, their interests, the way they see life.

We  work with exercises and tools often used in devised and physical theatre.
Our aim is to prepare the participants physically through games for awareness and focus, breathing exercises and to find ways to explore the group rhythm and to build trust amongst the participants in order to enhance collaborative creative work. Equally important for Theatre Eidekanou, is to cultivate individual and group imagination through physical and verbal improvisations, creative use of objects and mask theatre, innovative play with space, building original characters. As artists we are very much influenced by theatre practitioners such as Jaques Lecoq, Eugenio Barba and Agosto Boal, not only for their perspective of theatre, but also for their way of making theatre. 






As previously said, Eidekanou Theatre has been offering since last year a practical workshop in documentary making addressed to adults, regardless of their previous experience in film-making . The workshop is designed by Michalis Theodorou (filmmaker, journalist) and its aim is for each participant to complete by June 2015 a short documentary on a subject of their choice. 

For those interested in group singing, the workshop of Polyphonic songs is continued too this year. The main area of research is songs from Epirus and Southern Italy, which are sung without instrumental support or microphones. The workshop leader is Pavlina Konstantopoulou (musician, composer).

Apart from the workshops organised on a weekly basis, Eidekanou offers one-day workshops in a specific subject each time, both for adults and children. These are announced through the Press, Facebook Page and the e-newsletter. The current workshop “Theatre Kitchen” (on the 25th October) is addressed to children aged 6-11 and will be held in English. Through games and theatre activities, we will experiment with culinary objects and materials in order to create an imaginary kitchen where anything can happen.

Lastly, Eidekanou Theatre is interested in creating interdisciplinary theatre and is planning to present a new performance and a short movie in 2015. “Snow Queen” is our last performance for children, which was presented in Kastelliotissa and a number of public schools in 2013 and is included in the Pop-Up Festival 2014 of Nicosia Muncipality.






"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life."
G.K. Chesterton

Eidekanou Theatre: As we grow we forget to play, something that when we are small we couldn’t live without. Nowadays, for young children this might even start as early as the age of six when their everyday routine, basically their time, is divided in two: time for school and activities from one side and time for play from the other side. In the school environment most of the time, play is outside classes because the capitalistic education paradigm has expelled it from the learning process as a waste of time, energy, focus and seriousness.

When we meet young children during our workshops, we immediately understand that it is a matter of couple of games for them to re-member, re-find, get in touch with the core of childhood, the play. Children are anyway mostly ready to receive and get involved in what constitutes the vital idea of play. On the contrary, the adults because of their constant preoccupation with everyday duties and social expectations are more resistant to play again.

The most important thing about play is its connection with the idea of time. When we are young the time counts in a different way because we live through playing and not through restrictions, duties and predefined social schemes. When children play they can concentrate even to a diminutive stimulus highlighting and expanding the value of present time. Through play they live the moment, the now. What we believe we do through the workshops is to enrich their moments of present time with qualitative opportunities to co-exist with others in a free context.


As Heraclitus said “time is a game played beautifully by children’’ .





 "Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
Saint-Exupéry,
The Little Prince

Eidekanou Theatre: From a different perspective, one could say that grown ups need to be reminded of their “hidden child”.
 In every man there is a hidden child which is called the urge to create and he prefers as play things and serious things not the miniature ships, recreated in the minutest detail, but the walnutshell with a bird feather as mast and sail and a pebble as the captain. The hidden child wants to be able to participate and to co-create in art, rather than being simply an admiring viewer. For this 'child in man' is the immortal creator within him. (Christian Morgenstern)





"The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult."
Eugene Ionesco

Eidekanou Theatre: Sometimes it seems inevitable not to get used to everyday life, to get drowned in dullness. To surprise ourselves could be a task in order to overcome adult-ness, to remind ourselves of the surreal, of the simplicity of existence. We are never sure but we certainly hope that the workshops do have a positive impact on children. Our main goal is for children to create experiences that could possibly follow them through their next steps in life. Offering them a platform to play freely, improvise, try and fail, create in collaboration, find joy in accuracy and rhythm, are all priorities of our workshops for children. Performing,  both as a child and as an adult, is for as an opportunity to share experiences with sincerity, which means sharing our process without the anxiety of presenting a “final product”.


The Story

Once upon a time there was a child and a face and they were a happy couple.
One day the rains started in the forest and disasters came and the couple got scared and left. On that day, a horrible old man made magical tricks and the couple had to separate for ever. But the evil wizard couldn’t keep them apart because a wild and canning witch wanted to take revenge on the wizard because the wizard had once stolen her jewellery and her magical secret, without which she couldn’t do anything. And so she did. When the wizard was deeply asleep, she found a way into his brain and she turned him into a good person. The couple was again together and they lived happily ever after.

We sit in a circle. We improvise a story together. Each one of us adds one word each time. No-one can impose an idea to the group, our only empowerment is to add just one word each time. No-one knows where the story takes us, when or how it will end. The above story is an example of this game and was created in Greek during a workshop with children last spring.






Thank you very much for this fantastic opportunity Eidekanou Theatre,
Lots of sunny days from Izzy the Cypriot lizard!





Theater Eidekanou

Workshop schedule (meetings on a weekly basis):
       Theatre and Play (for children 6-11)
         Saturday, 10:30 - 12:00
         contribution per month: 45€

       Documentary (for adults)
         Tuesday, 19:00 - 21:30
         contribution per month: 30€

       Theatre Workshop (for adults)
         Wednesday, 18:30 - 20:30
         contribution per month: 45€

       Polyphonic Songs (for 16yrs plus)
         Thursday, 19:30 - 21:00
         contribution per month: 40€

Eidekanou also organizes one-day workshops for children and adults, performances and invites artists to present their work at Praktoreio. In order to receive information on upcoming events, you can join our mailing list at eidekanou@gmail.com or like our page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/eidekanou


Address: To Praktoreio, Nikitara 19, Ay. Omoloyites, Nicosia, Cyprus
Contact persons: Elena Pavlidou, Nikoletta Verykiou
Phone no:        +357 99849598     ;  +357  96670490

Map Location: