With T. S. Eliot’s landmark poem The Waste Land—in Giorgos Seferis’ translation—as its central axis, this performance delves into poetry as writing, as reading, and as recitation, seeking to endow it with the dimension of a living, contemporary form of activism. The spectator, too, takes on an active role: instead of encountering a finished object displayed behind glass, they become present at the discovery of the poem as an archaeological find, at the reassembly of the fragments that constitute it. The actor-researcher, like an archaeologist conducting a dig, searches for these fragments patiently and meticulously amid what is impure, provisional, unfinished.
The Waste Land—an archetypal Modernist poem, polyphonic and choral in nature, a contemporary chorus for Today in its classical form—serves as a model. From there, The Poem Factory picks up the thread, diving into the very core of poetic function: the letter, the syllable, the word, the act of reading, the performance.
An actor and a musician on stage, joined by a group of final-year students from the Drama School of the Athens Conservatoire—together embodying the constituent elements of poetry—pose the inevitable question:
Poetry today? Why?
