The Greek National Opera Alternative Stage opens the 2026/27 season with composer and GNO Artistic Director Giorgos Koumendakis’ new work To Have Been So Close So Many Times, which brings together onstage four poems by Constantine P. Cavafy, three choreographers, nine GNO Ballet dancers, a singer, a sculptural installation, and two instrumental ensembles. This new ambitious music theatre and dance production will be presented at the GNO Alternative Stage at the SNFCC for nine performances on 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17 and 18 October 2026. This performance does not tell a linear story; instead, it plunges the audience into an immersive, emotional experience – an inward ritual. The production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) to enhance the Greek National Opera’s artistic outreach.

Modern dance and music theatre intersect in new and earlier compositions by Giorgos Koumendakis, one of the most important and versatile Greek composers, who also shaped the performance’s dramaturgy. Three chamber music works influenced by traditional Greek music converse with four poems by Constantine P. Cavafy, set in the amanes style by Koumendakis and performed by singer Zaharias Karounis. The dancers and musicians accompany the singer with pedal tones, created and taught by the composer, forming a metaphysical, otherworldly musical world brimming with colours and rhythms.

Three distinguished choreographers – Patricia Apergi, Ilias Hatzigeorgiou, and Eva Georgitsopoulou – create new choreographies based on a musical idiom rooted in traditional Greek and Byzantine music.  The body is brought to the fore as a carrier of memory, desire, and loss, while movement hovers between group coordination and individual deviation. Nine dancers move within a setting of constant transition, where time seems to slow, repeat, and take on an almost ritualistic dimension. The production is co-directed by Giorgos Koumendakis and Petros Touloudis, whose sculptural installation turns the stage into a moving soundscape.

Giorgos Koumendakis notes on his new compositions inspired by Constantine P. Cavafy’s poems: “The amanes music in Cavafy’s poetry does not belong to threnody or confession. it is a kind of metaphysical dialogue hovering between desire and decay. Amanes, with its slow breathing and melismatic inversions, does not lament – it exposes pain to time. It does not seek redemption; it aestheticizes pain, rendering it a form of thinking. It is precisely this suspension that constitutes the heart of Cavafy’s musicality. Cavafy does not write to evoke emotion. Emotion is already present in his poems, rationalized; just as in amanes, emotion is inherent to the form. His passion is measured, disciplined, almost architectural. Each poem serves as a musical makam, a gradual rise and fall of the voice within strict boundaries. Rhythm does not flow; it holds itself back. Phrases repeat, recur, like a memory that refuses to mellow out.

Unlike Greek dirges – which are extroverted, collective, almost liturgical –, amanes serves an inner function. It speaks to the darkness of the self. Just as Cavafy: his voice is not meant for  crowds but for each individual listener, one who knows the taste of defeat and pleasure at the same time. the poet doesn’t sing of loss but of the awareness of it; that’s why he doesn’t seek comfort. If Cavafy’s poetry had a sound, it would be an amanes in which each syllable drags the weight of time behind it and delays emotion. A voice that does not break. A voice that knows that pain, when properly expressed, turns into form.”

To Have Been So Close So Many Times, which premiered in June and July 2026  at the SNF Nostos 2026 of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) and the 32^nd Kalamata International Dance Festival to great success, is a choreographic composition created by three choreographers, each engaging with different musical works by Giorgos Koumendakis and poems by Constantine P. Cavafy. These choreographies approach the musical material through diverse aesthetic and movement languages. Each choreography illuminates a different aspect of the relationship among the body, rhythm, and collective memory.

Choreographer Patricia Apergi converses with Giorgos Koumendakis’ Point of No Return and draws inspiration from Cavafy’s poem “Gray.” “When I first came into contact with these works, I felt a constant transition, where before and after coexist. I experienced music that does not tell a story but insists, leaving room for the body to exist within this open, uncertain present. Thus, I also created an intermediate space, where time does not reach a climax but rather accumulates. A place where emotions don’t erupt; instead, they settle. A place where movement does not claim territory yet manages to exist. The body moves through a landscape of loss, memory, and exhaustion. Dance becomes an act of survival and obsessive repetition. The Point of No Return is not a choice. It is a condition. It is the human need to go on, even when we do not know exactly where we are heading,” notes Patricia Apergi.

Based on Cavafy’s poem “Far Away,” Ilias Hatzigeorgiou’s choreography explores the transition from the hypnosis of harsh everyday life to awakening, from oblivion and automatism to the memory of human creation and love, and back again. “It reminds us that we’ve all once been poets/artists – before the repetition of social patterns and the oblivion of normalcy erased our desire. The poet/artist within us is a child who suffocates while striving to survive as we insist on pushing them toward forgetting,” notes Ilias Hatzigeorgiou.

In Eva Georgitsopoulou’s choreography, inspired by Cavafy’s poem “September, 1903,” bodies dance within a fragile in-between space: a place of transition where situations transform. From desire to inspiration, from celebration to explosion, from sensuality to absence. “Their movement produces tensions, and the music turns into stage presence. Thoughts, movements, and compositions recur and shift like waves of embodied memory. Shame turns into extroversion, and pauses into an obsessive return to movement. A choreography, a collective dance rooted in vulnerability and exposure. Rituals, romances, and phantasies. Moments that appear only to fade again,” underscores Eva Georgitsopoulou.

Petros Touloudis’ sculptural installation attempts to create a space where tension does not erupt but lingers, as in Cavafy’s poetry. The tables, reminiscent of four-legged bodies in motion – in a position that discreetly evokes the archaic figure of Lamassu – seem like hybrid creatures that move across the space, carrying a moving soundscape with them. The installation serves as a mechanism that produces and conveys sound, transforming the stage into a field where poetry, music, and the body meet through the material quality of vibration—a space where emotions do not scream but rather echo across time, allowing room for imagination. “My first thoughts on the installation were not to craft an image for Cavafy’s poetry, but to create a space where something could happen. A space that moves, produces sound, and changes with the bodies and the music. Giorgos Koumendakis’ music provided, from the very beginning, the line of this feeling, and on it we gradually built the various levels of the performance,” notes Petros Touloudis.

Zacharias Karounis delivers a unique vocal performance of the set poems, accompanied by Angelina Tkatcheva on the santoor, Oswald Amiralis on percussion, the Oros Ensemble, and the Osmosis Saxophone Quartet. John Papatzanis leads percussion coaching and performs a wide variety of percussion instruments on stage alongside the dancers. The costumes are designed by Daglara, and the lighting design is created by Nikos Vlassopoulos.

Featuring the GNO Ballet dancers: Angelos Antoniou, Yannis Gantsios, Elena Kekkou, Marita Nikolitsa, Stefano Pietragalla, Daniele Pecorari, Yorgos Hatzopoulos, Cecilia Hatziemmanouil, Despina Chrysostomou