Bears in Libraries

Thanks to an exciting and ongoing creative relationship with Kalamata drama, Gabrielle has been able to work with international cohorts of actors and actors in training. She has been given Support, space, time, Freedom of creativity and inspiration to seed and develop several projects in Kalamata, Greece, since 2021.

Below are images and footage taken from two of these Reasearch and Developmental Periods.

The first of these, ‘Bears in Libraries’, took place for an invited audience in the beautiful Kalamata Library in December 2021. This Research and Development piece was made possible thanks not only to Kalamata Drama but also to, and in collaboration with, the Maria Callas Alumni Association of the Music School of Kalamata and the Cultural Centre of Kalamata. In the footage you can watch here, listen for the classical sound of Greek monothonic chant filling the space as the ‘humans- in- bear’ roam amongst the books and in and out of the ‘caged’ areas of this splendid library.

Images below thanks to the Maria Callas Alumni Association of the Music School of Kalamata

A second project seeded in this fertile region of the world was an exploration of King Lear with horses as the physical root to discovering the play and retelling its stories. Kalamata Drama, founder Andrew Visnevski along with executive manager George Iliopoulos crafted this three week intensive programme with the two focuses of Lear and horse at its heart. The actors looked at and worked with horses throughout the three week summer intensive alongside rigorous textual exploration and physical and vocal maintenance. Little by little they fed the physical language of the horse into the characters and environments of the play.

We worked in a series of incredible locations, both out doors and in, including the Theatre in the Municipal Cultural Centre of Kalamata, the Riding School of Kalamata and finally in Ancient Messene.

Photos by Kalamata Photography Association and Maria Callas Alumni Association of The Music School of Kalamata.