Nena Venetsanou "Stiff Violets"
FOUGARO ARTCENTER welcomes for the first time Nena Venetsanou, who presents her latest work, "Stiff Violets", on Saturday 15 November.
Having set to music the texts of German-speaking and Greek women poets of the twentieth century, the celebrated singer and musician brings to the forefront the female poetic voices that survived World War II and turned devastation into a discourse on high art and power.
With lyricism and emotion, and accompanied by great musicians, Nena Venetsanou pays tribute to women who stood up to silence, believed in hope and raised their art in opposition to oblivion.
The show comes after a highly successful first cycle of staging "Stiff Violets" last winter at the Train at Rouf theatre in Athens.
Contributors
Nena Venetsanou vocals
Yorgos Tosikian classic guitar
Dimitris Papalambrou electric guitar
Solis Barkis percussion
Translation of poems from German to Greek: Ioanna Avramidou
Nena Venetsanou
Singer and composer Nena Venetsanou was born in Athens in 1955. She studied History of Art and Archaeology in France, at the same time training as a singer. Her recent pursuits include cultural and political actions in support of the antifascist front and the feminist movement. In 1992 she was awarded the Prix Charles Cros by the French Academy of Music, in 1992 she was awarded by the International Peace Bureau for her contribution to art and peace in Greece (1992), while in 2010 she was made a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic.
Stiff Violets
After the emblematic 1983 album "Pandora's Box", a rich artistic work for spreading the female poetic word of Greek women of the interwar period, Nena Venetsanou returns with a new anthology of poems by German-language literary figures Nellie Sachs, Masha Kaléko, Rose Ausländer, Else Lasker-Schüler, Edith Södergran, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Sarah Kirsch and Ilse Aichinger, and sets to music their Greek translations.
These German-speaking poets lived as stateless persons in various countries after World War II, rebuilding their relationship with the world through poetry in defiance of those who favoured silence. Their work sprouted like a flower from the ruins of war, giving voice to the speechless gaze that penetrates what is fragile and questions more than it answers.
Hosting these poets in Greek are the poems of Victoria Theodorou, Nina Nachmia, Giovanna Kalpaxi and Maria Tsiskaki's testimony from the Nazi camps. However much the status of women in Europe has been enhanced, the artistic contribution of women poets has yet to be suitably acknowledged. Their poetry, isolated or scattered across collections, loses its weight as a picture of female identity within the European world of twentieth-century Literature.
"Stiff Violets" have nothing to long for; these poems walk alone in silence, yet the power of song brings all the feelings they contain back to life.
