Elena
Stamatopoulou
Elena Stamatopoulou has studied informatics, cinema, and theatre. She is a graduate of Drama School at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, specializing in Directing and Dramaturgy-Performance Studies.
She holds a PhD from there also (her doctoral thesis was completed with a scholarship from the State Scholarships Foundation) and she is a postgraduate historical researcher at the Ionian University. In 2022, she completed her postdoctoral research at Drama School of Aristotle University on the actor Manos Katrakis and the file held on him by the state security.
Snapshots from performances
She has worked as an educator in Secondary Education as an Informatics and Theatre Studies teacher. She created a theatre group at High School of Koufonissia, a very small island, where she was teaching, for three years (2013-2016), participating in 2014 in the International Youth Festival of Ancient Drama in ancient Messene with the performance of Euripides' Troades. She also worked theatrically with students at EPAL Moudanion, but the pandemic halted further development. In 2021, she was transferred to the Music School of Thessaloniki, where she performed a musical-theatrical performance against school bullying in 2022.
A founding member, director, and performer since 2002 in the theatre collective Facta Non Verba, presenting 40 performances mainly in Thessaloniki but also in Athens, Ioannina, Patras, Xanthi, and Volos. Her choices range from original texts, connections, and collective creations-performances such as: Ragtime, Nois, Pause, Fragments, A day like the others, Plan F Schema A and B', a dialogue with Psychosis 4:48 by Sarah Kane, as well as almost classic theatrical works, such as Genet's The Maids, Waiting for Godot, and Endgame by Beckett, Büchner's Woyzeck, The Investigation by Weiss, The Parade by Anagnostaki, and others. She premiered Gagarin Way by Gregory Burke in 2012 and presented the contemporary American play Recovery by Anne Marilyn Lucas in a European premiere on March 7, 2020, in the presence of the playwright.
In recent years, within the Theatre of Communication, she systematically engages with the Greek civil war, through a research-experimental project titled Kör, experimenting, among others, with the connection between nature and history, having organized three-day seminars in natural environments where significant battles of the civil war took place, in Nestorio, Grammos, at the National Reconciliation Park, Aetomilitsa, and the Arrenes lakes in March 2019 and summer 2020. She also works on projects like the Liberated Zones, which started as a closed research workshop and opened to the public in the city's public spaces. These projects, which she started working on in 2017, combine energy techniques with the original theatrical tools developed by the group over two decades, aiming for connection rather than separation.
In these projects, she has begun to develop and organize a method with artistic and therapeutic goals known as guided theatrical meditation.
She has attended seminars in Greece and abroad on physical and political theatre.
For example, physical theatre and performance: Ludwik Flaszen, a close collaborator of Grotowski, Richard Nieoczym, a student and collaborator of Grotowski, Gregor Weber, a butoh dancer and teacher, summer course on physical theatre at East 17 University in London, seminars with Dimitris Varkas, Nancy Stamatopoulou, Sissy Doutsiou, etc.
Political theatre: Collective creation with The Living Theatre in Livorno, Italy, with Bolivian director Cesar Brie at Udk University in Berlin.
She organizes and conducts acting and directing seminars, artistic-educational projects, as well as open classes in activation and therapeutic theatre. Certified Qigong teacher.
For two academic years (2017-2019), she taught courses in theatre history and research methodology at the Theatre Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In 2022, she was approved as a member of the Special Teaching Staff (E.E.P.) in the same department. She has participated in conferences with presentations on theatre studies and education, as well as in events and organizations of similar themes. Theatre as a historical source is her original contribution to the research field, with corresponding publications and presentations, as well as her postgraduate thesis on post-war Modern Greek farce comedy as a historical source for studying the period of the Greek civil war.
Her book has been published:
The Modern Greek Theatre during the Years of the Emaciated Democracy (1944-1967),
by Isnafi Publications in two volumes.