Vasia Attarian and Mirto Makridi: BINGO!

[1] The first photo

This is more or less how the idea of bingo was born—in the Messenger chat shown in the photo above. It happens to us sometimes, not too rarely, that we go through countless meetings without a result, and then suddenly a message comes through like a lightning strike and resolves everything. It went through many stages before becoming an application for Onassis AiR. But it was born quickly, as sometimes happens when you simultaneously know precisely what you’re looking for but haven’t got a clue what it looks like. And with exactly that feeling, we submitted our application to the program on the basis that we wanted to create a durational evening, with the audience playing bingo, while we talk about the present. If we had to distill our intention, it was to create a participatory performance that would last long and teeter between contemporary variety theater and an event in which our social and political nightmares would appear—along with the passage of time that has washed us ashore in the 21st century, and the passing of a single night where we play a rather pointless game of chance that, nevertheless, has taken the world by storm.

[2] The second photo: Onassis AiR began for us in September 2024. As a first step, we borrowed a bingo machine, which you can see here!

[3] For much of the time, there were three: Nefeli, Sotiria, and Ioanna. They were there for feedback meetings, presentations, ideas, and all kinds of support. They were—and still are—Onassis AiR.

[4] The fourth day of the week, Wednesday [the name of the day in Greek - "Tetarti"- sounds like the Greek number four]. It was the day of the collective lunches, which began with a sense of awkwardness and ended in meetings with Katerina, Urok, Catriona, Eva, Efthimis, Dimitris, and Meriç, and all kinds of conversations in the atrium.

[5] Five times we overturned the basic idea of how bingo is played in the performance, until Iliana and Konstantinos helped us figure it out during the dramaturgical meetings by asking us the right questions.

[6] We had six rehearsals with Maria, Evdoxia, and Prometheas—the evening’s callers—to play-test the game itself, some early content lines, and, above all, the structure. The connections between the numbers and historical dates, age, and quizzes emerged from these rehearsals.

[7] Seven hours at least is the amount of time it took Ioanna to translate the Open Days text into English after we sent it to her at the last minute, and of course, she made it on time!

[8] We spent eight hours at the Open Days dress rehearsal doing technical tests and then sat in complete silence to watch Urok, Katerina, Efthimis, and Chara in their own presentations. To this day, we still believe it was one of our most interesting days—it was October 30th, and not a drop of rain fell.

[9] December 9th officially marked the end of our three-month residency. What began as a simple idea in a conversation had become a large-scale project, with 40 recorded minutes of test performance with an audience in the atrium and new questions emerging for the next round of rehearsals.

[10] In the past ten years, we have never had the financial support—and therefore the time—to enter a proper development process for an idea before the final presentation deadline at its premiere.

[11] 11:00 in the morning, a walk through the atrium for the Open Days, with sunshine—the next photo.

[12] At 12 o’clock in the night, Efthimis arrived at Istanbul for the research trip, an experience that had everything: meetings, exhibitions, time with the co-fellows, and much more! The visit to Depo—and the conversation with the venue’s coordinator—remains an incredible gift.

[13] Left blank, like the floor numbers in the skyscrapers of New York.

[14] That’s how many versions of the logos we had to choose from for the callers’ T-shirts (in the next photo, you can see us trying to determine late at night—and the final printed T-shirt in the one after that).

[15] At number 15, for deeply personal reasons, we held a one-minute silence with the audience in the atrium. To this day, we believe it was one of the most important dramaturgical moments of the entire attempt.

[16] It took 16 tries for Elena (the choreographer) to teach the bingo song’s dance to Maria, Mirto, Prometheas, and Evdoxia. The song was written and performed live by Dimitris (composer, live music), and it went something like this:

Make your own damn luck

Bring it upside down

Spinning crossing winning

You can turn it around

[17] Seventeen euros was the bet we made amongst ourselves that the audience couldn’t stand up and join in to learn the dance, which we thankfully lost!

[18] Eighteen years old—the threshold of adulthood. Bingo is still in its adolescence, a wildly adventurous one, lucky enough to have had its structure tested in front of an audience, to receive feedback from its very first rehearsal from the co-fellows, to be supported by its callers in the initial stage of text development, and to have been performed first in a closed setting and then in a more open circle.

[19] There’s a word limit, so we’ll have to start wrapping up. But before we do, we need a clear record of the keywords of Onassis AiR: Nefeli, Sotiria, Ioanna, Efi, Georgia, Iliana, Konstantinos, Vasso, Mitsos, Efthimis, Urok, Catriona, Eva, Katerina, Chara, Meriç, and Alexandros.

[20] And those of the bingo night: Dimitris, Maria, Evdoxia, Prometheas, Elena.

[21] 21 is the key number in a common game of chance with cards. Over these three months, we came to the conclusion that luck and risk are central to this performance:

the human desire to take a chance on fate. Drawing from games of chance that have existed since antiquity and run through human history, we ultimately wanted to offer a strong incentive to all of us—performers and audience alike—to join this strange night: to try their luck. And we promise we can raise their adrenaline in an era of fractured reflexes.

We hope to meet again sometime, at some evening full of numbers, lots of luck, lots of hope, plenty of time, important historical moments, and failures with lots of music. To be continued.

Enjoy the spring,

Mirto, Vasia