This August, "Halepas" returns to his homeland

Fοllowing a brief stop at the 8th International Festival of Andros on August 16th, the theater performance "Halepas", directed by Argyro Chioti and produced by Onassis Stegi, arrives on Tinos. Between silence and absurdity, stillness and creativity, a contemporary music tragedy awaits us, this time not against the backdrop of an Athenian stage, but that of a Cycladic island, where the great sculptor Yanoulis Chalepas was born and lived a large part of his life. At the Koumaros theater, on August 18th.

From his birth in the village of Pyrgos on the island of Tinos – amid the marble slabs and plentiful dust of his family’s stone cutting workshop – to his legendary sculpture of the “Sleeping Maiden” that stands inside the First Cemetery of Athens. And from his breakdown, his committal to a psychiatric hospital, and his many years spent in isolation up in the mountains of his island, through to his spiritual awakening and the sweeping renaissance that characterized his old age.

Halepas’s habitat, a unique greenhouse with scattered trees, creates a natural cypress grove. All within a soundscape dominated by the wind of Tinos, the noise of the quarrying marbles pinned in his mind, waking up our nightmares and dreams. Through dream-like illusions, Argyro Chioti walks down the difficult path that was the sculptor’s life.