Category: Interviews

📚📚Theatre and performance lecturer, director and writer Natalie Katsou spoke to Reading Greece about the meeting point between #theatre and #poetry, as well as about experimentation as a strong moving force in her work.

"Experimentation for me is essentially a mixture of curiosity and playfulness, together with the pure enjoyment of writing as practice, as a physical way of being/doing.

[...] Theatre and poetry are constant projects/projectors. They reflect what is here now and they shape possibilities ahead. Looking for a different way to say the same thing, employing a different medium, genre, or language, or jumping from verse to soliloquies is a freedom and a compelling passion to share that freedom, to share ideas – ideas that are profoundly influenced by that adventure and practice. Wasn’t Borges who said that each writer constantly writes the same book?"

📷 ©Yiannis Katsaris

📚📚Where does poetry meet #psychology? Where do personal micro-stories meet the collective #History of the world?

Dr. Yiorgos Samoilis spoke to Reading Greece about his latest #poetry collection "Τa fyl(l)a" (Τhraka, 2023), his poetic language and the interrelation between the personal and the collective in his work.

"It is inevitable that the personal becomes embedded in my writing. I write from a place of subjectivity, my understanding of myself, the world, and those around me. I am both embodied and embedded, an Aristotelian social animal. Therefore, in my work, the personal cannot escape its encounter with the social and the cultural. For me, the creation of a poem entails a moment of encounter: my perceptual system takes something in-let’s say an object-and, through the construction of language and the use of imagination, transforms it into something different (sometimes beyond the conventional or the normative). In addition, as a social being, I am also a by-product of the collective, situated at this particular point in time and place. Thus, the personal, the cultural, and the sociological all come together to form a dish, a kind of soup, as I like to think of it composed of many ingredients thrown into a pot, my brain. I am not certain whether the dish is entirely edible, but I have done my best to stir its contents at the time when this collection was written".