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After the Party

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From 8 November at the Eleni Papadaki stage of the Rex Theatre, the National Theatre of Greece presents Maria Zavakou’s After the party, a play about cyberbullying and the challenges faced by the youth of today, directed by Yolanda Markopoulou. It is a coming-of-age story set in the digital age and all that that entails: ‘likes’, red hearts, anonymity, violation of privacy, and internet rights. How safe do you really feel?

A teenage party begins. The social media generation, who live and breathe technology, are confronted with the dangers of the online world. Nothing is innocent any longer. Nothing is hidden. When young people, parents and teachers are forced to take a stand in a case of cyberbullying, a chain reaction reveals the nature of complicity and the role that silence plays in allowing violence to thrive. School, bedrooms, and even free time become like prisons. Who is telling the truth and who is lying? The boundaries between fact and fantasy are blurred. And reality is constantly slipping away.

The original script is based on true stories accumulated during field research carried out by the author. “After the Party” follows 5 teenagers, 2 boys and 3 girls, who are immersed in the world of social media and video games. The main character, Iris, a popular instagram influencer, falls victim of her boyfriend’s scheme to circulate naked pictures of her, after he falsely finds out that she wants to break up with him. The theme is harsh, the scenes are full of explosive emotions and drama, the language borrows a lot of Gen z online slang, the movement work is informed by gif repetitions and video-game characters’ movements.
 
The video on stage was conceptualized as a rich environment dressing a set full of different mapping surfaces. With the video design here we expect to see a hybrid world unravel, between the virtual and the physical, where all visual and graphic elements from devices emerge in larger scale, engulfing the characters’ actions. 
In terms of content, I used a lot of accumulated material from vecteezy, a stock platform, but ended up using a lot of AI tools, and this is where I would like to stand for a moment.
 
 
 

 

 

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