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Socrates Now
October 20, 2017 @ 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm +04
About the Event:
“Socrates Now” is a delightful and quite humorous dramatization of the famous philosopher’s defense and his rebuttals to a guilty verdict and sentence to death. In the Apology, reported to us by Socrates’ disciple, Plato, the wise man of Athens firmly and eloquently defends himself – rather than apologizing in the contemporary sense – against politically motivated accusations of not believing in the gods of the state, and of corrupting the Athenian youth.
Yannis Simonides channels the eccentric yet magnetic personality of Socrates and offers a profoundly social, political, but above all human work which captivates the audience with the humour, immediacy and simplicity of its theatrical rendition.
The presentation has toured the world with rave reviews. The event is to celebrate 25 years of diplomatic relations between Armenia and Greece.
About the Speaker:
Yannis Simonides was born in Constantinople and raised in Athens. He is a Yale trained actor, director, producer. He has served as professor and chair of the New York University Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department and as the executive director of Hellenic Public Radio in New York. He is the founder and director of the Greek Theater of New York (Elliniko Theatro), which is celebrating 36 years of continuous service. His performance work includes plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Brecht, Kazantzakis and others, along with solo and ensemble pieces culled from the writings of Plato, Cavafy, Makriyannis, Gogol and others. He has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts (USA), the Greek Ministries of Culture, Education and Foreign Affairs, the Onassis, Kostopoulos, Niarchos, Tsakos and Leventis Foundations, IBM, Mobil and Time Warner. He has narrated the PBS television specials Axion Esti, Visions of Greece and Return to the Homeland, and he has received an Emmy award for producing and narrating the documentary “A Light Still Bright” on the Greek community of Istanbul. He has performed the Apology of Socrates to hundreds of thousands of audiences worldwide, and is scheduled to take it on tour in the USA, Georgia, Switzerland, Scotland, Greece and Cyprus through 2017. As a founding member of the international literary organization “The Readers of Homer”, he has co-produced marathon audience-participation readings-celebrations of the Iliad and Odyssey in Chios and Kos in Greece, the Library of Alexandria, the University of Uruguay in Montevideo, the 92nd Street Y in New York, the Roman Odeon in Troy, the Getty Villa in Malibu and Les Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels. He is currently at work on a theatrical rendition of Plato’s Republic and on Euripides’ Bacchae with Maori artists in New Zealand. He was recently honored by the city of Athens as Ambassador of Hellenism for his lifelong service to Greek arts and letters worldwide.
Distinguished guests:
Nafsika Nancy Eva Vraila, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Greece to the Republic of Armenia
Organizers and partners:
Embassy of Greece in Armenia
RA Ministry of Culture
Elliniko Theatro
American University of Armenia
Greek National Tourism Organisation
Coca-Cola Hellenic Armenia Company
Aegean Airways
Charentsi 28 Restaurant
Language: English with translation into Armenian
