HISTORY
"Kudos to The Beggars' Operas and I hope they go on with the same passion" Stefanos Lazaridis
"Young, uninhibited, respectfully insolent and essentially innovative", as described by Greek daily I Kathimerini, the music theatre company "The Beggars' Operas" was founded in 2002 in Athens, Greece by composer Kharálampos Goyós, designer Constantinos Zamanis and production manager Gabriella Triantafyllis, focusing on the production of low-cost opera and music theatre with a modern aesthetic.
In marked contrast to the rigorous coding of the institutionalised spectacle commonly understood as "opera", which is defined by dogmatic notions, gigantism, high costs and a technocratic approach to both musical and theatrical expression, "The Beggars' Operas" aimed towards the creation of "non-dogmatic opera", characterised by equivalence between musical and theatrical expressive means, rational production processes, democratic targeting, and ideological and aesthetic flexibility. The company's belief has been that music theatre, rather than a genre made by, and for, "experts" and "connoisseurs", is an art accessible to all kinds of spectators, provided that it is approached in the right spirit: namely, as theatre, and not as "spectacle".
From 2005 to 2014, "The Beggars' Operas" presented and co-presented 18 music theatre productions in Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras and Berlin, ranging from contemporary versions of classic repertory pieces to first performances of new works, and from experimental music theatre to Greek operetta and musical. Production models varied accordingly to the specifics of each project, and ranged from "orthodox" productions with institutional support (in collaboration with organisations such as the Athens Festival, the Dimitria Festival, the Orchestra of Colours and the Piraeus Municipal Theatre) to "heretic" underground happenings in conjunction with institutions such as the State of Sabotage and the Athens Biennale in spaces such as BIOS, the "Knot Gallery", the Thessaloniki City Hall, the former Athens Stock Exchange and the "Embros" Theatre occupation in Athens. Valuing the ideal of collaboration between aesthetically progressive forces, "The Beggars' Operas" worked with several musical and theatrical organisations of comparable ideology and range, such as the Neuköllner Oper, the dissonArt ensemble, the ARTéfacts ensemble, the Latinitas Nostra early music ensemble, the "vasistas" theatre group etc. They also engineered three complete recordings of music theatre pieces, Kharálampos Goyós's parody-opera Little Red Riding Hood and the (Good) Wolf (issued on CD by the Orchestra of Colours), populist oratorio New Greece (The Making-Of) (digital album on fytini.com) and Nikos Kypourgos's musical Silence, the King Is Listening (in preparation).
Since 2015, "The Beggars' Operas" have been active as an arts production company, collaborating in opera, music theatre, theatre and dance productions.
"The Beggars' Operas" have been subsidised twice by the Greek Ministry of Culture, for the seasons 2009/10 and 2011/12. (3/4 of the latter subsidy remained undisbursed.) In 2020, they also received the special subsidy for damages caused by the measures taken against the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.