-a compass to connection-
Many countries show dramatic numbers of loneliness and depression. Ten years ago, musical journalist Andrea Voets started looking for a way of living in closer contact with others. She ended up in Greece, where she feels welcome and carried by lots of strangers around her. How do the Greeks manage this, in the midsts of a deep economic crisis?
While We Live was listed as one of the best productions of 2020 by Dutch quality-newspaper NRC.
For While We Live -a compass to connection-, Andrea Voets makes a social roadtrip through Greece: via the metropole of Athens and the remote, tiny island of Lipsi towards the mystical mountains of Eipiros. Together with dozens of Greeks of her generation, she deciphers their social logic and tools for meaningful contact, as an answer to fundamental loneliness in Western societies.
Andrea searches for ways out of this problem, in group-conversations about trust, openness, sharing, togetherness, closeness, the experience of time, rituals and tears-without-words. We get a secret peek into fundamental, ancient values, that lie at the base of meaningful contact. Practical ethics, filotimo & filoxenia, the connection with those who came before us, a surprising understanding of catharsis the spontaneous concept of glenti. While We Live presents these ideas as actions that can easily be put into practice by all of us, once you have had the chance to experience them a first time in the theater.
While We Live allows everybody in need of a different social perspective to experience a new compass to connection.
Created at De Balie in Amsterdam, supported by the FPK, AFK, L. Klein Stiftung, the BNG- & Cultuurfonds.
While We Live was named in the list of best classical music 2020 by the Dutch quality newspaper NRC.