AEF2025: Tenant

The Athens Epidaurus Festival celebrates its 70th edition in 2025, with 95 days of artistic brilliance featuring over 3,000 artists from 14 countries. From iconic venues in Athens like the Herodeion, Pireos 260, and the revived City of Athens Lycabettus Theatre, to the grand finale in Epidaurus, the festival brings the world’s top performances to Greece’s stages.

This year’s programme includes world premieres, new commissions, and exciting artistic strands such as Contemporary Ancients, which reimagines Greek tragedy, and Fierce Women in Performance, exploring gender and power. The GRAPE – Greek Agora of Performance platform highlights emerging Greek talent, while the Subset Festival brings experimental sounds to the stage. Cycles Roots revisits folk traditions with a fresh twist.

Check out our curated picks from this year's programme here.

Step inside a house made of light, memory and moving images in Tenant, a captivating video installation by artist and video designer Pantelis Makkas. Set inside a transparent structure at Pireos 260, the work brings together fifteen years of theatre collaborations — from Euripides and Shakespeare to Pinter and Dario Fo.

But this isn’t just a retrospective. Tenant places video not in the background, but centre stage. Scenes from classic plays are reimagined, projected and transformed into something entirely new.

For Makkas, a “tenant” is more than someone who occupies a space — it’s a presence that lingers. In this glowing house of memory, ghosts of the theatre drift across translucent walls. Characters appear, vanish and re-emerge in unexpected ways. Familiar tales shift and ripple with every glance.

It’s a visually rich encounter with theatre’s past — less sit-down-and-watch, more walk-around-and-feel.