An immersive performance between concert, theatre and installation
ENA ENA is the name of an imaginary Greek rural nightclub. Literally meaning “one by one,” it reminds us of the phrases “step by step,” “bit by bit,” “piece by piece.” A band, a singer, a waiter and a security camera give life to the world of the performance, interacting with each other and with the audience. The music is a microtonal amalgam of the Greek culture of klarina from the 1970s to the 1990s, blended with improvisation, electronic music and field recordings, and shaped by heavily amplified aesthetics: an uncanny paneghíri, the Greek folk countryside celebration.
Transformation is the work’s central dramaturgical principle. ENA ENA enters the world of klarina nightclubs, where a rural musical and social experience was carried into the Greek cities, reconfigured as urban nightlife. Personal memories and performative materials are de- and re-composed, while songs, bodies, clothes, voices, cameras, speakers, instruments and social roles repeatedly change function and position. The work marked an important step in Deligiannis’s development of composition as a transdisciplinary practice and opened the research trajectory that later continued through the Margaroni Residency, Xirómero/Dryland and Nightwater.
On this page
Inside the World of Klarina
Documentary Tools
Transformation, Not Representation
Composing Across Disciplines
Setting a Wider Trajectory
Credits
Related Pages
Inside the World of Klarina
The world of klarina extends beyond its music. It is shaped by the relations between musicians, singers, people dancing, waiters, families and audiences, and by nights whose duration is negotiated through songs, requests, drinking, money and social display. This world takes its name from the clarinet, the central instrument of the panighíri: the folk celebration through which music, dancing, food and local community come together, often lasting through the night into the early morning. As musicians carried this repertoire and its social practices into the cities, the open-air gathering found another form in indoor clubs. The relation between musicians and dancers remained central, while the introduction of amplification and electronic instruments, and the evolving economy of requested songs gradually reshaped the aesthetics of the culture.
For Deligiannis, this was not a culture encountered later through research. It (in)formed part of his family life and childhood. His father is a folk clarinetist, his mother was involved in folk dance and his sister in singing. As a child, he followed his parents to local feasts in villages and small towns, first as a listener and later joining his father on the musicians’ stage as a percussionist. Music was inseparable from everything surrounding it: people arriving and leaving, food being served, dancers entering and withdrawing, children moving through an adult environment, and musicians adjusting the intensity and duration of the event as it unfolded.
A childhood memory returned during the development of ENA ENA. At a panighíri in a mountain village, Deligiannis moved away from the gathering and stood behind a tree, watching from its edge. That distance transformed his perception of the entire event. From there, the live music, the dancing bodies, the crowd and the tables appeared as a composition in space. He still belonged to what he was observing, yet could temporarily disappear from the adults’ attention.
This position –inside a world and at the same time slightly outside it– became important to the work. It connected participation with observation, familiarity with estrangement, and the visible centre of the event with its fading periphery. The experience did not become a scene reproduced on stage. It offered a way of looking: close enough to be part of the culture, distant enough to notice how its bodies, roles, sounds and objects organise one another. Personal memory and cultural experience enter this construction in fragments.
ENA ENA (one by one) suggests succession, accumulation and repetition: one gesture following another, one version replacing or covering the previous one. The doubling of the word also evokes echo (delay), a defining feature of the amplified sound of klarina.
The work emerged from a culture Deligiannis had inherited and inhabited, but also learned to watch from a distance. It begins from that double involvement. It enters the codes of this world from within, then dissolves, repeats and transforms them until the nightclub becomes a place of its own.
Documentary Tools
The making of ENA ENA included a hybrid creation process, in which a documentary approach began with a simple shift: archival recordings, existing sounds, gestures and behaviours could be studied as compositional material. Documentation offered more than information about a subject. Through repeated listening and viewing, details could be isolated, transcribed and placed into new relations. A vocal line, a bodily attitude or a social exchange could operate both as a score and a found object, carrying its original context while being part of different layers of an interdisciplinary counterpoint.
These tools, first applied sonically in Ekínos, a composition made for Trio Grasp at Onassis Stegi, were developed through re-, an artistic research project that took a dynamic work-in-progress format and was presented in two draft versions in 2018 and 2019. Each presentation tested a changing combination of automated instruments, Deligiannis himself as a performer and a scenic environment that immersed the audience.
The starting point of re- was archival online documentation from the Greek klarina culture of the 1980s, including a short video from the legendary nightclub Elatos. The people appearing in this material became the focus of close observation: their gestures, facial expressions, vocal behaviour, performative presence and ways of interacting with each other. Deligiannis approached these details from the dual position of composer and solo performer, allowing the observed material to pass through his own body.
The documentation was used as a score, but not as a set of actions to be copied. Its fragments were repeated, exaggerated, interrupted and recombined until the source began to mutate. Deligiannis would attempt to re-enact several female figures drawn from a cultural world that was also partly his own, the failure of the attempt forming part of the dramaturgy, while the overall performance gradually decomposed into interactions between body, light, sound, scenography, text, robotics and audience. Family memories entered the same process in altered form: the musician-father became a robot musician, the singer-sister a self, the dancer-mother a collection of body parts trying to coordinate themselves, while the audience experienced the performance sitting at tables inside a provisional cabaret or indoor nightclub.
This arrangement was explored further in ENA ENA, where the social codes surrounding the performance became as important as the material on stage. Watching, drinking, proximity, exposure and the relation between performers and audience could all be tested alongside the musical and performative material. The scenic environment –an uncanny nightclub– would function as a system of roles and behaviours, not only as a visual reference or as a theatre stage.
In ENA ENA, the solitary performer of re- became part of a network formed by a singer, a band, an audio engineer, cameras, screens, objects, and an audience sharing the same space. Documentary attention moved from the study of selected figures towards the relations between acting bodies: who performs, who serves, who watches, who controls the sound, and how these functions organise the course of the event.
Musical procedures remained central to this expansion. Repetition, fragmentation, variation and recomposition were applied not only to songs and recorded sound, but also to bodies, speech, images, gestures, objects and spatial arrangements. Through this process, documentary material became a way of composing the social and performative world of ENA ENA.
Transformation, Not Representation
ENA ENA approaches the action of performing through re-enactment rather than representation. Its materials refer to existing bodies, social roles, musical practices and personal memories, yet they do not return as stable images of an original reality. Re-enactment becomes a way of turning back towards an experience and allowing it to acquire another form. What is recalled is repeated, displaced and altered under the conditions of the present.
This dramaturgical approach developed through Deligiannis’s dialogue with Yannis Michalopoulos. Their work focused less on what each element represented than on the relations it produced and the functions it could assume. A singer, a waiter, a musician, a security camera or an audience member enters the performance as who or what they actually are, but that position remains temporary. Meaning emerges as these functions move between bodies and devices: a gaze replaces a camera, a waiter occupies the singer’s presence, an audience becomes a spectacle to itself, an indoor reality mixes with an outdoor one.
The title already proposes this movement. ENA ENA is a repetition and a partition: one after another, one beside another, each presence remaining distinct. In Greek, éna also belongs to the neutral gender. It therefore introduces an intermediate territory between fixed positions —between male and female, child and adult, performer and spectator, centre and periphery. This intermediate space is not a neutral point where differences disappear. It is produced by the distance between two parts and by the attempt to cross, align or reverse the border separating them.
Each of these dipoles generates a relation and a space of transition. The child who leaves the feast remains connected to it through observation. The waiter exists between the audience and the artists, belonging fully to neither side. The security camera and the CCTV monitors mediate between seeing and being seen. Presence is understood through the possibility of absence; the centre becomes perceptible through a movement away from it.
Absence became especially charged during the period in which ENA ENA was developed (2020–2021). The pandemic had interrupted gathering and imposed distance between bodies, while digital communication produced new forms of remote presence. The performance brought an audience back into a physical space and placed this paradox inside its dramaturgy: people could be together while remaining separated, present while mediated through screens. The nightclub became a fantasy of gathering shaped by the recent experience of its impossibility.
The transitions occurring within the performance were allowed to unfold through a method nested within a dream logic. Beginning from memory, ENA ENA builds a world in which past experience and future desire can occupy the same space. A dream does not reconstruct events in their original order. It brings together incompatible times, bodies and places, allowing one figure to contain traces of another and one action to replace a previous one. In this sense, the entire performance operates as a re-enactment: an attempt to return to an experience while accepting that the return can only produce something different.
Composing Across Disciplines
ENA ENA developed through a series of workshops in which music, dramaturgy, scenography, performance, sound, costume, light and technology entered the process from an early stage. The work did not begin as a finished composition waiting to be staged. Its form emerged through experiments that allowed one discipline to affect the others: a spatial decision could alter the musical structure, a technical device could momentarily become a protagonist, and a performer’s action could reorganise the relation between sound and audience.
Deligiannis’s position moved across composition, stage direction, sound and performance, allowing him to work both from within the performative action and across its overall structure. The creative team he put together worked simultaneously through planning and concept meetings, and artistic and technical workshops. While studying found archival material of panighíria from the 1970s till the 1990s, the voice of Kiki Margaroni proved to be a focal point of the research’s sonic world. In particular, an old cassette recording of the song Ena ena keramhídi (one by one the roof tiles) sung by her became the main material around which the entire performance was constructed. At the same time, research conducted during the project re- brought in references which were tested anew during the creative process of ENA ENA. A waiter appearing in found video material, a singer’s dress, a search for songs that could expand the studied playlist, and research into vintage analogue sound equipment and instruments were all gradually incorporated into the workshops and the process of composing a hybrid performance installation in the format of a concert.
As these materials accumulated, the work with dramaturg Yannis Michalopoulos created an ongoing dialogue around the sequence of songs, performative actions and abstract poetic parts, in which the limited presence of language and the absence of a linear narrative created an interplay of potential meanings. Language required particular attention because of its tendency to dominate everything around it. Words entered the performance in fragments: sound checks, lyrics and announcements. Their meaning remained connected to sound, rhythm and performers’ practical actions, allowing speech to participate in the performance without becoming its principal narrative instrument.
The scenographic and lighting work of Roelof Pothuis developed alongside these questions. The nightclub environment had to contain the performance without illustrating it, while the placement of tables, musicians, cameras, monitors and technical equipment shaped how the audience watched and was watched. The memory of the child behind the tree watching a communal gathering, shared during the process, offered a way of understanding this spatial relation without turning the memory itself into a scene. Dedicated workshops throughout the development phase were designed to simultaneously merge and test sonic, performative and scenographic ideas, allowing them to influence and inform one another.
The band musicians worked with three songs from the culture of klarina. The songs came from a later phase of Greek rural folk music, in which newly composed melodies and lyrics during the 1970s and 1980s retained the sound and social function of older folk repertoire. The musicians revisited them through a continuous practice of variation, microtonality, duration, amplification, improvisation and deconstruction. Coming from backgrounds in jazz and free improvisation, their role extended beyond learning and playing the repertoire. Through their entrances, pauses, repetitions and movements, they continually rebuilt the sonic and spatial environment of the performance, dictating its social conditions. The folk singer’s work, in particular, involved more than vocal interpretation: voice, bodily presence, mediated image and the developing relation with the waiter were composed together.
Sound and technical systems were treated as active elements of the work. Live mixing, feedback, field recordings, CCTV, car speakers and technical noise entered the dramaturgy through their physical and temporal effects, with the sound engineer joining the performing team and remaining visibly present “on stage” throughout the work. Costume and scenographic materials also acquired functions beyond appearance: they altered bodies, redistributed attention and changed the way performers could relate to objects and to one another. The I/O team tried to include such materials and objects as early as possible in the creative process.
Their overall collaboration depended on substantial contributions from each team member, while the work retained a coherent artistic direction and internal logic. The different disciplines entered the process deeply enough to transform the work, while their relations were continuously shaped into a single compositional world. The concept of a score had different manifestations: transcribed music material, series of cues, parts developed orally, an overall dramaturgical score, a different kind of score for the sound engineer, and a full score bringing together all performative and sonic elements of the work.
Setting a Wider Trajectory
ENA ENA marked a pivotal point in a longer artistic and institutional trajectory. Both its hybrid format and performative world gave rise to artistic endeavours that could not be fully explored inside a single performance. In particular, the presence of folk singer Kiki Margaroni’s voice created the impulse to return to the people, places and cultural relations surrounding the archival recordings and to investigate them more closely.
ENA ENA also initiated a fruitful collaboration between I/O, Gaudeamus and Onassis Stegi. Produced through I/O and co-commissioned by Gaudeamus and Stegi after an extended dialogue, the project bridged artistic and production activities in Greece and the Netherlands and helped secure support from the Performing Arts Fund NL internationalisation programme. The performance was presented multiple times across the Netherlands – at Gaudeamus, Muziekgebouw and Korzo – as well as at Stegi in Greece and Nicosia Municipal Theatre in Cyprus.
The collaboration with Stegi flourished further through its full support for the Margaroni Residency, a custom-tailored long-term residency at Onassis AiR initiated and directed by Thanasis Deligiannis and Yannis Michalopoulos in 2022–2023. The residency provided the right context for in-depth interdisciplinary artistic research into the culture that gave birth to ENA ENA. Borrowing the folk singer’s name, the residency turned towards fieldwork in rural communities and at local feasts, while tracing musical histories, agricultural life, and shifting economic and social conditions over the past decades. The second phase of the residency focused on how the documented material could be worked with and recomposed into a performative experience.
The Margaroni Residency’s results led to the immersive installation Xirómero/Dryland for the Greek Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024, and the large-scale performance installation Nightwater at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam in 2025. Through this trajectory, ENA ENA marked an important development in Deligiannis’s artistic approach, as composition increasingly became a transdisciplinary practice capable of organising sound, bodies, images, objects, spaces and social relations within a single performative world.
Credits
Thanasis Deligiannis | concept, stage direction, sound design, performance
Natasa Tsakiridou | voice
George Dumitriu | violin
Kaja Draksler | keyboards
Onno Govaert | drums
Yannis Michalopoulos | dramaturgy
Roelof Pothuis | set and light design
Vasiliki Sourri | costume design
Danai Belosinof | assistant director and production assistance
Kostas Chaikalis | audio engineer
Konstantinos Margkas | technical director and light technician
David Jonas | creative coder
Frank van der Weij | project development
Elia Kalogianni & Yorgos Kyvernitis | documentation
Production and Support
ENA ENA was created and produced by I/O; commissioned and co-produced by Onassis Stegi and Gaudeamus.
With the support of the Performing Arts Fund NL, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Onassis Stegi’s Outward Turn programme, Norma Fund, Source Elements, Het Motorblok and George Ignatides.
Related Pages
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