Home » Academics » Department of Music, Theatre Arts and Dance » Music, Theatre and Dance Research

Music, Theatre and Dance Research

Research Areas

  • Creative practice as research, especially within music performance, theater and dance
  • Associated research into the context and processes within performing arts
  • Pedagogical practice in the performing arts, and especially the link to creative practice

Research Objectives

  • To foster a creative community that is supportive of the exploration of new techniques and processes in artistic creative practice
  • To enable faculty to site their individual creative practice within this community, as well as creating links to the wider creative practice and artistic community
  • To sustain the current profile of active projects that mix creative practice with more conventional associated research

Research Projects -- Music

  • Group Singing as a Tool for Democracy: community music project & lecture & choir-led circle singing (January 2025) (Minakoulis)
  • Pertrach Project: studio recording of music setting Petrarch mixed with contemporary responses to his poetry, underway, to be presented in concert at the Italian Institute of Culture in Athens (Minakoulis).
  • Female Figures in Greek Mythology: collaborative project with Dr Elisa Barbessi (Sorbonne)to research and create a series of concerts of Italian cantatas, each based on a Homeric female figure. In collaboration with the Municipality of Athens and the Instituto Italiano diCultura. (Minakoulis).
  • Cello Ensemble: Masterclass and performance at the University of Wyoming Cello Festival(May 2025). Collaborative cello projects with Dr. B. Vanderborgh & Dr. N. Karakousoglou, involving new compositions/arrangements/improvisations and professional development seminars. (Jones).
  • Chomatsas Recording: studio recordingof‘Symplegades for cello and piano’, a new work by composer and music alumnae Stathis Chomatsas (Jones).
  • PolyTempora: research project about polytemporality in jazz, involving recording/video and writing. Part of it has already been recorded in 2019, continuation planned for 2025.Accompanying paper planned for submission (Amiris, Ladopoulos).
  • Mikis Theodorakis Project in concert–100years: Series of lecture-recitals and concerts presenting the music of Mikis Theodorakis in Greece and abroad, including works for piano, piano with orchestra, chamber, and vocal music. (Papageorgiou).
  • Mikis Theodorakis Recording Project–100years: Completion and release of recording project featuring“The Complete Piano Music of Mikis Theodorakis”,2nd edition, including new-recorded performances. (Papageorgiou).
  • The Chopin Project: “Frederic Chopin & George Sand”: A series of music–theatre performances in Athens and around Greece as piano soloist, orchestrator and arranger of theatrical text based on Chopin’s and Sand’s original letters. A project involving research at the Chopin Museum in Warsaw, with its first performance at the Athens Herodes Atticus Odeon with the LondonRoyal College of Music String Orchestra, conducted by PatrickBailey and directed by Jaroslaw Killian. (Papageorgiou).
  • Dialogues between Soloist and Orchestra: Working with the National Radio Symphony: A broadcasted lecture and live performance as pianosoloist with the Greek National Radio Symphony Orchestra (ERT), conducted by M. Oikonomou, in a program of 20th-century music, including American composers. (Papageorgiou)

Research Projects -- Theater

Katerina Drakopoulou

  • Performance and AI / Technology: Experiment with interactive digital environments, exploring how technology can reshape the creative process and the audience’s experience.
  • Develop and document scores for Dance / Performance.
  • Develop and stage collaborative group performance(devising).
  • Create and present solo performance.
  • Interdisciplinary collaborations-Partner with artists from other disciplines and experiment with interdisciplinary processes and practices.

Katerina Nikolopoulou

  • Presentation at the Demos center towards the end of January: Performing Borders and Democracy.
  • Research project that relates to the teaching of Professional Communication and the language Gen Z is using.
  • Continuous collaboration with the dance group Anima-Soma

Antonia Tsamouris

  • My book review on Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George andMartha will be published within the year at the special CDC issue of Comparative Drama (Western Michigan University). Inmy text I am examining one of Ed. Albee’s most well-known theatre plays that have been made into a film, that is, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
  • I have co-written the article“Whatever Happened to Grandma? The Performativity of Age in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and The American Dream”.Ed. Michael Y. Bennett, which will be published by the end of 2025, by Routledge in The Routledge Studies in EdwardAlbee and American Theatre.
  • In May 2025, I will be presenting my paper at the Eugene O’Neilworld World Conference that will be held at Athens University. My paper examines comparatively O’Neil’s A Long Day’s Day’sJourney Into Night to Ed. Albee’s A Delicate Balance in relation to aging studies.
  • My critique of Simon Stone’s performance of Medea, presented at the Athens Festival, summer 2024, will be published in January 2025 in “Critical Stages”, the international magazine for the Critique. In my performance review, I am examining Stone’s heroine in relation both to her ancient counterpart and in relation to the ageing studies with respect to female ageism.
  • My article on Edward Albee and some of his ageing heroines in relation to female ageism has been accepted for the celebratory volume since Albee’s birth (in the volume Theater and Performance, Michigan Uni. Press).

Thanos Vovolis

  • Presentation at the Demos Center–January 2025.Paper Presentation: Performance, Activism and Citizenship: The Experimental Theatre of Thrace.Abstract: Local communities and social groups nowadays interact to create a dialogic environment using the arts as a vehicle. The paper examines the case of the Experimental Theatre of Thrace as a pivotal Greek example of the emergence of new forms of citizenship as a performative, expressive practice. It provides us with an example of how artistic projects canregenerate communities and how communities are empowered to produce cultural artisticprojects where the creative process promotes ethical and social responsibility, awareness,and social sustainability
  • Paper presentation at the Eugene O’Neill Society’s 12th International Conference, May 27-30, 2025, University of Athens.Paper presentation: “Face and mask dichotomies in Eugene O’Neill’s masked dramas”By examining the detailed stage directions in Eugene O’Neill’s masked dramas‘The GreatGod Brown’, ‘Lazarus Laughed’and‘Days Without End’,the author approaches the motif ofthe mask with primary focus on the analysis of the layout of the stage space, thespatiotemporal dimensions of masking and the dialectics between the face(s) and themask(s)