A marketplace becomes a stage in Greek production at Chinese theater festival

On June 18, 19 and 20, the production was staged during the 2026 Aranya Theater Festival, which is held in Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, from June 17 to 28. The international theater event brings together 34 productions from 14 countries, including China, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Spain, Austria, Poland, Argentina, Chile, and Ireland, in a lineup designed to draw global attention.

Pitted Prunes became the name of the production after a handwritten sign spotted at a stall. The phrase opened a chain of associations: fruit engineered for convenience, stripped of seeds, shaped for predictability. Something living is altered so it can circulate more smoothly through systems of trade.

For Vasileiadou, this became a quiet but persistent metaphor. What happens when life — fruit, labor, even artistic production — is refined until its roughness disappears? What is lost when the "wild" is removed in exchange for efficiency, visibility, or market value?

The rehearsal room became a kind of second marketplace. The project, developed with Trohies Theatre, began in fieldwork: conversations with farmers, vendors, and producers. These testimonies were brought into rehearsal not as fixed material, but as raw exchange — spoken, tested, reshaped.