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

Out of this process emerged a collective dramaturgy. Around 90 percent of the script was born in rehearsal, through improvisation, memory, and collision: philosophical fragments met street slang; political speech met personal recollection; everyday gestures of selling and buying were reimagined as theatrical scores.

At its center was an increasingly urgent question: What does it mean to "sell" and to "be sold"? Not only in markets of produce, but in markets of culture, attention, and identity.

In rehearsal, performers began to answer with stories — of neighborhoods, families, songs, and habits. What emerged was not definition but atmosphere: a shared sense of the ordinary life that persists beneath economic and cultural acceleration. A life marked by imperfection, loudness, informality, and endurance.

The market provided a lens through which to see this clearly. Fruits are sorted and graded; people, too, are increasingly measured, ranked, and made legible to systems of value. The performance asks whether anything remains outside this logic.

In 2025, the work was staged at the Athens Epidaurus Festival — Greece's leading cultural organization and one of the oldest continuously running festivals in Europe.

When Pitted Prunes traveled beyond Greece to China, Vasileiadou did not originally imagine such a journey. The idea still feels, in her words, "like a dream".