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The Duty of Comedy (EU Culture Programme 2012-2013)
The EU’s Culture programme (2007-2013) has a budget of €400 million for projects and initiatives to celebrate Europe’s cultural diversity and enhance our shared cultural heritage through the development of cross-border co-operation between cultural operators and institutions.

Three objectives…

The Culture programme aims to achieve three main objectives: to promote cross-border mobility of those working in the cultural sector; to encourage the transnational circulation of cultural and artistic output; and to foster intercultural dialogue.

…and three strands

For the achievement of these objectives, the programme supports three strands of activities: cultural actions; European-level cultural bodies; and analysis and dissemination activities.

Support for cultural actions

This strand enables a wide range of cultural organisations coming from various countries to cooperate on cultural and artistic projects. This strand includes three sub-categories:
 * 1) Multi-annual co-operation projects, running over a period of three to five years.
 * 2) Co-operation measures, running over a maximum period of two years.
 * 3) Special measures, which relate to high-profile actions of considerable scale and scope. The support to European Capitals of Cultureand festivals with a European dimension fall under this sub-strand.

Support for cultural bodies

This strand supports cultural bodies at European level. They encourage exchanges between cultural organisations in different European countries, identify the European artistic community’s needs, represent the sector in dealing with EU institutions, participate in the public debate on cultural issues, and act as European cultural ambassadors.

Support for policy analysis and dissemination activities

This strand supports analysis and dissemination activities, which help to raise awareness of the Culture programme and its activities in various ways. The first focus is on providing support for analyses in the field of cultural co-operation and policy development.

The second is by supporting cultural contact points which have been established to ensure the effective grassroots dissemination of practical and targeted information on the programme locally in all participating countries.

The third focus is on supporting the collection and dissemination of information, so that cultural operators can make use of the output and results of previous EU-funded projects. This category also supports cooperation projects between private or public organisations which have direct and practical experience in the analysis, evaluation, or impact assessment of cultural policies at local, regional, national and/or European levels, related to one or more of the 3 objectives of the European Agenda for culture.

The Project
It is universally acclaimed that Aristophanes, the great Ancient Greek comedy-writer, is one of the most significant personalities in terms of comedy writing. His plays, composed and performed in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries BC, are the earliest surviving record of comic drama in European culture. The artistic influence of his plays is immeasurable, given that they have contributed to the history of European theatre.

Genuine representative of Attic comedy, a fully-formed and remarkably complex poetic genre which is wedded to its own cultural moment but also profoundly resonant for audiences and readers up to our time, Aristophanes writes about concerns that nearly all societies tangle with: domestic and international politics, celebrity lives and their scandals, popular entertainment, education and so on. Perhaps above all, his plots are famous for playing up with the conflict between tradition and conservatism on the one hand, innovation and unconventionality on the other.

Aristophanes depicts the fall of the Athenian democracy, raising the Attic comedy on the peak of its glory, while perfecting its social function. A new era was born with Aristophanes, an era of turbulence and reassessment of all. The reassessment of criticism was brought by through his lyric outspokenness. Under no obligation to any direction, he shouted out the truth; he proclaimed his disrespect for the holy, his hatred of injustice and towards all responsible for the suffering of the people; he made his duty for man and society publicly known. His concentration on this duty makes his work coherent. Indeed, by analyzing the name of Aristophanes, we may actually realize the excellent heritage he gave to the youngsters via his works; άριστος+φαίνω (aristos+faino) which stand for: excellent+shine.

With great sensitivity and a long-term service on Aristophanes’ work, studying and writing brilliant pieces of music on almost all of his comedies, Greek Musical Theatre Group SPEIRA-SPEIRA with the co-operation of skillful European partners, propose a performing arts project on Aristophanes, THE DUTY OF COMEDY, feeling how timelessly important and up to date are the comedy writer’s ideas.

The ancient Greek comedy writer’s heritage to humanity is today as powerful as ever. His ideas, as spoken by the chorus in his plays, depict his strong belief in justice, in respect, in freedom, in the educational role of theatre, in all great ancient Greek values, in the duty a comedy writer has towards society. By his hilarious stories and his outspokenness, his excellent satire and criticism, he informs the public opinion on the truth as he sees it in the spirit of the Athenian democracy of his era.

The DUTY OF COMEDY project focuses on chorus, which is a structural element of comedy –considering the fact that many of Aristophanes’ plays are named after the identity of the chorus- and on choral songs, which draw their subjects from shared myths of universal-interest topics, such as: love, loneliness, youth, old age, foreign lands, betrayal, futility, hope, celebration, feast, pleasure, beauty.

Involving professionals from many cultural fields, the DUTY OF COMEDY intends to create a genuinely European product, based on the creative collaboration among all participants. Primary objective is to unite diverse cultural backgrounds, such as the ones of the participant organizations, under the perspective of comedy and to produce artistic group work; to promote dialogue between various artists in order to perform the implementation activities of one project inspired by Aristophanes’ work; to serve to the value of co-operation not only between various European countries and cultures, but also various arts.