As part of the side events of the 1st Amateur Theater Groups Festival, the Culture Department of the Municipality of Rhodes is organizing its first theater workshop, led by the distinguished director, actor, and playwright Nikos Hatzipapas. The workshop will take place on Thursday, November 12, 2026, from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., at the Rhodes Municipal Theater.
This series of seminars aims to bridge the gap between professional theater and amateur creative endeavors. Through the guidance of distinguished figures in the arts, members of our island’s amateur theater groups—as well as anyone interested in the art of theater—will gain valuable knowledge, techniques, and skills, thereby enhancing the vitality and quality of their future performances.
A Few Words About the Workshop
The seminar, titled “Theater Direction: The Lazy Creator—From the First Reading to the Live Performance,” poses the following questions: How is a performance truly born? How do we move from the text to the stage, from an initial idea to an entire world, from the writer’s words to the actor’s live presence?
The workshop approaches directing as a process of discovery—not as the application of ready-made formulas, but as a journey of observation, choices, experimentation, mistakes, collaboration, and gradual composition.
The starting point is four simple yet crucial questions:
- What am I directing?
- Why am I directing it?
- What am I aiming for?
- How will I get there?
Through these questions, the entire process of a theatrical production is examined step by step: the selection of the play, research, reading and analysis of the text, understanding the characters and their relationships, the use of space and time, the atmosphere, the rhythm, staging, collaboration with the creative team, and the rehearsal process leading up to the performance.
Lecturer’s Biography
Nikos Hatzipapas was born in Rhodes and hails from Olympos on Karpathos. He has lived permanently in Athens since 1972. He studied theater, film, and graphic arts. In 1987, he founded the Magical Theater, and in 1997, the Helix Action Theater. His productions have been featured at numerous international festivals and European events in Great Britain, Poland, Belarus, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, India, and China (31st Festival of Nations).
From 1991 to 1995, he served as Director of the Municipal Regional Theater of Rhodes. From 1997 to 2000, he worked as a director at the National Theater. He has collaborated with the Experimental Stage of Art in Thessaloniki and numerous regional theaters.
Since 2009, he has organized the International Street Theater Festival in Athens. He served as Artistic Director for the European program Helidra – Dragon and the European program Kaspar Machine. He represented Greece at the Pan-European Nomadic University as part of the Aurillac International Theater Festival in France, which took place in 2008. In 2010, he participated as a guest at the Open Street International forum in Fermo, Italy. He served as Artistic Director of Rhodes’ bid for the European Capital of Culture 2021. Since 2015, he has organized the Valitsa Theater Festival—ASTFEST.
He has directed plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Molière, Carlo Goldoni, Anton Chekhov, F. García Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Beth Henley, Michel de Ghelderod, Michael Frayn, Yukio Mishima, Hugo Claus, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Kazantzakis, Theotokas, Ziogas, Matesi, Bost, Skourti, Kechaidis, Moursela, Lyberaki, Efthymiadis, Doriadis, Montcelese, Chourmouzis, Christofis, and others. He is a member of the Greek Directors’ Association and the International Theater Institute.
The eight short stories in the collection *Night* mark his first venture into prose. This was preceded in 1995 by the poetry collection *The End of a Narrative Myth* (Dodoni Publications). In 2022, the poetry collection “Lacrimosus” was published by “Otan” Publications, and in 2023, the poetry collection “The One Who Wanted.” In 2024, two of his plays were published: “Prost” and “The Stranger.” Since 2022, he has been teaching Theater Directing in the Department of Theater Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Dramaturgy at the “I PROVA” Higher School of Dramatic Arts.
Information
The seminars will be open to the public free of charge.