As part of the City of Athens’ popular This Is Athens City Festival 2026, performer, pianist, and producer Melachrinos Velentzas presents *Rebirth*: a performance that actively engages the audience, exploring everything we have left behind and everything that lies ahead.
A piano lay abandoned in a house in Athens. Its inactive and neglected body remained dormant for years, ever since the child who once played it had stopped. Not by choice. His connection to Music, to himself, and to others had been severed.
The performer transports this piano from the private space of his home to the public spaces of the National Garden and Plaka. At these two iconic landmarks of Athens, the piano will sound once more and its story will be told. The piano’s return to life will take place through a ritualistic process, with the audience as witnesses.
In the second part of the performance, anyone who wishes to do so will have the opportunity to write their own story about their relationship with the piano, music, or even their own life. Accompanied by the sounds of live piano music, a collective in-situ activity will take place, involving the writing and placement of these stories inside the stools, which will be located in the surrounding area and which belong to other abandoned and discarded pianos.
“Rebirth,” which incorporates elements of installation, performance, and happening, is a representative example of Melachrinos Velentzas’s long-term research, in which he collects pianos that have not been played for years and, along with them, gathers their stories. All of this research material will be captured in The Piano Cemetery: a large-scale installation with parallel actions, where a chorus of pianos and human stories will compose the collective score, inviting the visitor to remember.
To play again.
“Pianos are like people: they carry memories within them, etched into their very being. When I was little, I remember reading quite often the stern phrase, usually written on a yellowed piece of paper on the closed lid of the piano: ‘DO NOT TOUCH.’
Pianos are like people: they need contact. Otherwise, in one way or another, they slowly die, and their sound fades away little by little. Whatever we left unfinished may not have been our choice. And that is why it is worth revisiting that inner place of ours, where the things that concerned us were left unresolved.
Through Rebirth, the piano will return to life, freed from the burdens of the past. Melodies that unite and move us will emerge from its body. To remind us that the piano deteriorates when it is not played. Not when it is played. Just as man himself decays and is lost when he loses the joy of play and the essence of connection.”
Melachrinos Velentzas
Information
Monday 11 May Plaka| 21:00 – 23:00 | info
Friday 22 May National Garden| 18:00 – 19:30 | info
Admission is free
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