Lyto Triantafyllidou

Artist statement

Lyto Triantafyllidou is a theater director and performance maker, interested in exploring new ideas, colorful stories, and unfamiliar cultures, by creating artistic works that expand an audience’s moral imagination.

She is currently active in Athens, Greece. She has presented her work at different festivals and platforms in the United States, the UK, Israel, Italy, and Greece. Highlights of her directing projects include: Villa by Guillermo Calderon (Mikro Theatro Keramikou), Call Elsewhere by Stav Palti-Negev (New York Live Arts), I Want A Country by Andreas Flourakis (Martha Graham Theater), Miss Margarida’s Way by Roberto Athayde (Shetler Studios), Pool (No Water) by Mark Ravenhill (NSD), Desdemonas’ based on Othello (Cleio Theater), Cymbeline (NSD), The Line by Israel Horovitz (CondACT art club). In 2016, Lyto adapted and directed Mistero Buffo by Dario Fo. It was first presented as a site-specific performance at the Balcony Theater at West Park Presbyterian Church, New York. The performance was awarded Best Physical Theater Show at United Solo Theater Festival, NY, and Producers’ Award at Hollywood Fringe Festival. It was also presented at the Chicago Fringe Festival and Akko Theater Festival in Israel. The final performance of Mistero Buffo was at Cockpit Theater in London.

In other cases, my texts, short phrases or theatrical monologues, diary entries, fictional user manuals, instructions for mapping a terrain, or even an entire novel, involve ‘autofiction’. In an intimate confessional tone or an elaborate novelistic one my narratives point at female characters voicing their opinions on art, life and ‘couple politics’.
Another aspect of my work, this time in collaboration with performance artist Vana Kostayola, is an interest in feminine rituals of reclaiming power (real or spiritual). In that vein, our project Women Telling the Future (Espace Saules d’Out, Geneva; MCBA, Lausanne; Grand Palais, Bern) united Greek women practicing a traditional; non-commercial divination ritual, cafedomancy – the reading of the future in coffee grounds. In a succulent neo-oriental salon, the public was offered a rendezvous with an oracle as well as a series of activities to get rid of trauma, activities such as crawling, drawing, writing and smashing things. Influenced both by the festive ambiance of the greek ‘bouzoukia’ subculture as well as Christian ritualistic practices, this participative performance transformed the public into actors occupying the center of the scene. The performance apparatus was set so that several cultural reflexes between « the East and the West » materialized as open concepts, without being staged, and the women acting as mediators played both with the role of the female artist, and that of the witch.

At the same time, Lyto works on practice-led research projects that focus mainly on the notion of ’social imaginaries’. In 2020 she was part of the Beyond the SUD artistic residency, a program with a principal goal of connecting artists from South America with South European countries. The collaborations that flourished during this residency are currently continuing as part of the R-Evolution Residency. In 2019 she was a participant in the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program in Visual and Multidisciplinary Arts.

Lyto Triantafyllidou graduated from the MFA Directing program at The New School for Drama in 2015 and she holds a BA degree (directing major) from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Fines Arts, School for Drama.