Cafe Rebetika! Greek Music, Theatre and Dance from the Heart

Cafe Rebetika!,a dramatic love story set in the slums of 1930s urban Greece amongst the rise of rebetika, the "Greek blues," is conceived and directed by Stephen Helper. He’s best known as the co-creator of the Broadway hit Smokey Joe’s Café. Neil Litchfield caught up with him.

Set in a hashden in the slums of Piraeus, the port city of Athens, Cafe Rebetika!features cabaret, music, theatre and dance all uniting in a celebration of life and the exotic and gutsy sub-culture of rebetika and captures the characters at the heart of the Greek blues - drug addicts, prostitutes, anarchists, refugees, prisoners, Communists and drifters.

Where did the inspiration for Cafe Rebetika spring from?

“It came from seeing an historic photograph, taken in 1935, of a bunch of men, probably in their 40s and 50s, sitting on crates and chairs in an alleyway,” Stephen Helper said. “These guys looked pretty tough, but then they were holding musical instruments like the bouzouki, guitars and other exotic looking instruments, similar to where the modern day rock band got their inspiration.

“I was wondering who they were. I had never heard of Rebetika before, and my wife is of Greek background. So I thought, let’s listen to some of their music.

“I was smitten. And then there’s the (captivating) stories behind the music, and the men and women who sang them.

 “In 1922 there was what the Greeks call ‘The Great Catastrophe,’ a less-known ethnic cleansing, where a million people were brutally forced out of Turkey. Many of them, Greek Orthodox people, fled back to Greece.

“A lot of the people forced out were middle class, reasonably well educated, and they had music in their lives as well. But it didn’t matter who you were, you lost everything, and found yourself back on the shores of Greece. Well, you thought, at least you’ve got Greece to go to, but all the Greeks there turned their backs and said you don’t belong here, we don’t care if you’re Greek, we have enough problems.

“So many of them led very desperate lives in the slums.”

Rebetika, or the Greek blues, grew out of these displaced people mixing with the other outcasts of Greek society in the slums.

“It came out of this heartfelt, fabulously rhythmic, passionate, funny music that is so distinctive. It combines Turkish music, but also because Pireas was such a port city, with influences from Ireland, and the violin, the Balkans, and the clarinet, and the piano accordion. Everything meshed together, with a common feeling of people wanting to transcend the pain of their life, sort of like Flamenco and the American Blues. It’s out of that same spirit of both despair and resilience.

“And it’s so unpretentious. When you sing, or you hear one of these songs, you feel like you’ve a chord plugged into the heart and soul of the guy who wrote the song, and it’s just coming straight out – it’s very direct, and it speaks to everyone, even if you don’t know the words. We do our show with surtitles, so everyone does. You just feel you know where it’s coming from. It’s so human.”

Cafe Rebetika was initiated while Stephen Helper was part of the Multi Cultural Arts Development Program, sponsored by the Australia Council and RMIT.

“I love, and have done a lot of, musicals, but I was getting a bit tired of them and wanting to regenerate some creative juices, so I took on this program which dealt with diversity, and dealing with cultures outside your own.

“In order to show that you’d actually learnt something, you had to have a hypothetical project.

“My wife had record albums at home with pictures of these old guys. I think she at one stage she did say to me, ‘Oh, that’s Rebetika music,’ but they were on vinyl, and we weren’t listening to vinyl any more. So the inspiration came from the combination of my own personal need to expand my horizons creatively, and this program having to have a hypothetical project to demonstrate all the things like cultural brokerage, and other things we’d learnt about how to pay respect to another culture and how to engage with it in a creative way, and my wife’s record collection.”

Over the last five years Stephen Helper’s project has gone way past the hypothetical, and Cafe Rebetika is the result. The work premiered at the Arts Centre in 2009, subsequently touring the Eastern States, culminating in a sell-out season at the Sydney Opera House earlier this year.

What can audiences expect?

“Great Greek hospitality, a great deal of laughter and a debate amongst the characters about how to lead your life. They can expect sensational music. I just can’t help but emphasise the power and the joy and the radiating quality. You can’t help but tap your feet when it starts up – it’s that infectious.

“In Melbourne there are a couple of Rebetika bands, and we’re really fortunate to have the band who call themselves Rebetiki performing every night in the show, and they are part of the show.

“They to have been important in the creative development of the show, and their knowledge of Rebetika is quite deep.

“It’s a play with music, where the songs extend the characters, about a man who works very hard to live by his own rules of personal integrity. He sees that the world is so corrupt, and he says to himself, if I obey the political or religious leaders, I’m just following in the steps of corruption.”

And dance?

“Absolutely! Think of Zorba, think of the joy of life, and this music is just so energetic. It’s defiant  - I know things are tough, but we’re going to have fun anyway, and we’re going to dance, and we’re going to have a sense of fullness to our lives, and no-one can take that away from us. ”

Cafe Rebetika! plays at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, from November 3 to 13, 2011.

Photographer: John Tsiavis

Link.

To keep up with the latest news and reviews at Stage Whispers, click here to like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.