NOSTOS, Camden People’s Theatre
With Camden Fringe 2025 fast approaching, we’re publishing interviews every day of July (and quite possibly into August) to highlight the sheer range of shows on offer this year. This year the festival has expanded even further, even hosting shows as far afield as Baron’s Court Theatre, as well as all the usual Camden venues that have been part of the festival since very early on. You can find all our Camden Fringe interviews here.
Our next interview sees Marianna Sfyridi and Elisa Irsara talking about NOSTOS, a multidisciplinary performance that explores migration, memory, and the body as a vessel for ancestral stories. Drawing from Capoeira, Greek traditional practices, and improvisational dance, the piece reflects on the fluidity of identity and cultural belonging. Through waves of movement and ritual elements from our personal backgrounds, we seek to embody the push and pull of migration – an experience akin to oil floating on water: present yet never fully blending.
NOSTOS plays at Camden People’s Theatre for one night only on the festival’s opening night, 28 July. Further information and bookings can be found here.
What was your inspiration behind the show?
For me, as someone with Greek roots working with refugees in Athens, along with a background in both dance and healthcare, migration has always been more than just movement across borders — it is an emotional, cultural, and even spiritual shift. Capoeira, improvisation, and site-specific performance have helped me process these layers, and NOSTOS became a way to invite others into this embodied dialogue.
Together, we were inspired to create a work that is multidisciplinary, deeply personal, yet open to collective resonance — using movement, voice, light, and film to explore what it means to return, even if the place we return to has changed — or lives only in memory.
NOSTOS was born from a shared curiosity during the MA Dance Performance at The place between myself and Elisa — a need to explore what it means to long for home, to move through memory, and to trace identity through the body. Elias’ thesis work delves into the themes of home and homecoming, shaped by her experience of growing up between cultures — born in Santiago del Cile and raised in the Dolomites of northern Italy. Her artistic journey across disciplines — dance, theatre, photography, and light — deeply informed how we approached storytelling in this project: not as a fixed narrative, but as a fluid interplay between body, space, and image.
Is Camden Fringe going to be the show’s first time on stage, or have you already performed elsewhere?
NOSTOS had its first life as a short documentary film, emerging from a 3-month multidisciplinary research journey between Brazil, Greece, and the UK. While the themes and movement language have been explored in open workshops, artistic residencies, and site-specific improvisations, the Camden Fringe will mark the live stage premiere of the performance work in London.
We chose Camden Fringe for its vibrant, open, and grassroots ethos — a space that welcomes hybrid forms and emerging voices. As NOSTOS weaves together Capoeira, contemporary dance, oral histories, and diasporic narratives, we felt this would be the perfect platform to debut the show to a diverse London audience in an intimate, immediate setting. We’re excited to offer a performance that invites both reflection and connection through movement, memory, and shared stories.
What is it about your characters that you most enjoy?
What we most enjoy about our characters in NOSTOS is how distinct and complementary they are — almost like two contrasting threads weaving the same fabric of homecoming.
Elisa’s character is sharp, staccato, and emotionally raw — there’s something abrupt and unsettled in her movement at first, which feels very honest. Her transitions carry deep personal significance, as though each gesture holds a memory. What’s beautiful is how her character evolves throughout the piece — softening, expanding, and finally arriving into a sense of belonging. By the end, she embodies a maternal presence — one that embraces and offers care. That transformation is powerful to witness and perform alongside.
My own character is more fluid, carried by waves and circles. I enjoy the sensation of spiraling through space, of moving in loops that echo the tides — sometimes gentle, sometimes ecstatic. There’s something primal and liberating in this circularity, and in the way it invites both surrender and continuity. It feels like dancing with time itself or with Axe as we say in Capoeira.
Together, our characters represent two different paths toward home — one through rupture and resolution, the other through flow and return.
Are there any plans for what comes next?
Yes, we’re really excited about what’s coming next for NOSTOS. After Camden Fringe, the show will continue its journey with a performance at Chisenhale Dance Space during the Winter Season. This will be part of a broader programme that includes a series of community workshops focused on movement and belonging, in collaboration with a UCL research project aimed at supporting vulnerable communities.
We’re also planning to offer a repertoire-based workshop inspired by the piece, sharing our movement methodology with dancers and non-dancers alike. Alongside this, we’ll be hosting screenings of the accompanying short film in London, Athens, and Berlin, opening space for discussion and connection across borders.
We’d love to connect with other festivals, venues, or partners who resonate with the themes of migration, memory, and embodied storytelling — so please reach out if you’d like to collaborate or host NOSTOS in the future!
If you had to describe your show as a colour what would it be, and why?
It would be blue — a deep, shifting, emotional blue. Blue holds the vastness of the sea, the sky, and memory. It speaks to migration, to distance and longing, but also to calm, depth, and homecoming. It captures both the melancholy and beauty of journeys — physical and ancestral. Blue is for us the colour of return, of waves. It’s the feeling of being submerged and held at once.
If you could perform this show anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?
Two places that resonate deeply are Palestine and Brazil.
Palestine, because the show is rooted in stories of displacement, erasure, and the search for home – experiences that are tragically ongoing there. Performing NOSTOS in that context would be a way to honour and echo the resilient narratives of people whose bodies carry the memory and trauma of forced migration, colonial violence, and survival.
Brazil, because it’s both a site of rich cultural resistance and colonial history. It’s where the Afro-Brazilian art form of Capoeira was born out of oppression, struggle, and the need for bodily expression under captivity. The show’s focus on migratory bodies and the politics of corporeality would be amplified by performing in Brazil—on the very land where embodied resistance became a language of survival.
In both places, the performance would act as a dialogue – with the land, with the histories, and with the people – amplifying our core themes of memory, identity, and homecoming.
What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve received during your career, and how has it influenced your work on this show?
The most valuable piece of advice we’ve received is: “Keep experimenting – never lose the childlike playfulness.”
This has been a guiding principle for both of us, and it deeply shaped our work on NOSTOS. We both share a love for outdoor play, connection with nature, and exploring through movement and language. That spirit of curiosity and joy – of being nomadic, both physically and artistically – is what fuels our freelance journeys and this piece itself.
It reminds us to approach creation not from fear or pressure, but from openness, freedom, and trust. That’s where the piece was born – from playful improvisations in the studio, on rooftops, on the beach, in unknown places – and from a shared sense that dance can be both serious and deeply fun.
NOSTOS plays at Camden People’s Theatre on 28 July only.
