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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Greece on the breadline: the theatre exchanging tickets for food

    Greece on the breadline: the theatre exchanging tickets for food

    The National Theatre of Northern Greece is asking audience members to bring food which it will give to charity

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    Greeks queue to buy cheap potatoes in Thessaloniki. Theatregoers can now donate food in exchange for tickets. Photograph: Sakis Mitrolidis/AFP/Getty Images

    Solidarity among crisis-hit Greeks is showing up in unexpected places these days.
    At one end of Thessaloniki's long, cafe-lined seafront, behind the 15th-century White Tower that is the city's symbol, is the resplendent main stage of the National Theatre of Northern Greece (NTNG), as imposing a temple to high culture as anyone could wish for.
    Here the curtain is about to go up on a six-week season of plays, including works by Edward Albee, Harold Pinter and Jean Genet, that will be performed by members of the theatre's 100-strong troupe of actors under the banner Social Theatreshop.
    What's novel is that theatregoers coming to see the Social Theatreshop productions will pay for their tickets not with money but with food, which the theatre's staff will then distribute among half a dozen charities and welfare organisations in the city.
    "We are, everyone knows it, in a very, very bad situation," said the deputy artistic director, Giannis Rigas, who like everyone else involved in the project is not being paid for it.
    "We thought we, actors, technicians, directors, have to do something for people who now have so little money that they are going hungry.
    "But this isn't charity, it's a fair exchange: food for theatre. And it's also a nice way to bring people back to the theatre: put it back where it belongs, in the middle of the community."
    The opening play in the season, directed by Rigas, is a Greek repertoire classic from 1946 by Alekos Sakellarios. The NTNG is staging the piece, it says, to mark the 20th anniversary of the playwright's death.
    The title suggests another motive may be lurking somewhere behind the scenes: it is called The Germans Strike Again.
    "It's about a poor Greek guy who falls asleep after the war and dreams that the Germans have come back," said Rigas, straight-faced.
    "It's about the way we Greeks respond when we are under pressure. We usually quarrel, of course. But this play says: be cool, find our own way – otherwise the Germans will just keep coming back."
    In the present circumstances, he conceded, it was perhaps an apt message.
    Choice of play aside, the goal of the Social Theatreshop, Rigas said, was "to say to absolutely everyone in our community that we too, in the theatre, have them in our minds".
    Greek theatre, he said, is in dire straits: "Theatres are closing around the country. We have no money – well, we have a little, but it comes too late.
    "Our audiences have no money. Here we have some of the cheapest theatre seats in the country, €10, but that's still too much for some.
    Now, people can come to the theatre for a couple of cans of soup, or a packet of pasta – and they will be helping to feed people who cannot afford even to feed themselves."
    Evelina Papoulia, an actor and director who is one of the NTNG's brightest stars, is staging another play in the season, Thirst.
    The Social Theatreshop project, she said, "is terribly important now, because we have to show that nobody is alone. We have to do something for others, for each other, to show that we really can all come together".
    Organisers are quietly confident the theatre will be playing to packed houses until the end of April, when the Theatreshop season closes.
    Rigas said: "It's strange, you know, but people don't go to the theatre when they have money. They spend it on other things, on fancy things. Then when the hard times come, you need something different.
    "The theatre is a place to be together. It's a physical thing – the performers, the technicians, the audience, all become one. And we need to be brought together again. In recent times, we lost that."
    • You can reach me at @jonhenley or jon.henley@guardian.co.uk

    Greece on the breadline: the theatre exchanging tickets for food | World news | The Guardian
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    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Greece on the breadline: 'potato movement' links shoppers and farmers

    A scheme letting consumers buy food straight from producers is typical of the inventive ways Greeks are finding to get by

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    Greek customers buy potatoes direct from the farmers in Thessaloniki. Photograph: Sakis Mitrolidis/AFP/Getty Images

    There's some dispute about where and when it all started, but Christos Kamenides, genial professor of agricultural marketing at the University of Thessaloniki, is pretty confident he and his students have made sure it's not about to stop any time soon.
    What's sure is that the so-called potato movement, through which thousands of tonnes of potatoes and other agricultural produce – including, hopefully, next month, Easter lamb – are being sold directly to consumers by their producers, is taking off across Greece.
    "It's because everyone benefits," said Kamenides, standing in a clearing in the woods above Thessaloniki in front of one 25-tonne truck of potatoes, another of onions, and smaller vans of rice and olives. "Consumers gets good-quality food for a third of the price they would normally pay, and the producers get their money straight away."
    As devised by Kamenides and his students, it's a simple system. Their brainwave was to involve Greece's local municipalities, lending the movement a degree of both organisation and official encouragement that it might otherwise have lacked.
    So: a town hall announces a sale. Locals sign up for what they want to buy. The town hall then tells Kamenides the quantity required and he and his students call local farmers to see who can supply it. They show up with the requisite amount of produce at the appointed place and time, meet their consumers, and the deal is done.
    The direct sales are immensely popular. One organised last month by volunteers in Katerini, south of Thessaloniki, last month saw an online offer of 24 tonnes of potatoes sell out within four days, with 534 families pre-ordering.
    "Today," said Kamenides, "we have one truck here, and two in another municipality up the road. Tomorrow we have a sale with four trucks – that's 100 tonnes of potatoes, straight from the producer to the consumer, with nobody in the middle pushing up prices."
    The movement, said Elisabet Tsitsopoulou, one of the women queuing up to buy, is "extremely important. Salaries here are so low now, and still falling, but the price of everything seems to stay just as high as it ever was. This is much cheaper, much less than half price."
    Tsitsopoulou bought five 25kg bags of potatoes for her family and her neighbours. "The other advantage," she said, "is that you can see the quality and where the produce comes from. With supermarkets, you can never really be sure. It's just a brilliant system."
    The producers are equally delighted. Apostolos Kasapis said the principal benefit for him was that "I get paid straight away. The profit is not very high, just a bit above the production cost, but I get the money immediately, which in this crisis is very important."
    Kasapis said wholesale buyers sometimes take "a year to pay their suppliers. Sometimes, they don't pay at all. In my village alone, the farmers are owed more than €500,000. So for us, what satisfies us most with this system is that we have regained our power over the middlemen, who have been squeezing us and profiting unfairly from everyone now for years."
    The potatoes generally fetch 25-30 cents a kilo at direct sales, 5-10 cents more than cost and far cheaper than the 60-70 cents they typically sell for in supermarkets. If they have unsold produce sitting in barns and warehouses, farmers sometimes accept cost price; even that is better than the 10-12 cents routinely offered by wholesalers.
    Encouraged by the success of the movement, which has been enthusiastically taken up by local mayors, Kamenides said he was working on a broader scheme for unified co-operatives involving both producers and consumers.
    This could eventually provide a new economic model for the buying and selling of essential foodstuffs in Greece; several economists have suggested such schemes may prove an important way of breaking the "cycle of crisis" on which the country appears to have embarked.
    For the moment, though, the potato movement is typical of the new and inventive ways Greeks are finding to help themselves and each other in the country's fifth straight year of recession, with unemployment soaring to over 21% and more than half of all young people out of work. Even the minimum wage is about to be cut from €750 (about £620) a month to just €500.
    Few are immune from the effects. This weekend's sale above Thessaloniki drew a colleague of Kamenides, an associate professor of physics from the university. "My salary used to be €33,000 a year. Last year it was €22,000, with many more taxes to pay," she said.
    "That's a very big cut, and it's all the harder to deal with because your family budget is established over time; you take on commitments to match your income. If I can save €20 on two sacks of potatoes, that's worth having."
    • You can reach me at @jonhenley or jon.henley@guardian.co.uk

    Greece on the breadline: 'potato movement' links shoppers and farmers | World news | The Guardian
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  3. #3
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    The New World Order seems to be working well for Greece
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