Sirenos'26: MAMI

MAMI (Greece)

Premiere: 6 February 2025
Commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi 

Conceived and directed by Mario Banushi
Cast: Vasiliki Driva, Dimitris Lagos, Eftychia Stefanou, Angeliki Stellatou, Ennea Vangelis and Panagiota Υiagli
Set & costume design: Sotiris Melanos
Original music & sound design: Jeph Vanger
Lighting design and associate dramaturg: Stephanos Droussiotis
Artistic collaborators: Aimilios Arapoglou, Thanasis Deligiannis
Assistant director: Theodora Patiti

“My mother brought me into the world along with thousands of other children. She was a midwife.” MAMI, a hymn for all the women who raised us.
-Mario Banushi

Creator of a stage language all his own, the 26–year–old Albanian–born Mario Banushi is already touring the world with his first plays, Goodbye, Lindita (2023) and Taverna Miresia – Mario, Bella, Anastasia (2023), and is hailed internationally as the wunderkind of Greek theatre. If, in his previous works, the theme was mourning, in MAMI it is the source of life. For in Banushi’s personal mythology, the almost homonymous words “mami” and “mam” become identical. Mami, as in mother. Mam, as in food. One pulls out one’s heart and offers it to another like a warm loaf of bread.

Drawing inspiration from personal experiences, Banushi creates an unholy shrine to the mother-child relationship. To celebrate it. To exorcise it. To fill it with vows and curses. To fall in love with it. For, as he himself notes, “I have always said that birth is love in reverse.”

The stage becomes a landscape of memory. As eerie as it is familiar. The performers, immersed in silence, create moments of profound emotion and urge us to recognize and confront our own memories, our own relationships, and the emotional legacy we carry.

“When I was about a year old, my mother had to leave me with my grandmother in Albania and go away. Until I was thirteen, I called my grandmother ‘mami.’ When my mother took me with her to Athens, I grew up in the apartment above the bakery where she worked, with the smell of freshly baked bread. I grew up around many women. I grew up around young women and old women. I grew up with more than one mother. This show is for them: a wish, a prayer to the weight the word ‘mom’ carries for both the one who hears it and the one who says it. Who takes care of whom – I never understood this complicated relationship. And I never will. But I’m trying to unravel it like an umbilical cord, like the viscera that connects life to its roots.”

In collaboration with OMAZ Civic Non-Profit Company
Commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi [GR] 
Co-produced by: Berliner Festspiele [DE], Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe [FR], FOG festival / Triennale Milano Teatro [IT],  & Espoo Theatre [FI], Festival d’Avignon [FR], Grec Festival Barcelona [ES], Théâtre de Liège [BE], Noorderzon Festival / Grand Theatre Groningen [NL]

Initial research & development were made possible with the support of the Onassis AiR Fellowship [GR] and the Centre Culturel Hellénique - Paris [FR]
Τhe presentation of MAMI is supported by the Onassis Stegi Touring Program
With the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of Greece.

Mario Banushi 

Mario Banushi is an awarded theatre director whose practice moves between intimacy and myth, memory and family, articulated through a rigorously visual and non-verbal theatrical language.

Born in Greece and raised in Albania until the age of six, when he moved back to Greece, his artistic universe is shaped by displacement, family narratives, and a distinct visual sensibility. His works unfold without spoken text, inviting audiences into a sensory experience marked by visual poetry and emotional depth.

His early work Ragada, created during the pandemic lockdowns, marked the beginning of a practice developed outside conventional theatrical spaces.

His breakthrough piece Goodbye, Lindita quickly gained international attention, leading to sold-out performances and invitations to major festivals and theatres worldwide. This momentum continued with Taverna Miresia – Mario Bella Anastasia, which has toured extensively across Europe, North America, and Asia, establishing Banushi as a distinctive voice on the international stage.

His most recent work, MAMI, further expands his visual and poetic language and was presented at the Festival d’Avignon to widespread critical acclaim.