This is a verbatim transcript of a recent episode of my podcast Staging Sound, a podcast reflecting on theatre music, sound design, sonic practices and experiences, published on 21. December 2025. In this episode, I talk to Konstantinos Thomaidis (co-director, choral music composer) about the themes, development processes and aesthetics of his collaboration with Alexander Raptotasios (co-director) and Jeph Vanger (sound designer and electronic music composer) on the film “Mother Company”, which explores the complex layers of extractivist greed, rural economies, environmental disaster and a community’s pride and suffering through the presence of a children’s choir in a derelict power plant in Northern Greece. The episode marks the three year anniversary of starting the podcast! The transcript and the notes and references are by Konstantinos Thomaidis.
The episode can be found here:
00:00 David Roesner
So, welcome to ‘Staging Sound,’ where we speak about the sonic and the scenic, about music and theatre, about voice and film.
Today I have what I would call an old friend of the podcast, not because he’s old, but because he’s been there from the very beginning as my guest. And this is, of course, Konstantinos Thomaidis, who is an Associate Professor in Voice, Theatre and Performance at the Communications, Drama and Film Department at the University of Exeter. There he’s also Director of the MA Theatre Practice. He’s an actor, director, musician and researcher with a primary interest in voice, the cultural politics of voice pedagogy, and the development of methodologies for vocal practice-research. He co-founded and edits the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and the Routledge Voice Studies book series. In 2015 – I can’t believe this is 10 years ago, Konstantinos – he co-edited Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience.
He’s really fundamentally shaped – and that’s why I’m particularly delighted that he’s come back on the show – he’s really shaped the Center for Advanced Studies Research Group. That was the initial sort of excuse to indulge in making a podcast. When I double checked, I realized that our first ever episode, which you were on as well, even if remotely, was on the 15th of December 2022. So, it’s nearly exactly three years since we started the podcast, which I can’t believe.
Anyway, today he’s not here primarily as an academic – although I think you never take that hat off completely, that sort of smart analytical brain -he’s really here as a creator in many ways, as a co-director, as a composer, for a really exciting film project, which I wanted to talk about, because it’s got so much to say to this podcast and to these questions of staging sound and engaging with the voice, with soundscapes, and with staging mise-en-scene and all those things that have to do with it. The short film is called Mother Company. It is a through-composed short film, and it’s winning awards left, right, and centre (you’re more than welcome to name some of them) in the past – I’ve sort of haven’t got the list in front of me, but it is quite impressive. It’s really making the rounds at various festivals at the moment. It’s a beautiful, it’s a haunting film. It’s a very political film, I think, as well.
Konstantinos, can you tell us a little bit about, first of all, roughly what is this film about? Then, of course, I’m very curious about how you got to making it, what the process behind it was.
00:03 Konstantinos Thomaidis
Thank you, David, for the kind introductions. So, Mother Film…, sorry, Mother Company is a short film – it’s roughly 18 minutes – and we like to introduce it as an experimental music documentary.
It is a documentary in the sense that it presents the history of a region in Northern Greece, in particular its connection to lignite extraction and energy production, which I will explain a little bit more quite soon. But the medium through which we did it was using music and sound and soundscapes – as you’ve already sort of introduced – and voice.
It is experimental in format because it is a film, it is a documentary, but it is based on lineages of performance art and installation and site-specific performance and composed theatre,[1] which are my lineages. And of course, we co-directed this with Alexander Raptotasios; he also comes from a theatre background, and his primary interest is in site-specific and participatory performance. In some ways, the film sort of exemplifies these two strands of work.
The final cut was finished two or three months ago, in September 2025. It was produced by Ferodo Bridges, which is Alexander’s company. And it has begun its life in, as you already mentioned, in some festivals. One of the latest, sort of largest ones was a BAFTA-qualifying festival in the UK, Aesthetica. As you’ve already said, we were quite incredibly lucky to unexpectedly receive the award in our category: it won the award for Best Artists Film.
And it continues its life. It goes to festivals. It was part, last week, of an environmental initiative around the Climate Summit because the film is quite activist and talks a lot about environment and community.
00:05 David Roesner
Absolutely. What I found really striking is how it straddles so many different genres and approaches. It could be a straightforward activist documentary, talking about really important topics, about the destruction of land and of environment and of communities on the one hand, but then, it is much more than that. It’s also a music film. It’s also almost a concert film in parts.
And then, it’s also experimental, as you say. There were even moments, and I don’t know whether that was a conscious link. It just occurred to me, some of those early films like Koyaanisqatsi,[2] which is a Philip Glass film, or I’ve forgotten who made the film [Godfrey Reggio], but Philip Glass composed the music, let’s put it that way. But that combination of evocatively tying those together, but not in a kind of, not in a touristic way (‘look at the beautiful images, listen to the beautiful music’) but there’s always a different undertone to it.
Before we go to some of the elements and maybe some of the scenes, which are really quite striking, and the location, which is very striking, tell me a bit about how the idea grew between you and Alexander. How did you sort of stumble upon the topic and also made some of the core decisions? Because I understand that some of the aesthetic principles of the film were there really early on, were sort of a conviction very early on how to approach the topic.
00:06 Konstantinos Thomaidis
Yes, so Alexander and I have been collaborating for a number of years. I think we began sort of collaborating around 2017 or 2018. We met at workshops.
And then we co-created a large-scale project for the Greek National Opera. It was a play called The Events by a Scottish playwright called David Greig (2013).[3] The conceit of that play, is – I’m not going to give you any spoilers because you hear it very early on in the play – is that in the dramatic world, in the fictional world of the play, there is a multicultural, very inclusive and diverse choir led by a priest/conductor/musician, then a very disenfranchised, extremist, right-wing boy comes in and kills the choir. So, it deals with the aftermath of these events.
Now, the quite incredible conceit of that play: it’s written for two actors: the actress that plays the conductor and a younger actor who plays the boy and all the other characters that influence the boy, like the politicians, his father, his friends, etc. And every performance is hosting a different community choir. You invite a choir that has pre-prepared the music and some cues and some vocal cues, a few lines. You rehearse a little bit on the day and then they meet the play at the same time as the audience. So, the community in the auditorium encounters that play at the same time as the choir on stage.
We did this production together and it was a massive project. It ran for two years, two different casts because it kept going, we collaborated with 9 regional theatres.
And in that project, I was primarily director of music. I adapted the music and translated the lyrics, and I sort of directed the scenes that involved the choir. I had 26 choirs that I worked with across Greece, and we travelled all over, especially in various regions, because we wanted to go to the communities, not just, you know, Athens, the centre. And of course, Alex translated the play and directed the play.
Out of this experience, we both knew that we collaborate, that we learned a lot through such a large-scale collaboration. We had both very sort of expressed interest in community settings and in involving people in various ways. And obviously, we generated quite an active network of musicians, community musicians across Greece. We stayed in contact, we sent emails, we shared videos, and then the songs had their own afterlife.
So, this is the background. And then Alexander’s company, Ferodo Bridges, received this commission to explore themes that relate to these power plants in some regions of Greece, which have to do primarily with electricity, but also other forms of energy production more recently. He said: ‘would you like to do this together?’ And I said: ‘yes, of course.’ And we decided to co-direct.
At the very beginning, Alexander was adamant that this project should be a community project again, that we should ask the people and involve them and conduct interviews. And I was very intrigued by this approach because, as you said, it’s quite easy with that kind of film to make it a very aesthetic, ‘oh, I visited these regions, or I visited a beautiful, haunting location like a power plant.’
Then, we conducted a few visits, sort of reconnaissance visits,[4] and some, I would say, test interviews. They were not formal interviews. We met a lot of locals and we were trying to make sense of the local history.[5] And it was an interesting dynamic because Alexander is from Southern Greece where a lot of these stories are not very prominent, but I’m from Northern Greece and I live quite nearby, like an hour away, and we knew about those stories—but they sort of remain sort of hidden in the mountains.
After these interviews, my first instinct – because I knew I would be composing music for the film, I’m also a musician, and I knew this is going to happen – was immediately to say to Alexander that there is something here, but (a) we are, in a way, strangers, foreigners, we are visitors, and we need to make that explicit. A lot of the time, the documentary has this transparency that what you film is the ‘truth,’ is ‘authenticity,’ and I wanted to make very obvious the device that some people did something with the material from the region.[6] And secondly [(b)], we realised through these initial interviews, and later on a whole body of formal interviews, that if you make a film about this history, you can either make it about all the horrible things that happened in the region and sort of the underlying message being ‘oh, this is horrible, it should never happen again,’ or to raise awareness to the fact that this history is still ongoing. It affects people still in the region, there are new issues on top of the old ones. For example, right now there is decommissioning in the area and because of the shift to greener forms of energy, which have left a lot of people unemployed, there is rapid depopulation. And I thought to myself: ‘the people that are primarily affected and will be affected are the younger generation or the children.’
So, the first key directorial decision that I made – and Alexander became really, really sort of excited about, and we decided to do it together – was to make the film with children from the region and make it so that it is a choral, music-based film.
We selected a regional choir and we exclusively worked with children. They are the only people you see in the film.
And as a final note to this background, the reason why we could find that choir and worked so extensively was because of the previous project, because of The Events. One of the conductors in the region, with whom we had worked for The Events and was very excited, we contacted and we said: ‘we’re looking for children.’ She already had a children’s choir that she was working with and she said: ‘would you like to collaborate with us?’ And we said: ‘of course, yes.’
And so, we continued and deepened our collaboration with the region.
00:13 David Roesner
Excellent. That sounds like serendipity stroke, or struck rather, not struck.
And it is, from just viewing the film, the fact, because also your children in that choir, not your children personally, but the children in the choir, they obviously speak lines from those interviews. And there’s also funny moments. I mean, it is a serious subject, but when, you know, one of them just… I don’t know, probably 8, 9 years old, says ‘and I run the company’ or ‘I’m the boss here’ or something like that, or ‘I work, I usually work with the big machines’ or something.
There’s a nice little friction there and a certain innocence, but also a vulnerability, because of course, having these children on site – you mentioned already that this is a site-specific film in the sense that it really came out of and was filmed, I think, entirely on location at that power plant. Which is sort of, at least in parts, I mean, you say at the beginning that it is partly still working, which is kind of unbelievable because it looks very derelict at this point. And there are, again, there is a mixture of, sort of, almost a patina, you know, almost like a, like a beauty in the waste, and at the same time also, even just looking at it, feels a bit toxic and it feels all the things that you mentioned in the film, all the massive environmental and health problems that were caused through the operation of these kinds of power plants.
So, there are a couple of things there in terms of the location, for example, or the region’s history.
00:15 Konstantinos Thomaidis
Before I go back to the children, which was the opening of your question, I’ll just give a brief summary of that history. Just after the Second World War, there was an initiative in Greece to sort of create public access to energy and source locally. A lot of this happened in this region in Northern Greece – because it is very rich in lignite, which is, we can call it, sort of in a pedestrian way, ‘brown coal’ – in order to produce electricity. Over the years, 5 power plants were created in the region and they’re still functional. A large amount of electricity production throughout the country is actually created, generated there.
That power plant is the very first one. It’s a historic building that was created in the region. And the reason is sort of half-operational is because 10 years ago, there was a fire accident. So, on the upstairs room where we have the controls, there was a fire that completely destroyed that level and now it cannot be functioning. At the same time, the big, sort of EU-supported and -facilitated turn towards greener forms of energy was happening.[7] So, nobody in a way invested in rebuilding or fixing it because they knew they were transitioning towards, you know, other forms of energy.
So that building has the patina of all these years of work. Some parts of it are untouched, they’re still very functional, and some parts of it are destroyed. We filmed on the floor that has been destroyed. The beauty of that floor is, of course, you have some corners that – I mean, it was a fire accident, but they managed to suppress it very quickly – you have some, you know, areas that are quite destroyed, but you have all these big machines that look very sort of historical. They’re so old, nobody would work this way any longer. They’re all wrapped and they’ve been moved because they’re creating a museum. So, it’s a museum in the making, that floor. Immediately, when we visited, Alexander and myself, we said: ‘all right, we’re going to film here.’
Now, in terms of how we learned a little bit about the region: apart from all these reconnaissance visits (and I have to say that they lasted for about six months until we found the power plant, until we found the mines that we wanted, because next to the plants you have the mines where extraction happens and all the external shots are in the area of the mines) we conducted formal interviews with 26 people. These ranged from current employees – quite wide-ranging really- from miners all the way to CEOs and former employees that sort of are pockets of history from different decades and different periods of how lignite extraction operated in the region. Also, because there has been a lot of environmental impact and health impact in the region because of power plants,[8] essentially, that have been operating for decades, we interviewed people, for example, from associations like the Cancer Patients Association in the region. So, we put together this body of work, and we thematized these topics that emerged from the interviews.
To go back to the children: the children in the film, for me at least, operate across three quite distinct but also interlinked realities.
The very first one is the documentary reality, or we might call it a little bit more precisely, the verbatim level of reality. We invited the children from the Varvouteion Municipal Conservatoire of Ptolemaida. We did a lot of games and experimentation. We did workshops in a very sort of applied theatre, community-based approach. Then, we filmed these workshops and the children reenacted extracts from the interviews, some of which they selected, some of which we gave to them but they organized in their own structure. So, there was some sort of co-creation there. The scenes are organized around topics: for example, the historical transition from a very rural agricultural area to industry and energy production; the amassing of wealth, the complete sort of capitalist turn of the region because of what was happening; the impact of that industry on the health of the local population; the influence on the environment; and finally, in the last 10-15 years, the complete shift in what’s happening in the region because of the decommissioning and the turn to greener forms of energy.
The children created almost little scenes that we filmed, and, of course, all the text is verbatim. Nothing they say comes from any other source but the body of the interviews, the corpus of the interviews. And they also present themselves as workers, as you already mentioned, in some of these cases. We had a list of all the interviews and the very first question was: ‘what did you do for this energy production line?’—and they introduced themselves. Then the children picked roles and essentially presented themselves as these roles.
00:21 David Roesner
Excellent. And also, of course, the children sing because they’re a choir, and I wanted to come to that part, sort of the various sonic layers that film has, which are very interesting and very interlinked and intertwined. Tell me a bit about those different sections, those different layers with which you worked in composing and conducting and sort of getting the children to really engage vocally in and with the film.
You’ve mentioned one which is sort of the more verbatim part where they speak or whisper parts of those conversations, of those interviews, of the information. What are the other layers that you put into the film?
00:21 Konstantinos Thomaidis
I’ve already mentioned that the children operate in this verbatim/documentary reality. There are two other realities and these two actually cross-fertilize each other and interlink quite heavily.
The one is a poetic or symbolic one. We asked the children to perform some sort of evocative imagery or sonic imagery. For example, there is a scene – which actually ended up being the opening scene – where they are dressed up as miners with all the protective gear, and their torches, you know, are lit and they are amidst smoke. What they do in that scene is they commemorate, the voiceover in particular,[9] all the people that have perished due to industrial accidents. Or, another sort of symbolic scene is: we asked them to build, to recreate a scale model of the factory. We brought all the parts and they did it. So, inside the factory, they were building the factory. And then that has a part B, where we asked them to bring personal objects, their favourite personal objects, or toys, and reimagine – they basically destroyed – it, or as I would like to say, they reinvented it in a more joyful, hopeful, and future-looking form.
As part of this evocative reality, there’s a third reality, which, as you already mentioned, is quite crucial for us: it’s the musical reality of the film. The way we arrived at this is for very precise reasons. First of all, because I’m a composer-musician. Even though this is a sort of audio-visual medium, it’s film, I think very much in sonic terms, so I already was thinking about rhythm and sound and was composing songs. But also, we wanted, it was a nod to the one level of authenticity for these children, which is the one thing we know about them is that they are a choir and they’re working together. So, we brought them in as what they are: a collective of musicians and voicers. Essentially what we did is – again through workshops, there was a lot of play, there was a lot of experimentation – I composed with and for them four different songs that are the four main parts of the film.
The first one is a sort of sonic memory and reenactment scene. I played a lot of sounds we recorded in the region from [power] plants and I asked the children to recreate vocally those plants. So [in the film] we are in a disused factory that has no sound essentially, and then we created a chorus of them creating machinic sounds.
The second one was sort of dirge or lamentation -it’s humming, it’s very improvisational I was composing it in the moment[10] and then later on in the studio – which underpins the commemorative scene, the accidents scene.
And the more composed scenes are the third one (which is a folk song from the region, which I adapted. It’s a monophonic song that I recreated as 4 – there is one part of that is 5 – voices, and I composed it specifically for the choir), and then finally, a verbatim song that I composed. This is 7 voices – I mean, for the most part it’s 5, but it ends up in 7 – for which we used text from the interviews, and I composed it for this choir. This is the closing scene of the film.
All this is blended and integrated with a through-soundscape and electronic soundscape music created by sound artist Jeph Vanger. He’s an incredible artist, one of the most prolific and quite well-recognized right now in Greece from our generation. We also did a visit with him and he recorded material, and all the music that you hear and all the electronics are based on sounds we recorded from the [power] plants and the mines.
00:26 David Rosener
Now, you were kind enough to ask Jeph to describe a little bit further this process. Maybe this is a good time to actually play a little clip of how he reflects on creating that soundscape and then we’ll come back to the vocal selections as well. Let’s listen to that clip very briefly.
00:26 Konstantinos Thomaidis
Yes, of course.
00:26 Jeph Vanger
Hi, my name is Jeph Vanger and I was the sound designer for the film. I’d like to share a little bit about the sonic world we created and how it came to life. For this project, we wanted the soundscape to feel deeply rooted in place—not just inspired by the environment but actually built from it. So, we travelled up to Ptolemaida to the old power plant factories.
These are massive, abandoned industrial structures with incredible acoustics. The moment you walk inside, you hear this long metallic tail to every sound, the kind of natural reverb that no digital plugin can truly emulate. We spent days exploring those buildings, clapping, shouting, dropping objects, and capturing how the space responded. Each hall had its own character. Some were dark and resonant, others sharp and echo-filled, almost cathedral-like. Just being in those rooms felt like listening to an instrument.
We also went out into the power mines where the machinery was still operating as they excavated lignite. These machines are enormous, more like moving landscapes than tools, and each one hums, growls, and pulses in its own rhythm. Engines idling, metal arms scrapping, even subtle textures like dust shifting, and distant mechanical drones. These sounds became the raw materials of the film sound design.
Back in the studio, I began to weave all these elements together. I took the reverberations and impulse responses from the factories and applied them to my electronic compositions as well as to the field recordings. That way, even when the sounds were heavily processed or abstracted, they still carried the fingerprint of those spaces.
I also worked closely with the vocal compositions by Kostantinos Thomaidis. He composed the vocal material, and it was performed by the children’s choir of Ptolemaida. The goal was to create a sound world that feels both grounded and otherworldly, built from real places, real materials and real histories, but shaped into something new. Sound, for us, wasn’t just a layer added on top of the film. It was a way to understand the environment, of listening to what these locations had to say, and then carrying those voices into the narrative.
I hope that when you watch the film, you can feel some of that, the weight of the machinery, the vastness of the empty factories, the echoes of human presence within these industrial giants. It was a challenging but incredibly fulfilling process, and I’m grateful we were able to capture these disappearing soundscapes before they changed forever.
The following part reveals the connection between Konstantinos’s voice compositions and the children’s choir that amalgamated with my sound design. [sample plays underneath]. You can hear the voices of the children without the bangs of doors that basically they’re the percussive parts of that composition. Here you can listen to it without the percussive elements, and then with the percussive elements of banging doors and bass thumbs. [Music sample concludes].
00:30 Konstantinos Thomaidis
It’s quite interesting hearing Jeph’s perspective, and we have had so many beautifully creative discussions to generate, first of all, the atmosphere and the working frameworks out of which the sound environment would emerge. In this particular song… – I’ll take a little bit of a step back and explain how it came about.
It’s the closing scene of the film and all the children sort of get rid of the protective gears, and it’s the first time we see them travelling to the edge of the space. Up till then the atmosphere is quite claustrophobic, we wanted to create this idea that there’s this community who almost lives in the plants and can never go. But there are massive windows on the side of the factory, so we brought the choir near the window, and they stand there and they look—and, of course, outside you just see these massive machines and still energy production is happening. It’s almost like they’re wondering: ‘can we ever get out?’ or ‘what’s happening outside, what does the future hold for us?’
00:31 David Roesner
There’s always a Beckett moment there, isn’t there? They’re trapped and they look outside and they decide to go but they can’t or something.
00:31 Konstantinos Thomaidis
I’m glad you bring this up, because whenever we said ‘scene’, whenever we cut, – because it was quite a difficult scene to do, because of light, etc etc, to film-, I used to whisper to Alexander ‘they do not move.’[11]
00:31 David Roesner
Oh yeah, so the end of Waiting for Godot. I didn’t know that. It was really a coincidence. Anyway, great.
00:32 Konstantinos Thomaidis
Essentially what happens in the scene is: it’s a song and we see them looking out of the window and singing that song, but in between we also have inserts. I’ll talk a little bit about the song. As I said, Alexander and I were quite adamant that we want to talk about the future of the region. [For this scene] out of the interviews, we selected extracts that specifically mentioned the future of the region, but also children. So, it’s a world of adults talking about the children and the new generation, but now the children, sort of re-envoice these words, talking about their own future almost in the third person. It’s this weird effect.
I put together this piece, which is, I would say, is in the lineage of Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, as you’ve already mentioned, it’s sort of minimalist and there are a lot of repetitive patterns, but we start layering them. And the effect I wanted to produce was one of dissensus.[12] A lot of the time when we talk about choirs, there’s this presupposition that immediately we talk about harmony and everybody agreeing, together, and creating this beautiful sound that you never hear in real life. But of course, musically, that’s not entirely correct. There are a lot of spaces where we have dissonance. And I didn’t want to create the image of ‘one community / we all agree / we have found commonality and that’s it.’ It’s very much a debate, the interviews are so contradictory, and I didn’t want to synthesize them in a way that reduced their complexity.
And the key for me was this idea of dissensus. If I’m allowed to wear my academic head once again, sorry, my academic hat on my head once again – because these ideas were in the background, then you forget about them because you’re an artist and you’re making something, and then they come back when you think about what you’ve made; there’s this sort of iterative loop[13] between researching, thinking, and creating – I almost thought about this idea of the collective as autonomous, sort of self-reliant individual, this idea of the neoliberal subject that sort of materializes themselves and the world is their oyster. And also this other idea, which is all about the collective and interdependence and, synergies and interactions and so forth. I’m leaning more towards the second. Personally, I believe in communities where members support each other, but a lot of the time you might think of the collective again as a way of reinforcing individuality (‘We support each other so that again, you’re the best autonomous version of yourself.’). [But] I like this idea by Nancy (1991), the inoperative community, where essentially, of course, it’s all about the collective interdependence, but it is, in a way, not about sharedness (We come together as individuals that share specific aspects of our identities and reinforce these identities) but it’s an idea of radical un-sharedness: (We come together while acknowledging difference and we try to work through difference and in proximity). It’s a collective of distance, but that happens to be in proximity.
It’s this beautiful idea of community that I try to represent vocally.
00:35 David Roesner
Great. Yeah, now that makes a lot of sense. And as a sort of theoretical background, it really shapes, I think, what is quite tangible in the film – it’s this ambivalence that you talk about. There are moments that feel activist in the sense that they do put their finger on very sore subjects and very gross injustices that clearly have happened to the region. And at the same time, you don’t shy away from saying, well, it’s all great that it’s all moving towards green energy, but the job loss is incredible. And a lot of people bemoan the fact that yes, but we used to be, wealthy, we used to be well off, we earned good money here. All those ambivalences that are clearly there and that are in the topic that is simply very complex, they are really expressed very beautifully in that film.
And also, as you said, I have to think about the notion of verbatim, which of course you already transcend in a way, you could almost call it ‘post-verbatim’ with our dear colleague Duška Radosavljević (although I don’t think she’s coined the term, I’m not sure, but she uses it very, very elegantly in her book).[14] Because ‘verbatim’ in its original form really meant, you know, speaking the lines as they were heard, exactly as they were said in interviews. And here, of course, because of the children saying them, there is already a… it’s once removed. And then, in your compositions, it’s once more removed and becomes – I’m not saying ‘aestheticized’ because that sounds like it’s made palatable in some way, I don’t mean it in that way – I mean, it becomes artistic, it becomes sort of compositional, and that’s really quite interesting.
00:37 Konstantinos Thomaidis
I’m really interested in this notion of the post-verbatim. A lot of the time – because we talk about film, for example, or nowadays TV or YouTube or social media as media – we tend to forget that theatre, where a lot of these discussions around the ‘verbatim’ occur, is also a medium,[15] it’s a frame. The moment you put a frame, there is a sort of composed reality. And for me, it was really crucial to give some perspective into these verbatim interviews.
So, you have the first level, which is, the people that gave the interviews. Then, you have ourselves that thematized it; it was a big research project. Of course, I’m a researcher, but we also have a research collaborator, Vassiliki Aga, who’s a specialist on social policy, who sort of helped thematize and asked some really interesting questions, we collaborated on that. And then, of course, there is the third level of the choir and the children that, of course, by virtue of singing or creating soundscapes with this material already, it becomes distant, it becomes something else. The mediality and mediatization of it becomes quite sonically evident—you can put your finger on it.
And for me, that was crucial because of – I believe in one of our discussions, Pieter Verstrate has already mentioned that, I think it was also in his chapter in your edited collection with Tamara[16] – this idea, by Chouliaraki in fact, of agonistic solidarity.[17] It’s easy to talk about solidarity if you do it in broad strokes – ‘here as a community’ – and also if you erase the medium through which you express that solidarity. But, actually, in agonistic solidarity, which shows the clashes and the debates and the emergence of different strands of action within and outside communities, you need to make very prevalent the issue of justice. And for me, that was quite important: to show that there are debates: people agree or disagree what justice would mean for the region, but also the way the history is told. If we say ‘and then we shift it to green energy’ then you all got justice? [No,] so you keep it alive.
Secondly, what she says is you need the aesthetic medium to be a little bit distant. She talks a little bit about irony. Of course, that [Chouliaraki’s article] was 10 years ago and I didn’t feel irony would be appropriate, but music would be a proper form of distance in this case.
00:39 David Roesner
I just wanted, because you mentioned the folk song, which I think is an interesting element, to bring into this because, as you said, all the material is generated through your research and through the interviews you conducted. And this is almost like an insert, like a sort of a remnant from some, I don’t know, imaginary folk culture or something. Tell me a little bit about how you stumbled upon this particular song, why you put it in. And we can also, I understand, listen to an early…
00:40 Konstantinos Thomaidis
There is a beautiful recording[18] with two sort of elderly women from village area in that northern region. Yes, let’s play it, let’s listen to it first and then I’m going to explain.
00:40 David Roesner
Yes, yeah, that’d be great. Wonderful. Here we go.
[Militsam’ song plays]
00:41 Konstantinos Thomaidis
So, this recording… I was looking for songs. I, quite early on, wanted to use a folk song, (a) because a lot of those folk songs predate the turn of the region from the agricultural to the industrial, so they carry with them other kinds of memories and they give us a little bit of background, against which we can read what’s happening [now]. But also (b) it was a nod of respect. Even though I composed the songs, and they’re all composed and they’re in the studio and there is Jeph’s electronic music as well, I wanted to always be in relation to the material from the region (for example, the reenactment of the machinic sounds, etc etc). With the folk song, again, you adapt it, you recreate it, but you [also] say ‘this is something that has been going on for generations here’—and it’s quite obvious, it’s quite evident.
I was listening to various songs – there are some compilations, there is a lot of material online and I had done a few recordings in the region. I asked some of our interviewees to send me material. And I stumbled upon this research project by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. It’s quite a massive project which sort of recorded and catalogued a lot of folk songs. It’s an ethnomusicology – it was primarily, the way I understand it, a digitization project, archival project, that happened to use folk songs as its material.
There is this folk song which is called ‘My Little Apple Tree,’ [‘Militsam’’]. This song exists across various… it’s one of the most popular ones. It’s so different in every region, almost every region in Greece has its different variation. And in that valley in between the mountains where all the [power] plants are in Northern Greece, you have a very famous rendition, which is carnivalesque. There is a very famous, you know, carnival every year and you have really sort of big folk customs and, you know, people come together and it’s very anti-structural and it’s very funny and very tongue-in-cheek.
And I started researching the song a little bit more, and I found one recording of a different version in the region, in one of the mountains. And there, is an almost liturgic version of the song. It’s much slower, it’s very different in tone. You can almost – it’s monophonic, but you can – almost hear the harmonic sort of contours of it being very, very different to the carnivalesque version. And it belongs to a genre which is sort of dying -in Greece at least, I’m not aware of what’s happening in other regions of the world. These songs are called monadika, which means the ‘unique ones.’ They’re songs that are sung once a year on one occasion. For example, the carnivalesque song you can even sing, you know, you go out and people know it, but these songs were sung once and they were sung on Easter Day, when people were also enacting some sort of, let’s call them, necrorituals: there was respect for the dead. That version immediately spoke to me a little bit more, especially if we think about the accidents, about the cancer, about the environmental issues.
So, I found this monophonic version. Then, the second part of it is that I listened to a lot of prior recordings from concerts from the choir, and I had already started rehearsals with them, we were playing, I knew the voices, and one of my hidden aspirations was, I just don’t want to go and create a film with this community – which of course, offers a lot to the community and it’s a chance for them to share their stories and to learn a lot about film and music production – I wanted also to leave something with them. So, I composed a song that now they use in their concerts, they sing in their exams. It was a version specifically made for them. And, also, I heard their songs and I had this aspiration… They normally sing 2 or 3 voices – I’m going to create something that is 4 voices and it turns into 5 voices, I want to teach them how to do it! So, I spent almost four months on that song. It arrived at a beautiful technical and aesthetic level, but, in a way, it was also a gift to them.[19]
In terms of the content of the song, the lyrics are quite symbolic for me. The song obviously talks about a little apple tree, but the lyrics say ‘oh, my little apple tree, I want to come and get your apples because you’re laden with beautiful, heavy apples, but I’m scared because you’re hovering just at the edge of a cliff.’ And the apple tree responds: ‘oh, if you really want the apples, you’re going to find another path.’ For me, it’s a… -again, it’s an artistic process, it’s not that I can absolutely explain it – but it immediately spoke to the complexity of what happened in the region. It’s almost [as if] energy production became this beautiful apple tree that gave people purpose and wealth and ways of surviving after a destroyed Greek economy after the Second World War.
Yet at the same time, it was hovering at the edge of a cliff.
00:46 David Roesner
Maybe to take us back to the beginning of our talk and maybe sort of also to draw it towards a close and kind of take you back to my introduction of you, which of course was very heavy on the academic side, and I spoke to your academic achievements, which are of course significant and really leading in the realm of voice studies.
And you kind of hinted at that while you were speaking earlier, that there are moments where you reflect and you analyse, and then you kind of set that aside for a moment and kind of function as an artist or think or feel and act as an artist, and then come back and you call this ‘iterative loop,’ which I think is a very apt description. I just wondered to a point now having re-entered academic life, you’re teaching, you’re back in the hamster wheel of academia, what kind of impulses did you take from this project as a scholar or towards a scholarship? Are there things that you feel you’ve learned, you’ve revisited, you’ve sort of shifted your perspective on?
And vice versa – you mentioned some things that you brought to the project as an academic where you felt ‘I’ve studied obviously voice, but not only as a practitioner, not only as someone who can teach a voice and compose and is a voice pedagogue, but also someone who’s a theoretician of voice as well.’ I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that dual role of the academic and the practitioner and the transition through that project.
00:48 Konstantinos Thomaidis
That’s such an interesting question. Thank you, David.
It’s quite hard to answer because I’m quite immersed in this project. Obviously, the film took about a year to research and do the workshops; and then it was very localized, it was days of filming during 2-3 months; then there was editing and post-production that lasted another 15 months; and now the distribution and the festivals… So it’s, in a way, it’s still going.
So I’ll begin answering the second half of your question, if you wouldn’t mind, which is what I thought, or at least I’m aware that, I brought to the project: which are some research questions that I always carry with me, that they have to do with sonic or in particular vocal points of meeting.
You already know I’m quite obsessed with this idea of the vocal in-between.[20] That’s a term that I have coined and I think through this [in relation to] what happens between voicer and listener, between different voices and communities. So, a lot of the strategies of composition and directing that I’ve already mentioned had to do with this idea: how do I make it explicit that this community are members of different histories and backgrounds meeting each other. But also us meeting this community—making that explicit, it’s part of the vocal in between that we co-create.
The more sort of crafts-based technical thing that I believe I brought quite heavily on the project, apart from composing, I brought… Me and Alex, it was uncanny, we were definitely directing the same project even when we were doing test frames. I was testing a frame and then I would go and say to Alex ‘would you like this?’ And then he was testing a frame and then our frames would be identical. We had this beautiful moment of coalition. Alex comes from a visual studies background, so there were a lot of visual decisions that we discussed and he was initiating those. I come from a music and sound and text background – I’m a classical actor, but also I’m a voice theorist and a voice researcher and a musician – and I brought this, in a way, to use a term that you have unpacked a lot yourself, this vocal (or musical in your case) dispositif as the underpinning logic of it all.[21]
A lot of the time, even the whole industry – if you want to call it that because we are very indie and very experimental, but I’ve learned a lot about it because of the festivals – is obsessed with this idea of visuals first: ‘In film, the visuals narrate, the text or the music are adjacent or accompaniments.’ And there is even this term, which I have to admit I highly disapprove of, that a film is almost ready and it’s accepted as a submission to festivals or distribution or agents when it’s ‘picture-locked.’ So you do a visual montage and then we’ll see what happens with sound, but nothing’s going to change much.
00:51 David Roesner
No…
00:51 Konstantinos Thomaidis
So, what I brought is this idea that sound, voice, text and music can come first. And we can think of all material in these logics. I created this almost ongoing loop between the visual editing room and the sonic editing room. I was in both. We finished, for example, the visual first, you know, draft. (I would never call it ‘locked’). We did some work with Jeph based on his compositions and then some further ideas I had, then we reopened [the editing]. We did this five or six times, and it was a constant dialogue.
But a sub-part of this approach is, I feel, I don’t know, that’s also my vocal activist part, that I infected even the visual room with musicality because… Whereas you might think, when you have cuts, you’re thinking the narrative visual logic (‘is it a match cut?[22] Do these objects, align with each other? What are the colours and what sort of things you need to change if you change the colour scheme, etc etc?), I kept bringing the sonic logic. I was counting beats, like ‘now we have, you know, tension,’ for example, ‘because if you listen to it (and I was counting so that everybody in the editing room could listen), you hear this is now, this is something that is allegro.’ And suddenly we go: ‘do we need a transition or do we keep the same visual beat, but I do something opposite with the sound?’ So suddenly, even the visual room became music or sonic, because I was using this compositional logic.[23]
And the third part I brought to the project – it’s quite hidden in the film – but I’m quite, I was quite insistent on this logic of vocal plurality and diversity and inclusivity. The region is quite… for the most part, mono-ethnic because of how remote it is and the histories of Greece. But because of post-1990, demolition of this sort of side of the world, Eastern Europe, there were floods of migrants, etc. So, a lot of these kids come from second or third generation migrants. And I wanted this to be in the film and, in some cases, I used a little bit, just a hint of accent and I kept it on purpose. I didn’t want to ‘fix’ it. Or there is a comment about somebody that came as a foreigner and I kept that. I insisted that we put that line and I created a pause after it’; it was in a scene where everybody says: ‘I do this, that [as professions]’ and somebody says: ‘I’m a foreigner,’ and then we have a beat. It’s like a pause (‘Let’s think about it.’). So, I brought this perspective, even in a community that appears from the outside, very ‘mono.’ I tried to depict it in its real plurality that we don’t speak of.
00:53 David Roesner
Yes.
00:53 Konstantinos Thomaidis
Now, in terms of the first part of your question: how I think about it right now. For the most part, I have been thinking about this logic of dissensus and what, you know, choruses of dissensus do. I have an ongoing project. I have been teaching choirs and choruses in the theatre for the last six or seven years in various modules. And I am coming up with terms that sort of express what I’m trying to think about.
I think in some ways it [the film] is not exactly that because it does other things as well. The choric work in that film falls into a category that I have coined as ‘choruses of sonic remembrance’: the choirs that come together to remember in sound. In a way, it’s sonic heritage or sonic rethinking, sonic re-performance of a repertoire. So, I’m thinking a little bit about that—and I’m actually writing something about this. I’m trying to figure it out as I’m writing. What I want to say about this film is its relation to that notion, of course, of sonic remembering. Because in some cases, it’s really straightforward. So when Mikhail Karikis did a film in Kent with retired miners, the film is all about – it’s a short film, it’s I think less than 10 minutes – it’s a video, it’s not a film, it’s a video where basically you have an external shot of the miners making sounds from the mines that they feel are going to go extinct now. The entire film is that. But for me, this is the sort of ‘preservation end’ of the possibilities. And I’m thinking of: ‘what other possibilities are there?’ in a way.
Then I have been thinking a lot about what children do on stage or on film, especially when they come together as collectives. I have noticed there is a sort of rise in interest in the performativity of children’s collectives. So, I’m thinking [about], I’m collecting projects. Of course, there’s Tim Crouch and Are You a Robot?, where it’s a form of autoteatro[24] where you have two half choruses of children come together, and it’s beautifully written. One of them are the real humans and the other ones are the digital versions, the robots, and they’re trying to figure out which one is which, and both of them are so human. It is autoteatro that the kids don’t really know it. They enact it with text in hand. And, of course there is Yvon Bonenfant and the whole Vivacious Voices projectwhere kids participate in an installation which is ready for them, but they record the voices and they play with them, so it’s an expanding tapestry of texts.
But I realized after we did the montage, I watched at the Hayward Gallery in London a project by Mexican artist Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, which is called Sonnet of Vermin, where she asked children to reenact sort of traditional folk, monster, god, deity creatures and beings from First Nations, essentially, Mexican territory folk. And they make comments on environmental catastrophe.
So, I start finding these correlations with other artists and creating with children, which is becoming quite sort of interesting and exciting to me right now.
00:57 David Roesner
Beautiful. That was so much more than I hoped for as a response. That’s incredible. And it really speaks to how -I mean, I have no idea how you find the time; you seem to have longer days than we all have but – how do you get the loop between the academic thinking and writing and the terminology and the theory back to the practice and back to the theory and make sure that both enrich each other.
And I also really enjoyed how you spoke about the twin mind between you and Alexander and how it reminded me of, there was a previous episode, some episodes back, where I spoke with Bella Merlin about our collaboration, actually, and she coined the beautiful term of ‘creative resonance,’ which I enjoyed as well, because it’s also a sonic term, you know, of course, and it kind of spoke to the fact that at the time we had to work divided by an ocean, because she was an American and I was in the UK and so forth. I was actually in Exeter where you sit right now, so it seems to be Exeter that seems to be the facilitator of all the research…
00:58 Konstantinos Thomaidis
…it’s a place for music and sound and embodied research. Alongside Munich, I believe.
00:58 David Roesner
Well, Munich is, of course, the navel of the world, as we all know. It sometimes thinks it is, but that’s a different story.
Anyway, great. I think that’s a quite full-on take on the film, although it’s always fun to talk longer about a film than it takes to watch it! But really, it’s good, because it shows how much is in, how much can be, in 18 minutes. So, I highly recommend, everyone, to check online whether there’s a festival near you to watch Mother Company.
Konstantinos, thank you so much for taking the time and talking us through the film and some of its processes. It was very rewarding. And as I think our listeners will have appreciated, it’s so much to do with ‘staging sounds’ as this podcast is called. So, I couldn’t have found a better topic for today. Thank you so much.
00:59 Konstantinos Thomaidis
Thank you very much, David. Take care.
00:59 David Roesner
You, too. Thank you.
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Buchanan, Susan, Burt, Erica, and Orris, Peter (2014), ‘Beyond Black Lung: Scientific Evidence of Health Effects from Coal Use in Electricity Generation,’ Journal of Public Health Policy 35(3): 266–77.
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Chouliaraki, Lilie (2011), ‘“Improper Distance”: Towards a Critical Account of Solidarity as Irony,’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 14(4): 363–81.
Delaney, Marita (2009), ‘Koyaanisqatsi: The Dislocation of Feeling,’ Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 3(4): 78–87.
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Glass, Philip (2025), ‘Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance (1982),’ Philip Glass, https://philipglass.com/films/koyaanisqatsi/.
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Hampton, Ant (2010), ‘Thoughts on Autoteatro and The Quiet Volume,’ https://www.anthampton.com/tqv_notes.html.
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Kaličanin, Milena M. (2016), ‘Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006): An Illustration of Post–verbatim Theatre,’ Књижевна историја 160: 303–17.
Karikis, Mikhail (2012), ‘Sounds from Beneath,’ Mikhail Karikis, https://www.mikhailkarikis.com/category/all-projects/sounds-from-beneath/
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Morris, Mitchell (2007), ‘Sight, Sound, and the Temporality of Myth Making in Koyaanisqatsi,’ in: D. Goldmark, L. Kramer and R. Leppert (eds), Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press, 120–35.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991), The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Bryony Onciul & Konstantinos Thomaidis (2022), ‘Gifting Together and Gifting Back: A Pluriphony of Postcards,’ Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 13(2): 326-36, https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2022.2066342.
Pitas, Ioannis (editorial overview) (2013 [2010]a), ‘«Μηλίτσα», Εράτυρα Κοζάνης: Μακεδονικά Τραγούδια[‘My Little Apple Tree’, Eratyra, Kozani, Macedonia Songs],’ YouTube, https://youtu.be/L2-Eo1hjQOw?si=hC5iPPPvjZqRe4qL.
Pitas, Ioannis (editorial overview) (2013 [2010]b), ‘«Μηλίτσα», Σιάτιστα Κοζάνης: Μακεδονικά Τραγούδια[‘My Little Apple Tree’, Siatista, Kozani, Macedonia Songs],’ YouTube, https://youtu.be/4Gdnpc85pWo?si=qYdfpOjxNtI-JjAv.
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[1] For the concept and practice of ‘composed theatres’, please refer to Rebstock and Roesner 2019.
[2] For more on the film, read Morris 2007 and Delaney 2009.
[3] For research on the play, please refer to Zaroulia 2016, Hudson 2017 and Mader McGuinness 2025. I have previously unpacked the role of music in the play through deploying the interdisciplinary lens of audio forensics in Thomaidis 2017.
[4] I borrow the term ‘reconnaissance visit’ from the working practices of Polish theatre company Gardzienice (Staniewski and Hodge 2004: 136-37) and extend it towards the audiovisual medium of documentary film making.
[5] For a broad history of electrical energy production in Greece, consult Tsotsoros 1995.
[6] Rabiger and Hermann outline these as the two fundamental and opposing philosophies of approach in documentary filming, calling the supposedly unobtrusive approach the ‘observational mode’ and its contrast the ‘participatory mode’ (2020: 22-23). My directorial intentions fully embraced the latter modality.
[7] For the directives and targets associated with the EU support of renewable forms of energy, read regular updates at the European Commission website (n.d.).
[8] Among much research on the health and environmental impact of lignite extraction for electricity production, a good overview can be found in Buchanan, Burt and Orris 2014.
[9] For the filmic function of the voiceover (or ‘off voice’), read the opening chapters in Chion 1999.
[10] A small glimpse in how I compose improvisationally with conductor-like hand signals can be found in Thomaidis 2020. I use a range of 15-20 signals, depending on the class, workshop and creative process.
[11] The is the infamous closing line in both acts of Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (2010 [1956]).
[12] My artistic, embodied approach to dissensual music-making has been inspired by Rancière’s political and aesthetic conceptualization of dissensus (2015).
[13] For the ‘iterative loop’ between analysis and embodied/artistic praxis, see, among various other practitioner-scholars, Szanto and Sicotte (2022), who trace the lineage of the term back to Bruno Latour’s understanding of ‘iteration.’
[14] Serbian Professor of English and Drama Milena M. Kaličanin used the term ‘post-verbatim’ around a decade ago (see Kaličanin 2016). Stuart Fisher (2020) has also queried the function of ‘testimony’ in verbatim dramaturgies. For Radosavljević’s sonic/aural/oral analysis of this landscape of contemporary practices, see Radosavljević (2023: 61-90).
[15] My understanding of theatre as medium and the significance of examining theatre from a media and cultural studies angle owes much to Theodoridou 2015.
[16] I am referring to David Roesner and Tamara Yasmin Quick’s edited collection Music and Sound in European Theatre (2025). For the chapter I am referencing, see Verstraete 2025.
[17] See Chouliaraki 2011.
[18] For the full recording and archival information, see Pitas 2013 [2010]a.
[19] My conceptualization of cultural and aesthetic practices as gifts emerged out of a prior research project with First Nations artists, co-led with Bryony Onciul (see Onciul and Thomaidis 2022).
[20] For earlier formulations of the vocal in-between, see Thomaidis 2017, Thomaidis 2020, Thomaidis 2022, and Thomaidis and Verstraete 2023.
[21] For my approach to voice as dispositif, see Thomaidis 2025. For Roesner’s analysis of the ‘musical dispositif’, see Roesner 2014.
[22] ‘The match cut is often used as a transitional device between scenes. […] One image exactly replaces the other on screen’ (Brown 2022: 93).
[23] I have previously deployed this compositional strategy to direct a travelling multimedia archive of soundscapes and coined the term ‘transmedial sonomnesis’ to describe this compositional-directorial approach (in Thomaidis and Theodoridou 2016).
[24] In my understanding of ‘autoteatro,’ I resonate with Ant Hampton’s approach (see Hampton 2010).
