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The profile · researched 29 October 2026
Fifteen Movements and a Tarantella: Encardia at Twenty-Two
For twenty-two years this Athens ensemble has worked the repertoire of southern Italy's Greek-speaking villages. Its year now splits between a Ritsos poem staged in fifteen musical movements and open-air concerts built to get the audience dancing.
Athens, 2004, and the music of the Italian south
Encardia was founded in Athens in 2004 and set itself a narrow brief: the musical and cultural landscape of the Greek-speaking regions of southern Italy. In practice that means tarantella, love songs, and songs about hardship and emigration drawn from Calabria and the wider Italian south, sung in Griko and in Italian dialects as often as in Greek. It is a repertoire that sits on the far side of a border most Greek groups never cross, and the band has stayed with it rather than widening out into generic Mediterranean fare.
The ensemble has grown to nine people, splitting vocals and dance across guitar, double bass, accordion, mandolin, tambourine and other percussion. Artistic direction and most of the composing sit with the guitarist Michalis Kontaxakis. The touring core presented at the Athens Concert Hall in July 2026 was five musicians — Natalia Kotsani on vocals and percussion, Vangelis Papageorgiou on accordion, harmonica and vocals, Kontaxakis on guitar and vocals, Kostas Konstantatos on percussion, mandolin and vocals, and Giorgos Danis on double bass and vocals — with four dancers alongside them. Dimitris Tsekouras alternates with Danis on double bass in the theatre work.
The records
The band's own discography page carries seven titles. The first was Αγάπη μου Fidella, followed by Το παραμύθι της ταραντούλας, ΜηTerra, Emigranti, the live and festive Kalos irtate, Γυναίκες της Πέτρας made with the vocal ensemble Pleiades, and a recording of the Σονάτα του Σεληνόφωτος. Greek Wikipedia counts four studio albums released between 2004 and 2018 plus two live recordings; a 2026 account in To Vima put the total at seven digital albums, which matches the band's own listing.
The guest list across those records reads as a map of who takes this material seriously on both sides of the Adriatic. From Greece: Nikos Portokaloglou, Alkinoos Ioannidis and Foivos Delivorias. From the Italian south: Giovanni Avantaggiato and Daniele Durante, both long-standing figures in the Salento revival. The group has also worked with the Symphony Orchestra of the Municipality of Athens, and the Γυναίκες της Πέτρας project paired the band's instruments with Pleiades' massed voices rather than simply adding a choir to existing arrangements.
Taranta, and a film that travelled further than the band
The single largest audience of the band's career came in August 2008 at La Notte della Taranta in Salento, where they played to a reported 120,000 people — the festival that turned pizzica from a local survival into a national event in Italy. Beyond Greece and Italy, the band has performed in southern France, Algeria, Germany, Switzerland and Cyprus.
In 2012 the documentary encardia, the dancing stone took the Audience Award at the 14th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, and it remains the group's widest point of contact with people who have never been in a room with them. The concert tally is the one figure that will not settle: an older agency profile credits roughly 500 shows, the band's own site says close to 2,000 across Europe, and press coverage in 2026 simply says thousands. The direction of travel is clear enough even if the arithmetic is not.
Ritsos in fifteen movements
The work that has occupied the band most recently is a music-theatre setting of Yannis Ritsos's 1956 poem Η Σονάτα του Σεληνόφωτος. It premiered in Monemvasia in 2021 as part of the Greek culture ministry's All of Greece, One Culture programme, and has been moved through Athens venues since. Kontaxakis wrote the music and directs the piece artistically; it unfolds in fifteen musical movements of original songs and instrumental interludes, drawing by turns on southern Italian melodic lines and on Beethoven's sonata of the same name. Anna Theodoridou performs the poem's woman without a name. Alexandros Politakis designed the lighting, Pantelis Dentakis supervised the direction and Dafni Stathatou made the poster.
Its most sustained run was at the Theatre of the No on Konstantinou Palaiologou 3, opposite Athens City Hall: four Sunday evenings in November 2025 — the 2nd, 9th, 16th and 30th, all at 20:00, tickets at €15. Writing on 11 November 2025, the culture site Cultok described the 16th and 30th as the final two performances of a run that had been extended because of the response in the room. The production returned to the same theatre on Sunday 8 February 2026 at 20:00, again at €15.
Where things stand
The band marked its twenty-second year in 2026, and the anniversary concert was the clearest statement of what it now wants a show to be. On Saturday 4 July 2026 the Megaron Garden at the Athens Concert Hall hosted an open-air performance at 21:00, billed around twenty-two years of Encardia, with tickets at €15 and a running time of roughly 105 minutes without an interval. The programme drew on southern Italian folk material as its base, with Greek folk song and settings of Greek poets layered over it, and the staging was built around the audience joining in rather than watching — the band's own word for the evening was an encounter rather than a concert.
Alongside the music, the dance side of the operation has become a visible part of the schedule. The band's events listing currently carries a workshop in the traditional dances of southern Italy and a collaboration with the Duende dance company, which places the pizzica steps in front of participants instead of only on a stage. Press coverage in 2026 summarised the group's output as two music-theatre productions, seven albums, a documentary and thousands of concerts, with the band insisting that no two of those concerts are the same and that each is approached as if it were the first.
What the two formats are for
The result is a band running two quite different evenings in parallel. The Ritsos piece is seated, scored, lit and acted, and asks for the kind of attention a poem needs; it has been revived in short Sunday-evening blocks rather than long runs, which suits both the theatre's scale and the band's touring year. The open-air concerts move the other way, towards participation, and are structured as a journey from the nostalgic material at the start to the tarantellas at the end, where the floor fills.
Neither format relies on a support act. What carries both is the same body of songs, and the band's willingness to keep performing material that depends on a dialect most of its audience does not speak.
The show, now
Two shows are in circulation. The anniversary concert format was shown at the Megaron Garden of the Athens Concert Hall on Saturday 4 July 2026 at 21:00: roughly 105 minutes with no interval, €15, five musicians and four dancers on an open-air stage, with no support act announced. The programme starts in the nostalgic end of the southern Italian repertoire, adds Greek folk song and settings of Greek poets, and builds towards the tarantellas, at which point the audience is invited up to sing and dance rather than watch — the band bills it as an encounter rather than a concert. The other format is the music-theatre setting of Ritsos's Σονάτα του Σεληνόφωτος at the Theatre of the No on Konstantinou Palaiologou 3 in Athens: seated, €15, Sunday evenings at 20:00, fifteen musical movements of songs and instrumental interludes, with Anna Theodoridou as the poem's nameless woman, lighting by Alexandros Politakis and directorial supervision by Pantelis Dentakis. That production ran on four Sundays in November 2025 and came back to the same theatre on 8 February 2026; Greek culture press attributed the extension and the return to the warmth of the response in the room, and the band's line on its own live work is that no two nights are the same.
Researched from megaron.gr · tovima.com · tovima.com · el.wikipedia.org · womex.com · encardia.gr · encardia.gr · encardia.gr