In ANASTENARIA: Ritual, Theatre, Performance; An Experiential Study, Ioli Andreadi, a theatre director and playwright who works internationally creating original, deeply personal pieces of theatre and performance, uses her field research in Northern Greece in order to tell a tale about a contemporary, fascinating, silent community of firewalkers and her own engagement with them, as it progresses with time and involvement.

Such an account shares something with a Performance Studies tradition of ethnographic interest, while reasserting the dialogue with stage practice, as it is and as it is imagined. Theory and practice meet, illuminating experience: loss and elimination, healing and survival, violence and love.

This is an intimate, true story of a surviving ritual performance that has a potential for reading across to stage work, in which the author is involved and academically engaged. Its ecstatic dimension is enriching, through offering a better understanding of the relation between inspiration, consciousness and technique.

The Anastenaria practices are specific and their investigation is relevant to questions that are urgent and compelling. Andreadi’s account can be read by both thinkers and practitioners as one more, contemporary, myth of the origin of theatre and performance, as a piece of intimate ethnography, as the script of a future play, or as the intention behind a future performance.