Becoming DIVA – A site-specific performance as part of Athens Pride 2026

On the occasion of this year’s Athens Pride, the Maria Callas Museum presents Becoming DIVA, a new site-specific performance conceived as an original production of the museum, with dramaturgy by Stratis Dalagiorgos. Inspired by the life and public persona of Maria Callas, the work revisits her figure through contemporary notions of identity, transformation and self-determination.

At the intersection of guided tour, performance and music, Becoming DIVA invites audiences to move through the museum in a new way. The life story of Maria Callas becomes a dramaturgical starting point for a personal and collective reflection on the freedom to shape, claim and redefine one’s own identity.

Becoming DIVA was created especially for the Maria Callas Museum and will be presented for the first time within the Athens Pride 2026 programme.

Becoming DIVA
A site-specific performance at the Maria Callas Museum

If you could leave behind only one version of yourself inside a museum, which one would it be?

A visit to the Maria Callas Museum gradually transforms into something unexpected. The exhibition spaces become activated, the narratives begin to fracture, and Callas’ life ceases to unfold as biography, turning instead into a site of live transformation.

Becoming DIVA is a site-specific performance situated between guided tour, happening, and embodied ritual. The exhibits, the routes through the museum, and the spaces themselves function not merely as a backdrop, but as living performative landscapes, constantly interacting with bodies, voices, and audiences.

Drawing from the trajectory of the legendary soprano, the work opens up broader questions around identity, exposure, and the desire to reintroduce oneself to oneself.

The audience does not simply observe the performance; they move within it. The museum is thus reconfigured as a liminal space, where the personal and the collective element briefly coexist without fixed boundaries.

What do you hold onto, what do you leave behind, and how much space do you allow yourself to become something else — something closer to yourself, or simply freer?

And somewhere between the exhibits, the silences, and the voices, the notion of the “diva” is stripped of its mythology and returns to something more human: the need to become what one has not yet dared to be.

Credits
Concept, Text Composition & Dramaturgy: Stratis Dalagiorgos
Artistic Curation, Site-Specific Design & Costume Creation: Danae Mega
Actor–Guide: Giannis Simos
Organisation & Creative Production: Maria Callas Museum; Morfoula Galopoulou, Artistic Programs & Community Engagement Manager