Clement Kouroukis, a member of our church, recently submitted a short film trailer for the 2021 international online Orthodox Arts Festival.
Chronicles of Christ is a storytelling program whichtook root in 2016 when Clement was working on another one man show Man and the Muses. The initial idea lay dormant for a number of years until Clement was asked to present a example performance of it at an Orthodox Arts Festival in Bath in 2019.
The programme took shape out of a mammoth amount of research: close to 100 books on ancient Christianity and Orthodoxy being consulted, and a good deal of inspiration to weave it together!
After the help of Father Stephen and Father Philip (from the Monastery of Ss. Anthony and Cuthbert) the programme was refined and edited down and Clement is now preparing for a national roadshow to bring Chronicles of Christ to audiences across the country. Clement hopes that Chronicles of Christ will be an important contribution to the mission of helping people to meet and come to know Christ through liturgical drama. The full theatrical programme lasts for one hour and twenty minutes.
Chronicles of Christ has also received the blessing of Archbishop Nikitas of Thyateira and Great Britain.
Clement Kouroukis (b.1980) grew up in Toronto and initially studied at The Canadian Academy of Method Acting. On arriving in the UK in 2012, he studied at Artemis School of Speech and Drama and PerformInternational, both in West Sussex. His UK stage debut was the lead role in a modern Mystery Drama The Guardian of the Threshold in 2015. In 2016 he toured a number of roles for Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, including a full production of Romeo and Juliet.
In the same year, Clement developed an ancient Greek one-man show using original ancient sources. Man and the Muses toured in 2017 for three months in England, Scotland and Ireland. Also in 2017, he was invited to New Zealand to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the First World War with a newly written play. This War Is Not Inevitable toured seven countries over seven months.
In 2018, he was given the lead role for another Mystery Drama The Souls Awaken, which toured England and Scotland. Recently in 2019, Clement played the role of Christ in The Shrewsbury Passion, an outdoor production on Good Friday.
Clement Kouroukis is also an event organizer, he has put on three international Speech and Drama conferences in Sussex. He has also given workshops and talks on Speech and Drama and on the History of Classical Music in England, Poland and New Zealand.
In 2019 he and two Canadian colleagues were given the free use of St. Julian’s, a 12th century church in the centre of Shrewsbury in Shropshire. They are working on developing it into an international music and cultural education centre. Clement became an Orthodox Christian in 2019.