SuperTitles has worked with the Athens & Epidaurus Festival (AEFestival) across several seasons: 2006–2008, 2012, and continuously from 2016 through 2026. Over the last five years, each summer has meant roughly 30 to 40 events packed into a two-month programme — parallel productions, fixed opening dates, and no room for last-minute guesswork.
One of our longest-running festival partnerships — and our reference model for full festival coordination.
Text preparation & translations
For every production we prepare the original-language surtitles — not a rough dump of the script, but titles shaped for readability, line breaks, musical phrasing, and live cueing. That means the same standards we describe on our Services page: progressive unveiling where the dramaturgy needs it, operator-friendly files, and text that works in a dark auditorium under pressure.
AEFestival is an international programme — it hosts both foreign-language and Greek productions. Every performance is surtitled in Greek and English: Greek so audiences can follow foreign shows and for accessibility on Greek-language work; English for international guests. All translations are provided by the festival’s translation partners; we match and synchronize those texts to the prepared originals — timing, segmentation, and booth workflow — so both language tracks stay aligned with the show through rehearsal and performance.
Logistics & premiere pressure
About 70% of festival events are premieres. There is no reference recording to work from; final texts often land only two to three days before the general rehearsal. We run the logistics with AEFestival production so scripts and translations arrive on time, get prepared, and reach the booth before the first run in the room.
That rhythm — dozens of shows, most of them new work, almost all of them on a tight clock — is what festival-scale surtitles coordination actually means. It is not one show multiplied; it is a conveyor belt of opening nights.
Live operators
We provide operators for every performance. A typical event has one rehearsal (sometimes open to the audience) and two to five performances. Peak summer days can stack five to seven performances at once across venues — each with its own file, language set, and technical handover.
Operators run SuperTitles in the booth: cue-by-cue control, multi-screen output, and recovery when the stage does not follow the score. Festival programming depends on that consistency show after show.
Technical planning & delivery
We take part in the technical analysis of each event — projectors, TVs, LED walls, booth position, and sightlines — so surtitles reach the whole audience, not just some specific rows.
- Live feed to all projection paths — usually one laptop with one to three outputs, feeding venue hardware via HDMI or video extenders
- Chroma-key feeds to video consoles — surtitles as subtitles over video when a production needs it
- Angled and outdoor rigs — at Epidaurus and other difficult sites, slightly rotated panels to match skewed projection geometry
- Pre-stretched output — corrected signal for non-standard TV resolutions so titles look right on site
- Projector shutter control — network control of shutters through our system, integrated into the show workflow
The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus is extraordinarily demanding for teams new to the venue. For us it is routine. The hard part at Epidaurus is not technical — distance, scale, and projection geometry are well understood — but human: artists and directors need to feel they are in good hands. They need confidence that surtitles will not expose a mistake on their Epidaurus presentation, and that our operators can follow the show when it turns improvised. That trust is what we have built season after season.
Track record: In years of festival work we have had no technical failures on show and no synchronization complaints from productions. Many directors and producers we meet through the festival ask to work with us again on their next projects — outside the festival calendar, at home venues and on tour.
Why it matters
AEFestival is the benchmark for what “full coordination” looks like at scale: text, people, hardware, and calendar managed as one service. If you are planning a multi-venue season with premiere-heavy programming, this is the engagement we point to.
Planning a festival programme?
Tell us about venues, languages, and dates — we will outline what full coordination can look like.