To Tμήμα Θεατρικών Σπουδών συμμετέχει και οργανώνει την Ελληνική Φοιτητική Συμμετοχή στην PQ23.
The one-sided view of the historical centre of Athens asa monumental ensemble -with reference mainly to antiquity- undermines the richness and diversity of the lived experience in a contemporary multicultural city providing heterogeneous sensory, aesthetic and sociopolitical stimuli. The exploration of the city’s sites as counter-monument, as a living situation, as current experience and performative potential, unfolds a polyvocal, contemporary and site-specific performative mapping of the city centre (and beyond) utilising the endless transformative manifestations of expanded scenography within the living archive of the city. An equally important starting point was the diverse explorations of the political body as personal and collective somatic writing in public space and its spatial context. An assembly of political bodies: politics of identity, gender and sexuality, love and desire, autobiographical reflections and social concerns regarding gentrification, homelessness and the immigrant/refugee crisis, media manipulation, critique of educational/cultural policies, even co-opting with the current protest mobilisations of the art world in Greece. The performative condition was a catalyst for activating public space and enabling human communication and direct interaction.
Supervisors of Student Participation
Maria Konomi, Assistant Professor in Scenography - Costume Design
Dr. Ilia Lakidou, Laboratory Teaching Staff
Project Supervising Professor
Maria Konomi
Supplementary assistance
Dimitra Nikolopoulou, PhD candidate ΝΚUA
Video / Μοntage
Nikolas Kladis, Theseas Markopoulos, Giorgos Tzanakos
Photos
Theseas Markopoulos
Video Teaser Montage
Ilia Lakidou
Music (Teaser)
Giorgos Braoudakis
Participants (Undergraduate)
The performance built upon a collection of found images and objects from the urban space in Athens and their composition in a single space, representing and reconstructing the city as our home. We collected photographs from our neighborhoods and from central urban locations, next to found objects from the streets in order to put together our presentation. In the performance a hand stitched cloth was used as a focal point and as a background setting onto which we synthesized a collage from all found and selected images and objects. The performance took place within the National Garden of Athens, a rare enclave of natural environment which stands in stark contrast to the densely built city of Athens. Through the choice of our location, we emphatically expressed the need to seek nature, balance and serenity in urban living.
Concept/ Performance Vasiliki Aggeloudi, Alexandra Almpani, Zoe Kelesi
Our action took place in a quiet spot in the National Garden of Athens. Calling a member of the audience to accept our invitation to bury him alive, the volunteer steps onto the park bench and with slow, long movements we wrap him/her with the gauze to bury him/her. As we gently lay him/her down on the bench, we take off our black handkerchiefs and begin a long process of lamenting. During the lament we recite a particular poem by the writer/poet Michel Fais, while people from the audience approach to take pictures with their mobile phones. Becoming aware of all the media attention, we start to perform lamenting for social media: we mourn even louder and more ostentatiously looking at the cameras.
Concept/ Performance Katerina Giakoumaki, Ιοannis Gionis, Dimitris Markos
During the Christmas season in 2016 a group of people dressed as Santa Claus placed a metal sculpture in Rallou Manou square in Athens and disappeared. The sculpture depicts a chain holding a red balloon or a red balloon lifting a chain. It was installed with a hand written inscription: the monument of the unknown artist. There are texts and poems dedicated to the allegory of this red balloon and its chain, poems and texts about love, art and people. This performance was conceived and realized as the Greek state was attacking artists/people who create invaluable transcendental artistic realities. People that have become a united body politic in the face of an unjust punishment imposed by the state. This performative action reflects the need to express and claim a space of existence for each artist as a political body, reminding us of our inevitable temporary existence and agony, as we so often so often remain invisible, unseen.
Concept/ Performance Maria Georgiou, Diamanto Nosti, Antonia Tsili
The project Restriction and political body explored the outside inscriptions of restriction of the political and social subject. The performance took place in Ermou Street, as a public intervention, with five performers, connected to each other by a rope, struggling to move along the central pedestrian shopping street, struggling to come to terms with a city projecting primarily images of business and consumption. One of the performers falls, energizing the aggregation and gathering of the corporality and materiality of the group dynamics. Falling activates the dichotomy between standing and falling and opens up all sorts of interactions and contemplations on the concept/situation of restriction and confinement in visual and relational terms. Rooted in political philosophical contexts, the problem of restriction points to the impact of authoritative inscriptions on the politic body and is understood as political from the moment the political body opposes, resists, disobeys, revolts, rebels. Linking the performers /subjects under restriction with the rope, chaining and connecting them, leaves interpretations open and potentialities pending as to the transformative outcome of their actions.
Concept/ Performance
Davidia Velaeti, Konstantina Daratsaniou, Anastasia Liori, Katerina Skylogianni, Charalambos Hatzidakis
Everyday life moves at a fast pace, and the Covid-19 pandemic has made us redefine our values as entities. Performing the ritual act of breakfast, eating bread and jam in the public space, the performance re-examines the creation of a society, an identity equally individual and collective, private and public, exploring ways of co-existence in the contemporary urban environment, in terms of affection, solidarity and tenderness towards the unknown Other. The body politic is about the notion of sharing breakfast and affection between us and towards passers-by, as well as intoxication and participation in a part of bustling Plaka right next to the Roman Agora. The chosen location in this emblematic neighborhood of the historic centre is a multilayered space in between a small square and a stone house courtyard, centered around the ruins of the former Kiouchuk Mosque.
Concept/ Performance Elisavet Andritsopoulou, Lefteris Argyros, Artemis Giannopoulou, Pelagia Memmou, Lida Rapiti
Documentation photos: Emmanouela Fourtouni, Thiseas Markopoulos
Documentation video: Katerina Koukoutsaki
In search of the "body politic", observing spaces and their people, our common thematic axis centered around issues of possibility or impossibility of the citizen's smooth integration into the urban fabric of Athens through property, signage, signposting, public spaces (pedestrian streets, parks, squares), as well as through the social structures of the state, national identity, and legitimacy. Incorrect or misleading signage, problematic licensing, degraded areas and squares, forged or meaningless documents and identity cards, illegal immigrants were some of the issues that emerged. Our chosen location -Koumoundourou Square- seemed to somehow effortlessly provide the appropriate spatial/dramaturgical context. The place is characterized by a diverse and mullticultural human element: a place where many immigrants/refugees of various nationalities gather and live, a place permeated with various aspects of this ongoing crisis. Within this square passers-by lounge under the trees, immigrants play cricket, while children run between the flowerbeds and play with the dirt. The square also possesses an inherent theatricality and an open theatre with about 250 seats partly in disuse, with no regular events. The recent protests of the art world in Greece against degrading legislations formed another layer of significance to of our performative action, as we incorporated the protest symbol of the red clown nose.
Concept/ Performance Maria-Leda Diochnou, Irini Kazantzidi, Giorgos Braoudakis, Giannis Tsiptsis
The performance took place in and around Stoa Orfeos (Arsakeiou) and the adjacent Dikaiosynis square in central Athens. This site has had particular cultural significance for the city, as the emblematic Arcade of Books: a space dedicated to publishers, book presentations and publications, as well as a lively hub of social life. Lately, the site has been more and more degraded, with shops closing after the longstanding financial debt crisis and the social distancing through Covid 19 and homeless people finding shelter there. With most of the project research happening in situ, it was soon discovered from a series of short interviews conducted on the site, that the building would undergo radical redevelopment, abolishing its character and becoming a high end gastronomy multiplex, a sort of Arcade of Moussaka. The ‘cooking with books’ performing theme was then considered an apt parody of strategies of intensive gentrification, advertising, trash TV and the glossy ‘remaking’ of the city of Athens. All dramaturgy and scores of the piece were conceived in a site-specific way, in a dialogue with the site and its various contexts.
Concept/ Performance Anna Theodoridou, Diamanto Nosti, Giannis Tsiptsis
You have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
from the poem Home by the Somali/British poet Warsan Shire
used in the performance
Concept/ Performance Maria Georgiou, Maria Raistelli, Antonia Tsili, Giorgos Folokis
We wanted to comment on the demolition and closure of significant theatres like the Embros Theatre - in the area of the historic centre, in Psirri. These buildings are un-recognised monuments that do not deserve to be closed or demolished for purely economic reasons. Narrating the history of the theatre building as a fairy tale, the performance creates an interaction of human bodies with its exterior architectural body, resulting in their joint integration. Through a participatory call to the audience, spectators help wrap the building with a roll of paper; with the audience also party wrapped, the audience-theatre connection and their shared fate is highlighted. In the end, two performers who symbolically stand for the theatre break the "bonds" setting the theatre building free: as theatre gives us life, we must give life back to it.
Concept/ Performance Stella Karageorgi, Filothei Kotzia, Angeliki Lanara, Flora Fousteri
Participants
Postgraduate Programme
“Greek and World Theatre: Dramaturgy, Performance, Education”
The project creates a dialogue between institutional and artistic space: it is about the coming together of artists and lovers, agents of the intelligentsia, for a "place" of "utopia" that no longer exists. Just as erotic mating no longer exists as an option of resistance to the flattening loneliness of people. Just as there is no longer any need or maximum potential for exercising the political right to vote and be elected. The performance creates a dialectic sonic framework using a deconstructed vocal improvisation between love and un-love, public and private, political and a-political, and ultimately refers to the split a contemporary body politic may experience. The project reflects my ongoing personal questioning of what constitutes the body politic, which seems to remain both anchored and fragmented when faced with the alienating mandates of our age: materialism and profit.
Concept/ Performance Eleni – Maria Antoniou
The performance took place at the entrance staircase of the Old Parliament building. The theme of the performance is derived from the long-standing lack of a reliable educational system in Greece, which has resulted in a disregard for proper writing of Greek language, a move away from classical education and its devaluation. The performance puts forward a critique of the political elites and the institutional space of politics as essentially indifferent to the value of education as a cultural indicator, resulting hence in the incubation of uneducated citizens. The performer depicts a negative role model: a man seemingly well dressed and well behaved, yet profoundly uncultured: the way he treats books and the environment, the fast food he consumes, the tabloid he reads.
Concept/ Performance Tilemachos Angelis
The human naked body is a political body. A-shamed is a naked human being in the historical centre of a European capital city who intersects with and disrupts societal, religious and legislative regulations. Taking as a starting point the sense of freedom acquired through the process of taking ones’ clothes off on a nudist beach, the performance puts forward a central question: what it is that differentiates humans from all other animal beings, resulting in the guilt of nakedness and disrespectful clothing. In this respect, the body is the source, the cause, the instrument, the solution. The performance deals with the question of freedom while negotiating its limits through disrobing. The performance follows the cycle of the body: liberation-freedom-liberation. A-shamed is the moment of performance. The body is the moment before and after A-shamed...I wonder how much square feet is taken up by nudity?
Concept/ Performance Olia Georgiadou
Participants: Olia Georgiadou, Maria Georgopoulou, Tilemachos Angelis, Alexandros Karapostolou, Sosi Vakoula
The performance took place on the street at the storefront of Attica department store, in the centre of Athens. A woman is seated on the pavement holding a cut-out paper heart, her existence left on the street, where she schematically steps in a situation of brief homelessness, although her clothes do not reveal this. Her heart is the heart of each of us, as a variable, class-wise, each one of us could be in the same position: rendered invisible and alone. The marginalization and social vulnerability transmutes the human being into a shadow of himself, looking for someone to warm it, to remind it of its presence. So, the woman holds her paper heart and shows it to every passerby; as for all, it is a matter of reminding herself of her humanity, more so in conditions of marginal survival, striving for love and acceptance. Perhaps by reminding herself of her own existence, she can reach self-respect and acceptance.
Concept/ Performance Maria Georgopoulou
From the garden of King Louis to the garden of modern palaces. The dimensions of the garden are enlarged, spreading across the city. Citizens are the new inmates and the media are the new means of monitoring and pacifying animal-humans. Modern "democratic" emperors monitor and direct the movements of their subjects through screens. The way is simple and easy. The subject becomes a prisoner of the society of spectacle, consuming the food offered by the rulers. Through the glass screens he is magnetized by images/simulacra of events, people, situations that are attractive, provocative, uncanny. Modern cages are made of seductive images, stories that produce adrenaline and pleasure, acting as a counterbalance to the reality outside the cage. The modern emperor gives the option of exiting the cage. But who is really ready to confronts his freedom?
Concept/ Performance Αmelia Eleftheriadou - Giorgos Tatsis
Postgraduate Programme “Greek and World Theatre: Dramaturgy, Performance, Education”
This walking performance aims to create a psychogeographical mapping in the urban fabric of Athens through an itinerary which includes places of personal importance. A work-in-progress that will grow for as long as I live in the city. I leave behind personal objects, marking particular spots that mean something special to me, something that someone else might see, connect with and share a similar thought, or else it might be lost forever without anyone else paying attention to it. An offering to our host city. A way to revisit central parts of Athens and claim my right to exist in it as a distinct individuality. Even for a few minutes, a public space acquires a private, personal significance.
Concept/ Performance Maria-Sarra Karpouzi
This autobiographical performance is about the experience of a woman who redefines her feminine identity through a wig when she loses her hair because of cancer. The performance also challenges people's reactions to seeing a woman in a cap, trimming her wig, and to the emerging uncomfortable associations. The performance took place in front of a hair salon in the neighborhood of Ilioupoli. The setting included two chairs, a table, accessories, a sign. As background music the song The Complaint in lyrics by the Nobel Prize poet Odysseas Elytis was used. I placed the naked head-rest of the wig on the chair next to me and looked at it. I covered my hair with a cap, took the wig and placed it on the head-rest, started combing it, trimming it as if I were in the extended space of an outdoor salon. Some people walked by and others paused to watch. One woman wanted to put a ribbon on the wig, while another, distracted by the event, was hit by a car while crossing the street. The action lasted 1 hour in total, with a 15-minute break after the woman's accident.
Concept/ Performance Maria Koronellou
Camerawork/ Montage/Sound Εvgenia Koutorevithi
At night, when all the lights of the big companies are turned off, on the busy boulevard, a body-based love hunt begins. Transformation is now taken for granted and what matters is the most successful transformation of a man into a woman. In my performance the car functions as a cocoon in which an "everyday" man transforms into a "butterfly" of the night. The transformation is ritualistic and contains all those "feminine" elements that will give a more feminine form, such as lipstick, wig, and high heels. This alludes to Victor Turner's theory of "rites of passage" and van Gennep's theory of "preparation - test - return" of the process of any great transition, change, transformation. The passage to the pavement is also in effect a march towards the different, towards the unknown, where your only weapon is your body. Proper transformation, however, succeeds when cars stop with drivers looking for love for sale and this particular performance was successful as several cars stopped.
Concept/ Performance Konstantinos Makridakis
The aim of the performance is to open a dialogue with the city itself, the de-historicization it is undergoing, the systematic governmental effort to abolish social meeting places, and the neutralization of collective common memory with respect to processes of intense urban gentrification. Observing the current situation of Exarchia Square -a historic landmark of Athens, in terms of social movements and public mobilizations-, most of which is now occupied by the construction site of the future metro station and guarded around the clock by Greek police special forces, we wonder how normal it is for a public space to be protected by the citizens themselves and whether we are gradually getting used to perceiving the above situation as "normality". The disguise of an animal was considered as an apt way to highlight the alienating restructuring imposed on Exarchia square and the figure of the rabbit was chosen as a symbol of the absurd par excellence. Consequently, in a series of interventions, three rabbits appear suddenly in the square and interact with the space, the passers-by and with other symbols of power- also in uniform.
Concept/ Performance Stella Magana, Afroditi Mitsopoulou, Angeliki Strataki
The three-part performance was based on improvisation and the experiential embodiment of the overall conceptual framework, and was filmed in the heart of the historic centre, in Plaka: on the upper part of the Roman Agora diagonally opposite the Parthenon It combines conceptual, somatic and political art by negotiating the concepts of enclosure and dis-enclosure of the body politic. In Part A, the body politic enters into public space, which becomes a non-place due to the violation of its political rights and so it decides to disentangle itself. In Part B, the exit of the body politic from the non-place takes place, while in Part C, the transition of the body politic into a new place of potentiality, takes place near the foot of the Acropolis rock. The song Anonymity Enclosure functions as a sonic/conceptual framework for the performance in combination with the compositions by Palolomenes Souls (You and us, Injustice), constituting a contemporary soundscape, while pain, agony, indignation and resistance are inscribed in the body of the performer. The body politic crawls uphill carrying stones in a nylon bag tied with a rope on its right leg in search of a new political space of equality and freedom.
Concept/ Performance Mari-Souzan Mouzela
Violin, Song/Songwriting Mari-Souzan Mouzela
Piano, Musical Composition Chrissa Melissari
Camera/Video editing Vangelis Bathrellos
The performance aims to present the image of women performing a stereotypically female job, peeling onions, which is associated with images of pain, tears, confinement. The women's hands, however, have the will to perform alternative acts, redefining woman by the weapon of language; this is none other than female writing. Five bowls of onions and five knives are placed on a fruit seller’s bench in the buzzing square of Monastiraki. Writing down their wishes on a parchment paper rolled out on the bench, each of the two performers then stand behind a bowl of onions, and start performing the mundane task of peeling the onions. During the performance, they repetitively call the audience into a participatory action, alternating between "Peel onions, it's your job" and "Write down and express yourself freely".
Concept/ Performance Katerina Bilali, Georgia Kokkinou
The city, and by extension urban space itself, is a structural factor of disability. Space directs us where we can go, telling us what we can do, who and what we are. Social relations and perceptions, such as those about disability, interact with space; they are created, established and reproduced or subverted through the way space is organized. The performance attempted, through an embodied, lived experience, to focus on issues of viewing and perceiving mobility disability in public space, proposing a route that takes up space along the perimeter of the metro platform, marking movement through physical public space. The aim is to highlight the barriers faced by people with mobility problems who use a non-powered wheelchair by simulating the challenges of navigating in a public space; another aim is through the use of signs, to allow the public to reflect on the importance of mobility and accessibility in our society, and also to address aspects of both the aesthetics of disability and explore stereotypes and prejudices on the part of society that form the daily experience for people living with mobility disability.
Concept/ Performance Giota Panagi
A body, "foreign", in search of an embrace. A body as board invites to a face-to-face "Encounter" with the Other, based on Levinas' ethics: "When I meet a person I hear at the same time a request and an order addressed to my responsibility: to be entrusted with the care of the Other. "Hug Me" is the command. Who to whom? Who is the subject and who is the object of the hug when the Person is ultimately Me? When the Other is Me? The aim of multi-locational, site-specific performace is to create a new reality out of reality itself. By combining the "symbolic" language (Lacanian term) of place, time, the body with the icon-imaginist language of the performer, an uncanny topos is born against which the viewer is surprised, bewildered. And when the embrace is performed, the lived experience of a utopian encounter takes place, for both the viewer and the performer, capable of freeing us from the fear of the Other, which is me.
Concept/ Performance Vangelis Papadakis
The performance asks the viewer to: Tell me your stories of abuse, with the action aimed at both victims and perpetrators. The Spirit/performer is covered with a white cloth/cocoon suggesting a statue before unveiling or an Erinya’ s (Deity of Revenge) statue waiting for her votive offerings. The Spirit/performer stands dead still against the Acropolis sacred rock and the urban night landscape at the background, holding in his hands a mirror in which the viewers can see their reflection. There is also an inscription stating the grim task of completing the live action: tell me your stories of abuse. Inspired by Herbert List's photograph - The Spirit of Lycabettus (1937), the performer brings the Spirit to life on the hill of the Supreme Court (Areios Pagos). The chosen location lies northwest of the Acropolis and according to the legend was the ancient city's supreme court: an ideal spot for this counter-justice social action, aimed at personal purgation from cases of abuse.
Concept/ Performance Ilias Sapountzakis
The performance highlights the basic theme of the body politic, with the body in its every movement, in its every stance "serving" as an agent of political expression either consciously or unconsciously. In Greece recently a new legislation has been put in effect regarding artists, which downgrades art studies and degrees, equating them with high school diplomas and devaluing the artists’ work and personal effort. The performance uses dance as a central trope of expression and explores how a political position and attitude can be expressed through movement and the body using as its central theme a dream: the dream of the artist is to take action according to his thoughts, expressions and creative visions. Dancers from three different schools were "united" to dance for this theme, in the central Parliament Square, a locus of particular sociopolitical significance. A dancer dreams of dancing together with other dancers to become a collective body in motion; her desire becomes reality, and through dancing she advocates for a profession/ art without barriers and degradations.
Concept/ Performance Katerina Trikoglou
Participant Dancers
Galani Gora, Despina Fakiola, Niki Mitsaki, Zoi Voga, Katerina Bourodimou, Eleni Zografaki-Pabouki, Elena- Maria Buntaj, Ria Koktsidi, Rahil Rimenidi, Nefeli Kolia, Mirka Palavou Hesper.
Music Ermis- Honolulu, Tripes- Giorti
Video editing Katerina Trikoglou, Despina Grammatikaki
