REVOLT ATHENΣ

A bomb, planted at the foundations of the festival…

Papakonstantinou and her ensemble do not beat around the bush: what they really mean to do is to (re) negotiate our turbulent historical present […]

An outstanding performance with a truly fresh approach…

Outstanding performance about social & political actuality in Athens…

The revolution of myths…

[…] Elli Papakonstantinou created a complex project, open to interpretation and with tremendous aesthetic craft; […] a perfect combination of different arts.

Elli has, a flair for the creation of such moments of euphoric stage anarchy…

[…] Elli Papakonstantinou dares to speak out about painful things, both in Greece and abroad. She toys with clichés and turns them upside down, leading Revolt Athens to its chaotic denouement, its culmination perhaps serving as an exorcism or as a warning […]

Historical truth and realistic politics…

[…] Elli Papakonstantinou forges a political/theatrical discourse, which comes without syntheses and recapitulations, without conclusions, still less without precepts, a discourse inhabited by sarcasm, self-sarcasm and irony […]

Lived Aesthetics of Crisis and Performance Politics of Discontent

Vyrsodepseio, A Θeatre in Times of Crisis, Elli Papakonstantinou & ODC Ensemble

Revolt Athens can be regarded as ODC’s intermedia piece par excellence, embodying the lived aesthetics of crisis in a dense visual, aural, spatiogeographic, and performative assemblage. Moreover, the performance represented the most geographically and socioculturally explicit work by ODC to date, matching content with context. The piece was put together as a multitonal audiovisual performance, a bittersweet, twisted travelogue bursting with joie de vivre5, at times confessional, anguished, desperate, sarcastic, aggressive, even raging. The piece drew on the harsh realities of crisis-struck Athens and the dystopic everyday life in the city. The main performer, Rosa Prodromou, exemplified the struggle of any person/ woman/ artist to maintain a sense of normality and grounding, seeking empathy and communication, whilst global and local neoliberal politics keep rendering human lives more and more vulnerable, destabilised, mediatised, precarious. The space evoked an improvised environment with a sense of urgency, a sort of crudely-made miniature construction site, a mix-and-match landscape of odd objects and emblems (a miniature Greek flag, the sacred rock of Acropolis) conjuring the urban landscape of the city of Athens complete with Parthenon, Parliament (Syntagma Square), the port of Piraeus, and the often shanty-looking blocks of flats (polikatoikies). Specific neighborhoods such as Exarcheia, Koukaki, Petralona were named, in an attempt to create a mental mapping of Athens.

Using video art projections and live feed imagery as a backdrop, the three artists onstage (performer Rosa Prodromou, composer/ musician Tilemachos Moussas and visual artist Pantelis Makkas) constantly worked on setting and re-setting the stage. The core themes of the piece unfolded in short, fragmented narratives. Multiple brief scenes exposed the vulnerable psychology of the individual, the precarious everyday life, the sociopolitical conflicts and the spirit of revolt vis-à-vis austerity politics, the undermining of democracy and the workings of all sorts of cultural stereotypes. The piece clearly took an antimonumental stance at Greece’s glorified past, critically foregrounding it as a regressive, oppressive, and limiting cultural construction. At the same time, the current confrontational reality and the crisis-induced degradation was visualised in the form of projections of Athens riots and the Aganaktismenoi’s political demonstrations. The iconography of street protests also served as a sort of counter-monument, a fragmented allusion to the “Acropolis burning”.

Oddly enough, some fundamental components of this aesthetics of crisis—as articulated in the works examined so far—can be regarded as unorthodox, even typically extra-aesthetic elements, which are, at any rate, primarily experiential: feelings of discontent and precariousness that are channeled through the piece, but also the state of agency, presence, and urgency that pervades the audience. Art critic Hal Foster recently identified the precarious as a basic concept which we can use to critically engage with contemporary art of the last twenty-five years, utilising it almost as a distinct aesthetic and conceptual term in its own right. Papakonstantinou and ODC essentially work along such overlapping lines and concepts: establishing the precarious state of living in Athens/ Greece today, not only as a predicament, or mere entrepreneurial artistic strategy, but principally as an act of resistance and a persevering active presence. ODC’s performative energies and live art strategies go beyond the representation or anticipated avant-garde theatricality. Capitalising on lived experiences and socio-political awareness, ODC’s work bursts with the power of live art, urging us to revolt by way of questioning our empirical reality and critically engaging with it […]

Athens-Epidaurus Festival

# 1 – Opening on History

But today in Greece, history also pulses in the breath of the present, as shown by the work of Elli Papakonstantinou, director of the cultural space “Vyrsodepseio” in Athens, born from the reconversion of the largest tannery in the Balkans of the nineteenth century: the activity craft-industrial art is now replaced by the artistic gesture (dance, exhibitions, music, theater). Since 2011 this is the headquarters of the ODC company, oriented to cross- cultural, interdisciplinary and political projects in a broad sense, because dedicated to the reflection on the polis . The imprint is also recognizable in REVOLT ATHENΣ, hybrid performance (word, music, images), initially conceived for a foreign audience: after Barcelona, ​​Vienna and Berlin, it is now shown to the Greeks with the same intent to draw, between tragedy and irony, a ‘poetic cartography of Athens’. A city-myth, a glossy postcard for tourists, but also a chaotic metropolis, symbol of a Greece crushed by the crisis, devastated by the flows of refugees and street demonstrations. Opposite and complementary faces of a collective imagination often nourished by stereotypes.

An actress (Roza Prodromou) illustrates the monumental and scenic wonders with the rhetoric as a tour guide and also comic effects. Athens is described in words, evoked by a miniature model and completed by images that scroll on the screen. The idyllic profile is punctuated by shadows, as in the eloquent sequence chosen also for the teaser : at the top of the Acropolis the Hellenic flag is waving, soon covered by a black cloud, real or drawn that is, metaphor of a murky horizon that pollutes the very identity of Greece. The guide becomes an ardent pasionariawhich denounces the tragedy of the present (unemployment, poverty, homelessness, suicides), on the edge of images and live music, up to the very strong final scene, a perfect synthesis of the director’s aesthetic and political intentions. Now she clutches in the hands of the snakes, his face is deformed in a cry of rage and horror, iconic representation of Medusa or the Minoan Goddess of the Serpents, as noted by the critic Dimitris Tsatsoulis (“imerodromos”, 06/18/2016). With an impetuous gesture she destroys the entire miniature of Athens, while on the screen the images of protesters, clashes with the police and hell of flames. Chaos and catastrophe, destruction of ancient and contemporary myths. Is it the end of civilization? Rather, a liberating gesture: from the abyss may arise the rebirth and so, swept away the Athens “of others”, it is possible to open a new page.