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OEDIPUS – ODC Ensemble, Brooklyn, NY

Over the course of the weekend, audiences that want to a have a different opera experience from what the Met is offering, can head over to the BAM Fisher in Brooklyn for “OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding,” a unique take on the famed Sophocles tragedy. The work features music by Tilemachos Moussas and Julia Kent and is written by Elli Papakonstantinou.

STOCKHOLM – The premiere of the play Alkestis, written and directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, a special commission from Dramaten, the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden in co-production with the Royal Opera of Stockholm, took place on December 2 in Stockholm and impressed audiences and critics. The play is a radical reading of the work of Euripides by the Greek director who in recent years has made a name for herself in the international theatrical firmament.

The premiere was described as the last mainstream event before the new restrictive measures were implemented due to the pandemic. The stakes were high as, for the first time in the history of the institution, a Greek director was presented with a commission for a modern work. The show also marked the first official collaboration between the Royal Opera and the Royal Theater of Sweden.

The play- which now joins the permanent repertoire of the Theatre- was covered by most of the Swedish media. Reviews highlighted the intense interest of the Swedes in ancient as well as modern Greek drama. It is worth noting that the new artistic director Andersson aims at increasing international collaborations and seeks to present Alkestis in Greece.

Greek Director Elli Papakonstantinou’s latest play, Alkestis, premiered at the Royal Theatre of Sweden on December 2. Photo: Sören Vilks

The Royal Dramatic Theatre, known as the Dramaten, is Sweden’s national stage. It was founded in May 1788 by King Gustaf III. Today, Dramaten presents plays on six stages in three different buildings and guarantees variety and flexibility – exactly what you would expect from a national theatre.

Elli Papakonstantinou is known for the immersive theatrical experiences she creates by involving the community and opening a dialogue with new technologies, the politics and great narratives of our time. In recent years, she has also charted a remarkable artistic course abroad. Her works include Oedipus: Sex with Mum was Blinding which had its world premiere at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in New York in September 2019. Among her international awards are the art award Fulbright 2018-9 and the Music Theater NOW Award 2018-19 (for The Cave). The world premiere of The Kindly Ones was held at the Mauthausen Camp in Austria. Her digital works Traces of Antigone (by Christina Ouzounidis), Aède of the Ocean and Land, and Hotel AntiOedipus were presented at festivals and organizations around the world, including the important IRCAM / Center Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Romaeuropa Festival 2020 in Italy, receiving rave reviews and a nomination for the Italian Critics Award 2020-2021.

The official trailer for Alkestis is available online: https://vimeo.com/654048802.

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Papakonstantinou, a Greek director, presented “The Bacchae” at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam’s largest concert hall. “The Bacchae” is very loosely based on Euripides’s ancient play, whose characters seem to have been transplanted into a postapocalyptic world. The stiff family of King Pentheus of Thebes gathers around a dinner table, in outrageously camp makeup and costumes, and await the arrival of a meteor that might destroy the earth. That meteor turns out to be Dionysus, the god who appears in Euripides’s play to punish Pentheus and his relatives for claiming that Dionysus is not the son of Zeus. Here, Dionysus — played by Ariah Lester, also the composer of the few songs peppered throughout — acts instead as a catalyst for an actual bacchanal.

A commanding perfrmance!

A wondrous, polyphonic synthesis of cultures and eras, a ‘queer ethnic futurism’ (…) Enduring energy, complementary powers, masks, tongues, psychedelic projections, glittering fetishes, dissolving forms, life vibrating beyond divisions, flowing in and out of all unexpected encounters and developments, shocking the mind as well as the body, the mind within from the body, breaking the boundaries of standardized identities.

A cello stands at the center of both This Is Why We Live, at La Mama, which closed September 29 and Oedipus, Sex with Mum was Blinding, at BAM Fisher, which also ended on that date, two international pieces—one based on the poetry of Wisława Symborska and the other after Sophocles, with a classical and jazz score by Tilemachos Moussas & Julia Kent.  Both are directed by women and focus, primarily, on women’s themes and talents, down to a string’s last pluck and bow. 

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The ideas of self-deprecation, penetrating self-criticism will reappear in Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou’s goth Oedipus.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second /

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first /

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home /

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger /

I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths /

I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today /

Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time . . .

Unless it is deeply, painfully ironic, laughter is not associated with Jocasta, the wife and mother of Oedipus. If Papakonstantinou (she also conceived and wrote the immersive opera) is to be believed, the ancient queen’s self-recriminatory behavior is also well-known in the lives of women today—and is an issue for men as well. ODC Ensemble’s Oedipus, Sex with Mum was Blinding is an intensification of Szymboska’s examination of women’s guilt, as well as a deep-dive into the psychology of the ancient queen (the seer Teireias also appears, who lived life both as a woman and a man). The grunge immersion—the often grainy cinematic environment is by Stephanie Sherriff–uses singing and technology, pop culture and neuroscience (advised by professor Manos Tsakiris), even an m.c., a keyboardist for the show, Misha Piatigorsky, who combines Joaquin Phoenix in Joker and Joel Grey in Cabaret.  Other men in the cast include Lito Messini as Oedipus, Elias Husiak, and Tsakiris. Papakonstantinou may seem indiscriminate, because she can pull from everywhere—she is unafraid of postmodernism, myth, and onstage cameras–the kind many Americans will recognize having seen work by Ivo van Hove—music (Kent plays the cello onstage)—including Philip Glass sounds and an excerpt from “Nature Boy”–languages, social media, and politics—“this country is based on racism.” Debatably, she shapes the work into the story of three women, an actor (Nassia Gofa) and two singers (Anastasia Katsinavaki, Theodora Loukas), one classical and the other jazz, who might seem to be refracting the same character, in guilt and trauma. Papakonstantinou is never exactly clear in her excursion through the subconscious—but she understands and elicits the feelings Symborska transcribes, in, as another illustration, the baldly titled poem:  “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself”:

The buzzard never says it is to blame. /

The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean. /

When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame. /

If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.”

The poet finishes:  “On this third planet of the sun / among the signs of bestiality / a clear conscience is number one.”

Current women’s theatre explicates, however, that no human, at least, has one.

It's not a matter of style or of a supremacist logic. It is an absolute negation of the human being. The negation of the Other. I, above all and everyone else, and usurper of the Other's body. Loss of identity. Violence with no qualms. Elli Papakonstantinou takes in her hands the box of Antigone and crushes it. She puts in it everything has become mythological and she destroys it. She explores the fact of breaking a Myth. What is left? Antigone is a figure that represents the power of detachment, of screwing up organized games and of finding her own dimension, her own image.

Antigone is the female power, it is the power of the underworld. What Papakonstantinou does is to retrieve those underworld powers to perform - on a sort of stage made by bits and pixels - what is still unspeakable, impossible, incomprehensible. Her show "Trace of Antigone" is more powerful than a "spleen". She goes beyond the tragic and aestheticizing French vision. She's careful not to tell any story, instead, she firmly investigates, with a focused ferocity, the Other, the so considered weak part of the Male/Female. And this part is bound to the reality of being a Woman. Because now more than ever, the dominating forces, the forces that destroy and cannot create, have reached unimaginable dimensions. This is why this show on Zoom is so intense and so powerful, it pushes us to breathe taking off our protective mask. The women in Antigone breathe, they breathe a lot. They are strong, angry, with their fingers clenched in their mouths, to indicate all the strength needed to rebel, to assault the violence, to be able to finally exist as an active subject among many scattered objects. The Woman is in the collective imagination the weakest part, the part that is possible to manipulate and play with. We have forgotten that Women are creators, they generate not only life, but thoughts, spiritual depths and human virtues. In this show all of this can be seen in the many windows of the Zoom platform, of the various sounds, in the visual and iconic references.

Here you have Antigone, from a distance. A distance that allows Antigone to touch you stronger than any violence. The use of digital media is imperative because it is not mediated, but immediate. The construction and the de-construction, the mythological narration, the perception of being the performers in a world of performers who are acting and staging a desperate show against death. The cast of women who offer this dimension, the actresses involved in the project, is very powerful. This is why I believe it's useless. it's not necessary to write about their talents. It's necessary to accept what they give. What arrives. Talent is a romantic virtuosic idea. What I found in those actresses who have narrated, discovered and detected Antigone and what she represents, is the Present, the Real, the unveiled Underworld. This is why this project, born as a non physical show in the incredible time of social distancing, is totally necessary. It serves its contents. It arrives, powerfully. This is why Elli Papakonstantinou's vision is so unique and irrepetible. Now. Now, absolutely now.”

The punk opera The Cave wins four stars - strange and incomprehensible, but the reviewer is still blown away by the experimental Greek ensemble

Athenian director Elli Papakonstantinou investigates female identity through myth and hurls a sharp denunciation against the ancient scourge of violence against women in a choral performance—combining music, song, and imagery—that sings a hymn to freedom, equal rights, and gender fluidity.

Even Judith Butler, the high priestess of the modern feminist movement, praised the performance of international director Elli Papakonstantinou, which brings Antigone into the present day through the bodies of contemporary femininities, such as Nalyssa Green.

Rage, disappointment, and fear surge within you as you watch violence span the entire length of a woman’s life, from the time she is a girl. The story of the girl is primeval, much like the fear that is implanted within her and takes her over.

The experience of fear, like any lived experience or action, is right there—completely real, taking on a material existence upon and inside a woman. Even if she has not survived a sexual assault, the fear of assault leaves its tangible consequence on our body and soul.

"I loved the performance and I am grateful that you translated the piece into English and other languages. It is socially powerful and wonderfully experimental. It moved me and made me feel deeply grateful for feminist art that connects our rage with solidarity," Butler stated.

Denouncing violence, the production serves as a site of resistance and challenges gender constructs at their very root, while simultaneously offering care and tenderness to Woman...

"Whatever does not remain hidden is revealed, and whatever is revealed changes," offering hope that gender-based oppression will transform into the healing of gender trauma, and into liberation from every form of gendered captivity.

[...] a voice that speaks for the silence of so many others.

For Papakonstantinou, Euripides' play provides the frame for a proposal to a joyful apocalypse. The show pulses and goes in all directions with such a festive spirit (…) a bewilderment at the breach of theatrical follie, a baroque Orlando furioso (...) Passion explodes through the skin, the bodies, the pores, the emotions in disruption with the dominant culture, definitely the patriarchal culture.

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Elli Papakonstantinou offers with this piece a theater of change, of discovery, of insolence. Its staging follows a relevant dramaturgical reading and serves a powerful philosophical statement in a radically theatrical manner. With desire as its cornerstone, this production of The Bacchae invites us to reflect on the limits of a society which boasts of having “no moral or technological restrictions”. She brilliantly raises ethical questions by playing with all the aesthetic tools that theater offers…

Yet another performance in this Holland Festival about the confrontation between a closed community and a mysterious intruder, following Angela and Metamorphosis of a Living Room . And actually, the protagonist, the 'environmental activist', in the festival-opening performance Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was also an outsider. In mythology, intruders with a mission that is pleasant or unpleasant for those around them are as old as the world. Gilgamesh, Akhenaten, a large part of the Biblical prophets, Siegfried.

The Greek tragedian Euripides also featured such a character in *The Bacchae* . The play is about the ultimately fatal relationship between a Theban king, Pentheus, and his mother, Agave.

Tensions rise when a stranger arrives. That is Dionysus, the god of religion and myth, of wine, lust, and ecstasy. He wants to convince the world that he is a god by descent from Zeus, by force if necessary. Pentheus does not believe him either. But the citizens of Thebes do, or at least they soon join Dionysus' orgiastic cult.

As a result, Pentheus loses authority over his people. When he eventually gives in, it is already too late. He mingles with an unruly crowd of revelers in the woods near Thebes, where he is torn apart in the commotion; his mother beheads him and brings the head, impaled on a wooden stake, to the city. Only when the intoxication has worn off does everyone realize what has happened.

Queerness has always been a part of Euripides' intense text. In the orgies, too, gender identities are heavily intertwined in Euripides' work. It is perhaps no coincidence that the (gay) Polish composer Szymanowski based his opera *Król Roger* on a similar mythology concerning a Bacchante-like Christian cult in Sicily, in which King Roger II of Sicily suffers roughly the same fate as Pentheus.

In this production of The Bacchae by the Greek ensemble ODC (Odyssey!), we see a set of white screens bearing projections of images from the cosmos. Agave and the seer Tiresias sit at a table while staff serve. At a certain moment, a projection of a comet appears on the screen, and it is announced that it is Dionysus, who, as a comet, could destroy the Earth.

First, Pentheus arrives, an equal to a statue of Apollo, but in tall red patent leather boots with stiletto heels. It makes him even taller, but also more gender-fluid . Then Dionysus enters in human form. Just like in Euripides, he brings a cult with him. In this cult, everyone can enjoy themselves without restraint. In this new world, sex differences have been abolished. Humanity has returned to an amoeba stage, of the organism originating from the first evolutionary phases of life on Earth that reproduces by dividing.

A 'musical queer version of Euripides' The Bacchae, in which*every* form of desire is encouraged by the god Dionysus,' say the creators. But wasn't Pentheus already quite gender-fluid? In Euripides's work, Pentheus already dressed as a woman, although that isn't necessarily 'queer,' the creators seem to be suggesting. Pentheus's problem, we are told, is that he is trapped in conventional notions of identities.

But after his court, including his mother, has surrendered to the new cult, he sees no other way out than to let go of the reins. He is anally penetrated by Dionysus in person, in a behind-the-scenes scene, filmed by a camera and projected life-size onto the screen above the participants at the feast. But just as with Euripides, he pays for his late surrender with his life, and we hear that here too, Agave carries his impaled head to the city.

What is the message of all this? To give an example, Dries Verhoeven depicted a drugged orgy getting out of hand, in all its ambivalence, much more accurately in * The NarcoSexuals *. And by the way, is the life of amoebas the ideal form of reproduction?

The electronic music of Ariah Lester, who also plays Dionysos, is certainly beautiful in any case. He has a lovely, ethereal voice in both the lower and falsetto registers. Something between, for example, the British electropop musician James Blake and Michel van der Aa. An association to which the projections of cosmic phenomena in the background contribute.

Elli Papakonstantinou: 'As a director, I follow the waves of text, live music, video art, and dance in search of a new performing language. This piece lies at the intersection of these currents: queer is a new aesthetic. It is a pop piece with classical operatic outbursts, a dance piece with stability at its heart, a cinematic concert: it is a Greek tragedy in the metaverse.'

At first, you might think you are at the wrong performance. But soon, Elli Papakonstantinou's The Bacchae offers us a Nietzschean gaze into the abyss.

The first ten to twenty minutes of The Bacchae are quite misleading. On stage, a dining hall is demarcated by curtains. A neatly set table with kitschy tablecloths, bows, and draperies. Lots of silver and gold. In their fine but rather stiff clothing, the actors seem primarily poised to perform a costume drama. Are we even at the right performance? The Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou is actually known for the dazzling way she makes ancient Shakespearean classics and Greek mythologies explode at theater festivals.

Thus, under her hands, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex was transformed into the musical pop spectacle Oedipus: Sex with Mum Was Blinding (2019), featuring a deluge of visual projections and frenzied acting. With Alcestis (2021), she created a feminist version of Euripides' earliest known play. With Eros , she intended to subject Plato's Symposium to a similar theatrical-musical mash-up, together with a Ukrainian company. But just before the premiere, the war began, and she radically changed it into a performance in which the actors were present via a livestream from Kyiv.

Add to all that emphatically contemporary engagement the fact that Papakonstantinou likes to make use of modern technology – facial recognition, game avatars, live visuals – and it is clear that this is a theatre maker who is at the heart of current events. At the same time, with her mythological sources of inspiration, she positions herself precisely within a tradition with an ancient past.

You also notice that intriguing dual attitude in the opening of The Bacchae . Anyone who reread Euripides' original beforehand assumes that we are in the royal palace of King Pentheus of Thebes. At the same time, as soon becomes clear, we find ourselves in a future that is not specifically dated.

The fact that science fiction and mythology intersect is by no means new and is, in a sense, self-evident. Both abstract reality, only the direction differs. With mythology, the imagination focuses on history—in this case, Euripides' story served in part to explain the arrival of the Asian god Dionysus—and in science fiction, that imagination is future-oriented. In this piece, that takes the form of a meteorite approaching Earth. Cosmic disaster that we know from films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact, Melancholia , and more recently Don't Look Up.

The Bacchae initially shares a somewhat satirical undertone with the latter . For instance, King Pentheus is hammering away rather heavily at proper manners and proper nutrition, delivering commercial-style speeches about it. The company throws itself at ambrosia-50, a green jelly in the shape of a perfectly straight cube.

We find ourselves in a tightly ordered universe, the message goes, with fixed male-female divisions, with rigid regulations and laws. Only the unashamedly sensual way in which some lick their plates clean reveals that something is brewing beneath the surface.

In this rational world, as a spectator, you also try to keep track of what is happening rationally. Who exactly is who from the original? Who are the male actors, who the women? And who is speaking, anyway? The combination of stick-on microphones and subtitles on the side of the stage is sometimes a bit confusing, especially since there is little traditional dialogue here in which actors react to each other. They address the audience primarily through monologues, short cries, and aria-like outbursts of song.

Then a stranger arrives. That must be Dionysus, played by Ariah Lester, the charismatic performer from Venezuela, currently still unrecognizable, huddled under a hood. He calls upon everyone to follow their deepest desires. For one of the servants, that means making videos that go viral. For the other, it is about getting rich. But no, that is of course not what Dionysus means. Do they feel no physical desire? Not really, admits one of the servants, who is apparently meant to represent the passionlessness of this (our?) efficiently ordered society.

And then, just when a slight disappointment is impossible to suppress, just when you fear that the performance will remain a bit tame, the performance breaks open.

It begins with a brutal rape, behind the scenes, but filmed with a camera and projected life-size over the guests at the dinner party. At first, it remains stiff, but soon it is as if a bomb has exploded on stage. Set pieces swirl in all directions, clothing is largely taken off, and in a succession of dance, music, and visual effects, we find ourselves in an ecstatic, orgy-like flow.

In Euripides' storyline, we have arrived at the moment when Pentheus, who had learned of the new Dionysian culture—degenerate in his eyes—wants to take heavy action against it. The stranger advises him to disguise himself as a woman so that he can attend the Bacchantes' orgies unseen.

Here the performance lifts off the ground and transforms into an ecstatic burst of energy that no longer speaks through the mind but works directly on the senses. It is exhilarating, sexual, but above all suggestive, partly because the participants in this orgy rarely have contact with each other, but everyone copulates with an imaginary partner.

All genres have now been broken down: dance, theatre, literature, performance, film, pop, classical opera. But languages ​​are also merging. We hear Spanish, English, Greek, Italian, French… And it is no longer clear who is a man, a woman, or anything in between.

The creators explicitly want to present a queer version of Euripides' Bacchae . One could say that this original, four centuries before our era, was already 'queer'. There is the masquerade of Pentheus as a woman, just as female roles in the amphitheaters at the time were always played by men, including those of the Bacchantes, but it naturally remained a male-dominated structure.

According to Elli Papakonstantinou, queer is more than just a set of sexual preferences. It is a 'new aesthetic', a 'possibility to look at the world in an entirely new, open way'. That is an interesting thought, but one about which there will not necessarily be consensus within the queer community. There are plenty of queer people for whom their identity does not have to mean a radically different worldview at all.

It is also not unproblematic that this new queer aesthetic in this narrative coincides with the cult of Dionysus. Granted, the latter can be seen as a movement providing an outdated, rigid culture with new vital impulses, but here it inevitably comes with the association of debauchery, decadence, and violence.

As in all Greek dramas, the original ends bloodily, in a world of betrayal, deceit, and revenge. In an ecstatic frenzy, Pentheus is mistaken for a wild animal by his mother and killed. A moralistic interpretation can be attached to this.

In Donna Tartt's bestseller The Secret History (1992), a similar tragic lynching occurs when Greek students perform a Dionysian ritual on their own initiative, which is certainly not presented as something worth emulating.

Until the nineteenth century, Euripides' play was considered too gruesome and too licentious, but that changed when Nietzsche defended it in *The Birth of Tragedy* (1872).

In this, Nietzsche contrasts two life forces: the 'Apollinian' (which strives for beauty, harmony, laws, and intellect) against the 'Dionysian' (which strives for chaos, intoxication, and ecstasy). However, Nietzsche did not advocate a reckless surrender to the Dionysian either. His primary concern was restoring the balance between the two. According to him, true tragedy existed only briefly, during the time when both these forces were present. Subsequently, culture shifted towards the Apollonian, with Socratic philosophy, science, and Christian morality.

The Dionysian intoxication, the 'immeasurable primal lust of existence', is stirred up when we catch a glimpse of the abyss. Then, says Nietzsche, 'we are forced to face the horrors of individual existence – but we do not freeze with fear, for a metaphysical consolation tears us away for a moment from the turmoil of fleeting figures'.

This Bacchante performance gives us such a glimpse into that abyss. The wonderfully exuberant playing and singing Ariah Lester and the ODC Ensemble immerse the audience in such a trance.

Even the stage floor participates. It becomes an instrument itself, as the movements on it are directly converted into sounds, and because it is connected to a seismograph that records the tremors on the spot on a roll of paper, which subsequently also becomes part of this Dionysian dance.

By then, we have left Euripides far behind. The storyline, insofar as there is such a thing left, takes a more scientific turn, towards single-celled life and something that perhaps suggests a return to the Big Bang. That all remains rather vague, just as the entire narrative line is not the strongest part of this performance. It relies mainly on the music, the choreography, the visual outbursts, and how they work together to make the audience part of one compelling and unsettling cosmos.

The play THE BACCHAE is originally a Greek tragedy by Euripides, dating from 405 BC. Performance artist Elli Papakonstantinou has created a contemporary adaptation, which is a theatrical, performative and chaotic vortex, mixing genres such as theatre, opera and queer culture.

This play tells the story of Dionysus' return to his native city of Thebes, and his revenge against his aunts and cousin, who insulted his mother and refused to recognize his cult.

Elli Papakonstantinou offers an unexpected reading of Greek tragedy, linking myth, philosophy and foundational narratives, highlighting her militant spirit and commitment to current social and societal issues.

The piece transcends boundaries between genres, languages, nationalities, and eras. The bursts of classical opera and the stability of dance blend to create a pop and cinematic work, captivating the audience and making the Greek myth feel alive and relevant.

With its striking staging, blending multiple visual effects, music, dance and opera, this piece offers a powerful and exciting experience.

For the creators of THE BACCHAE, “the concept of queer goes far beyond a set of personal preferences. It is above all an opportunity to look at the world in an entirely new and open way.” Elli Papakonstantinou , as director, follows the flow of text, music, video, and dance in search of a new performative language.

It was supposed to be an opera inspired by Plato's Symposium, a collaboration between the Greek ODC Ensemble and the Ukrainian Nova Opera directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, specially produced for the O. Festival in Rotterdam. The joint rehearsals were to take place in Kyiv.And lo: the members of Nova Opera had to flee. A week before the start of rehearsals, the Russian army began the invasion of Ukraine. Current events had torpedoed the original plan, and the members of both ensembles came together in Rotterdam—insofar as they managed to—to deliberate on the new situation.

Under the title Eros, the ensembles present the results of this frustrated collaboration. The material on display is fresh out of the oven and served steaming hot. The idea of ​​a symposium has been retained from the originally planned opera: the audience is received at long white-covered tables and welcomed by a committee that takes its seats at red-covered tables. Behind the committee hangs a full-screen projection screen.

A camera on a tripod and a second camera operated live provide the images projected onto them. Four vocalists, complemented by guitar, cello, keyboards, and a drummer, urge us in an energetic atmosphere to make a choice from the menu. We are addressed as 'soldiers of love'. The audience turns out to be guests at a feast dedicated to Eros. Love will be the topic of conversation. But then the air raid siren sounds, and the expectant excitement is brutally cut short.

The current reality of the war in Ukraine is depicted in misty, distorted images. It appears as though this symposium has moved to a bomb shelter. The committee behind the table plays with an old black-and-white photograph that ends up inside an inflated balloon, thus creating the image of a seemingly safe armor, but which is in reality an extremely fragile bubble.

The mobile camera records, but also manipulates the images. The camera rolls across the table, showing the plates that remain empty. At one point, we are granted a glimpse into something that looks like a planter, but as the camera gets closer, we see a miniature soldier stuck halfway in the earth: the battlefield is never far away.

A calm female voice frequently refers to Plato's Symposium. There are direct references to that classical dialogue: the names of the participants in that symposium are mentioned, and a single anecdote is repeated. Beneath the action lies a constant musical fabric that sometimes receives more independent attention.

The final part of the performance centers around the soprano Anna Kirsh. Perhaps the antique black telephone is a reference to Poulenc/Cocteau's *Voix Humaine*: Kirsh, too, is processing the absence of a loved one. But she criticizes one of the more famous passages from the *Symposium * and contradicts Aristophanes' account in which he claims that ever since Zeus split man into two halves, man will always remain in search of the other half to become whole again.

From the moment the air raid sirens and the bombings are recalled, the performance follows an erratic path, as if the performance itself has to absorb a fragmentation bomb. The performance consists of disparate ingredients that culminate in the crisis embodied by the soprano. Perhaps the soprano role can be identified with Ukraine itself. In any case, the performance itself is a metaphor for the uncertain situation at the border with Russia.

“A roaring group of men and a woman hoping to gain power by sacrificing for her husband. In the Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou’s dense & iconoclastic version of Euripides’ drama, everything lands in a clear feminist statement…”

“Ironic phalluses in a visually compelling classic play”

The myth of Alcestis, the queen who agrees to die instead of her husband, is not the best known of Greek myths. Yet it touches us, mostly because it is about a structural victim-culture. The woman is the one to bear, not only everyday life, but also she is there to bear the suffering. Alkestis is the first in a number of women who will allow themselves to be subjected to male, mental violence. She’s asking Nora, or Miss Julie.

The Dramaten has asked the Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou to make her own interpretation of Euripides’ more than 2,400-year-old text. She does it with live video and a direction that is as self-conscious as it is ironic. It is full of playful anachronisms, and winks to the audience, and finally a Dionysian, male rage that is quite voyeuristically parodic.

What impresses most is the cavalcade of images that the director rolls forward: scenes from various rites, as well as how Papakonstantinou draws mythological figures. The god Apollo is glittery turquoise and fluid gender – with a refined voice played by Joel Valois – that lets Alkestis become a plaything for Death: Torkel Petersson as a tuxedoed inexorable playboy sends Alkestis to Hades with a rape. Male brutality dominates the choir, here a raw mob that excitedly comments on the event.

The staging is effective and eclectic. The audience gets to follow the dinner of the royal family through a rectangular hatch, and the whole thing is almost reminiscent of a sad Norén confrontation. The funeral of Alkestis describes millennial rituals of death and mourning. The cheeky, phallus on a pedestal worshiped towards the end of the play looks as if it comes out of a Marie-Louise Ekman painting.

Karin Franz Körlof is absolutely perfect as Alkestis who believes that she can create a position of power through her victimisation. Shanti Roney lets her husband Admetos be carried away by a very real grief. Gunnel Fred delivers Hercules, who tries to put everything right, with fine humor.

Euripides leaves Alkestis unable to speak when she returns from the underworld. A woman silenced by violence but also by the realization of death as an eternal absence.

Elli Papakonstantinou opens up the end with a polyphonic dramaturgy. Suddenly phones next to the audience start to ring. It is now the ensemble that wonders what we think. Open to immediate interaction. A reasonable ending to an expressive visual world that sincerely wants to talk about gender, power and structures.

Elli Papakonstantinou is currently at the top of her game and addresses the general public via the internet with an opera-happening. The characters of the drama are transformed into “avatars” in the “meeting room” and with the participants-spectators taking on the role of Chorus of Thebes, but even in this digital we can follow the traces of the ancient drama. 

We are truly proud of Elli Papakonstantinou. We followed her steps abroad a few years ago as an extremely dynamic creator who was leaving due to the crisis. We welcomed her back recently probably as the most prominent representative of her generation internationally. 

We still remember her as a young woman creating tension at “Vyrsodepseio” with an artistic collective located in one of the most unpredictable parts of our urban world, in the uncharted area of Votanicos. 

And if we think about it, Papaconstantinou had been, since that time, searching for the essence – as she foresaw – of innovation for the new century before searching into form or repertoire. 

She was looking for it in a new, open and direct space, in a new dramaturgical architecture, where myth, creator, and audience meet in intersecting paths, exchange experiences, and redefine their overlapping identities. 

It seems that eventually, her violent release from the experiment of “Vyrsodepseio” worked to our advantage… Instead of the artist herself being restricted in one location, she carried her challenge internationally and transmitted it to global dimensions. Papaconstantinou set her sights on a career in the international arena – and to some extent she seems to have already succeeded. Her latest productions are under the auspices and funding of international art institutions, are being reviewed by foreign critics and theorists, and, most importantly, lay the foundations for a new art form – beyond postmodernism – that will concern us in the near future. 

In other words, Elli Papakonstantinou is at the top of her game at the moment. And this certainly gives us even greater joy when we see that the source of her inspiration is the application of new technology to the ancient myth. 

This gives her the opportunity to reach out to a wider community via the internet. While through the internet’s semiology she can reach the most advanced outposts of modern theory of identity, gender issues and psychoanalytic deconstruction. 

Her latest work is, in my opinion, the most settled in this regard. “Hotel AntiOedipus” is essentially an opera-happening, a continuation of her previous work, “Oedipus: Sex with Mum was Blinding”, which is developed on the well-known ZOOM app. 

After the production ‘s world premiere at the Centre Pompidou, numerous participants on

the platform are now invited to take part in a search for the hero ‘s face, in a space and perception that is constantly broken in “meeting rooms” with various people (Oedipus, Jocasta, Tiresias, a Doctor (Freud), a Woman…), in “avatars” that replace the talking face, eventually in manifestations of joy, grief, celebration and mourning. At some point the weight of the meaning shifts from one side to the other and the participants-spectators take on the role of the Chorus of Thebes. 

The curious thing about this innovative approach is that the myth is maintained to the end. Even in this digital pandemonium we can trace the steps of the ancient hypothesis but also of the old question of Oedipus to the “internal Sphinx”: “- Who am I?…” Only this time, the same question comes to our screens reversed: “- Who am I NOT? ”…. Because the modern Anti-Oedipus accepts many identities, has many faces, follows many paths. His face is nothing but the choice of a road in a three-lane road that includes potentially all other options. 

That is why in each of the “rooms” that we will enter to “decide” on Oedipus and its meaning, in each of the “avatars” that will hide us from the others or that they will obscure reality for us, we will find nothing but noise and multilingualism. Thebes has been turned into Babel and its Chorus (ourselves as a city of solitary beings) into a patchwork of languages, views and identities. 

Of course, the most informed among the participants in Papakonstantinou’s performance have already remembered Deleuze and Guattari in their own “Anti-Oedipus” and their contribution to the revision of the oedipal complex. 

Oedipus was projected as the victim of an exemplary punishment of human passion and erotic desire by the world of order and reason. In this way we watch our Anti-Oedipus moving away from his Jocasta becoming the symbol of constant guilt and self-punishment, we see successively his example being made a symbol by art, being institutionalized by religion, being objectified by science, being instrumentalized by power … This is where Papakonstantinou’s “Anti-Oedipus” begins. … But it ends up somewhere equally interesting. Behind the production hides the face of a human race that, although traumatically open, proves to be more tolerant towards that which is different. 

There is a world, afterall, that wants to meet and collaborate from different corners of the globe through its computer, willing to share and divide itself into many. The noise from the interventions, from the schizophrenic changes on the screens and the overflow of information, cannot hide the voice of this new world that rises asking for something universal, whole and true at the same time. 

Here is how the cold technology of gaming, facial recognition, Augmented Reality and live visuals transform into art, and how the place of exile of individuality transforms into a place of community and hospitality. In a “hotel” where the guests meet the face of Oedipus fragmented, yet always capable of becoming the beginning of rebirth. Once again. 

The music composition of the show is signed by cellist Julia Kent and Telemachus Moussas, while the live visuals are created by Stephanie Sheriff from the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics of Stanford University. 

It’s great to watch a Zoom show that actually looks good. This a serious and often exciting exploration of the uncertain world in which young women live; it’s full of stunning images, the result of careful, classy work by a great company.

From the beginning we are taken to a women’s world where “men don’t exist” which makes comment from this man difficult; but in its rage, power and fluency this is an extraordinary piece of work. A girl’s dangerous world crackles and fizzes with ever-present threat from men; the fact women cannot escape the fear is no less awful for being commonplace – it’s not someone who looks like a monster who will harm you, it’s just as easily the taxi driver.

The show doesn’t just assert that the essence of Antigone transcends this, it shows it. A group of women, thrown on their own resources celebrate their collective strength. The images are startling, rich and the more impressive given they are made in the homes of the artists, with just their bodies, faces and imaginations. A big cast (for Zoom) throws storytelling back and forth between screens and the performances are wild, enthralling, and often mad. The use of the technology (after a long pause before the start) is spot on, this is disciplined work.

The text is rich and suggestive as it sweeps between three languages. The music is a weird thread under this. There is a real feeling of place, not just in a text that tells of olive groves, but in the detail of the homes (set) and the costumes. When you sign on clear instructions make it easy to make the best of the show, which includes break out rooms and an agora - the Greek marketplace where everyone can meet - at the end.

“It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear of the neuroses and constitutes the essential part of their content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis.”
Sigmund Freud, Footnote added to the 1914 edition of Three Essays on Sexuality (1905)

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex becomes an inspiration for the creation of this immersive opera—developed partly by the director at Stanford University—a musical performance that manages to mix music with new technologies and neuroscience with grace.

The actors become involved with the technological elements on the stage either filming themselves or others, creating cinematographic close-ups, medium shots, and shots over the shoulder, reminding us the crucial role that personal space has in our daily life and how it’s been affected by the new technologies and media. 

Video projections of everyday images urge us to connect the past to the present. Neuroscience is represented through the dialogue on the woman (Theodora Loukas) and a real psychology professor, Manos Tsakiris.

Opera singers and jazz vocalists come together with musicians playing cello, piano, and other instruments and, with the help of technology, bring us a re-formed sound that matches the text. It becomes intense as the story reaches its peak, its climax, and softens when the text must be delivered and must be fully understood to help unfold the story.

The actors dive into the heart of the play from the very start. An exploration of the self, the play asks: Are we really free? Is there such a thing as free will, is it fate or unconscious? Matters of biological orientation and identity are raised. Can we change the nature of humankind?

The story of Oedipus becomes the story of the boy of the millennium, who, similarly, at a younger age, tries to figure out the great mysteries of his nature. 

The audience, the community, plays the part of the chorus, creating noise, alarming the characters to action. It is invited to participate by asking the same questions Oedipus faces through his journey. The child is a captive of his conflicting impulses. The mirror, the image the audience sees, and the image Oedipus sees through the camera lenses is not the self. It’s just merely a reflection of it. So, what can we do about it? How do we take action?

Jocasta sums up the story: ”Many men had been dreaming about having intercourse with their mothers; the one who doesn’t care about it, easier stands in life…” While the Sphinx is a representative of the maternal image of the avenging, dangerous mother, Jocasta is a woman, a wife, a mother, facing not just the fact that she married her child but had children with him too.

Everything has its roots in religious feeling, as it’s what drives the characters to action but also what starts the action of the play at first. Oedipus dares to question the Gods, to fight against what’s holy and secret, dares to listen to his will…or is he? 

The actors managed to find the depth of their character. Young Oedipus (Elias Husiak) had control of his voice and was able to use it in a way that clearly delivered the state of the character on every new discovery, which helped to unfold the story and build its character. His controlled body movements became fast and rigorous at times and the way he carried his body while not speaking were both compelling.

Nassia Gofa, as Jokasta, though not an actress, was engaged in her character and therefore a joy to watch and listen. We could feel her pain. 

Oedipus (Lito Messini) was stripped from his manly façade to reveal a female body, reminding us the bipolarity of the self between what we perceive as a female or a male characteristic and what its imposed to us by society, raising questions on constitutional bisexuality, as the child is identified with both parents, but also showing the struggle for understanding the self. Sexuality becomes the basis of love, affection, attraction. The father is a subject and the mother an object. 

“Do you like looking at yourself in the mirror? What do you like about your appearance? What don’t you like about your appearance? Is there anything in your appearance that reminds you of your mother? Is there anything in your appearance that reminds you of your father? Have you ever thought about killing your mother? Have you ever thought about killing your father?”

[...]

Oedipus: Sex With Mum Was Blinding at BAM (September 25)

Sophocles’ classic tragedy is getting a makeover in this opera, which uses emerging neuroscience technology to tell its story. Writer and director Elli Papakonstantinou worked with artists and scientists to build this innovative theatrical experience in which the audience becomes the actual chorus of the opera. Papakonstantinou cast an all-female ensemble of opera and jazz vocalists to perform in the Oedipus Rex adaptation, and employs both ancient myth and pop culture to reexamine gender and showcase the long history of community in political performance.

BROOKLYN – The myth of Oedipus has long been an inspiration to artists from ancient times to the present. The tragedy by Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus the King), opens with the city of Thebes suffering from a plague which will end once the murderer of the previous king, Laius, is found. Oedipus searches for the killer unaware that he himself is in fact the killer. The truth is eventually revealed that Oedipus unwittingly fulfilled the prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother, though Laius had left baby Oedipus exposed on a mountain to die in order to avoid his fate. Oedipus had been saved by a shepherd and given to the king of Corinth and raised as his own.

After hearing the prophecy of his own fate, Oedipus left Corinth and kills an old man (Laius) and four out of five of the old man’s servants at a crossroads after arguing over being run off the road. Oedipus then eventually arrives at the gates of Thebes and solved the riddle of the Sphinx which asked “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and on three legs at night?” Oedipus answered, “A human being.” The Sphinx then kills herself out of anger and the Thebans reward Oedipus by marrying him to Jocasta, their queen, again not knowing that she’s his mother.

Oedipus Sex with Mum Was Blinding, conceived, written and directed by Ellie Papakonstantinou with original music by Telemachos Moussas and Julia Kent picks up on the iconic themes of the tragedy and reconfigures them in an immersive opera that ran at BAM Fisher in Brooklyn, September 25-29. The limited engagement was the first stop of an international tour and the show will be staged next in Athens, Greece, later this fall.

The opera featured Nassia Gofa, Elias Husiak, Anastasia Katsinavaki, Theodora Loukas, Lito Messini, Manos Tsakiris, Julia Kent (cello), Misha Piatigorsky (piano), Hassan Estakhrian, Barbara Nerness (electroacoustic environments), and Stephanie Sherriff (live cinematic environment). Lighting design is also Elli Papakonstantinou. Mask concepts, design and materialization are by Maritina Keleri and Chrysanthi Avloniti, and Costume Design by Jolene Richardson. Professor Manos Tsakiris, who also appeared in the show as the Researcher, is also the Scientific Advisor for the opera.

The challenging material of the tragedy is reimagined in this production which mixes traditional performance with cutting-edge technology and emerging neuroscience and brings the audience into the action of the play as part of the Chorus. The talented singers demonstrated an impressive range in the piece, and the performers dealt admirably with the demands of the show. Among them, Theodora Loukas gave another powerful, emotionally-charged performance as Woman.

Papakonstantinou is a 2018-19 Fulbright Artist’s Award recipient, visiting scholar at Stanford University, and 2018-19 Music Theatre Now international award recipient.

Using new technologies which turn the audience into the actual chorus of the opera, the piece rediscovers the community at the heart of a political performance, as it was in ancient times.

Partly developed during the director’s stay at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, Oedipus: Sex with Mum Was Blinding also sees artists and scientists joining forces on a new neuroscientific case study. The study asks: Are we free? Dο we experience free will? Are there real alternatives, or is all that takes place the outcome of necessity? An exploration into determinism and self, the answers describe either our majesty or captivity.

Those familiar with the story of Oedipus and Freud’s Oedipus complex will certainly have a great deal to discuss after seeing this immersive opera which is definitely not your mother’s Oedipus.

Exiting the theater, a young woman behind me gave voice to the thought that was running through my mind: ‘What happens if I start singing the final song on the subway?’ The catchy doo-wop tune was innocent enough, but the lyrics could prove problematic. Cheerfully singing ‘Sex with mom was blinding. Sex with mom was divine’ might raise an eyebrow or two, even on the Q Train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

OEDIPUS: Sex with Mum Was Blinding was conceived, written and directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, a 2018-19 Fulbright Artist’s Award recipient, visiting scholar at Stanford University and recipient of a 2018-19 Music Theatre Now award. She bills OEDIPUS as an immersive opera that mixes traditional performance with cutting-edge technology and emerging neuroscience based upon Sophocles’s classic tragedy Oedipus Rex. New and radical it isn’t (for me it harks back to avant-garde work of the late 1970s and early 1980s, although the technology is certainly more sophisticated), but Papakonstantinou has created a thought-provoking theater work that proved to be pretty entertaining despite the grim subject matter.

She uses Sophocles’s story of patricide and incest to explore the tension as to whether a person’s fate is the result of predestined circumstances or is determined through choices and actions. Left-handedness, sexual preference and gender identity were tossed out to get the audience thinking, but Papakonstantinou struck a nerve when she challenged the American Dream that if a person works hard enough, he or she can attain their every desire. A great theory, but what if the cards are stacked against you from birth?

It isn’t surprising that the theme resonates in present-day America, and perhaps even more so in Greece which is still recovering from the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Granted, Oedipus’s plight is more tangled than most, but he was living the dream until he discovered that he had killed his dad and married his mom. To underscore his ticklish predicament, Tiresias pulled out a cell phone and asked Siri to define mother-fucker. Papakonstantinou isn’t shy about using explosive, some might say repulsive, language.

OEDIPUS lived up to its billing as a theatrical mash-up. In supervillain Joker guise, Misha Piatigorsky (great nephew of the renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky) not only played the piano but at times conducted the ensemble and led the audience participation sessions. The riot scene where the audience shouted out rants went on far too long, but the earlier one where Manos Tsakiris – who played the Researcher and acted as a scientific advisor to the play – asked the audience to pull out their mobile devices and engage them in selfie mode proved revelatory. People became engrossed in examining their own images, expressing satisfaction when asked if they liked what they saw: a launch pad perhaps for Papakonstantinou to delve deep into the Narcissus myth.

Nassia Gofa was wonderful as Jocasta, Oedipus’s mother. She’s a fine tragedian who knows her way around a torch song. It was her voice singing that final little ditty, plucked straight out of Grease, that lingered in my mind after the curtain fell. Soprano Lito Messini was stoic and clarion-voiced as Oedipus, clearly identifying with the hero-cum-scapegoat for his people’s woes. Her voice, like all the others, was amplified to compete with the electric instruments, but its quality was readily apparent.

Piatigorsky put on quite a show at the piano, which included playing with his feet, but cellist Julia Kent was a mesmerizing figure on the crowded stage who played with intensity and commitment. She and Tilemachos Moussas, an Athens-based composer, wrote the original music for the show. The music, borrowing from jazz, minimalism and pop, was full of energy and color. I would hesitate to call OEDIPUS an opera, but as a piece of musical theatre it has its merits.

Elias Husiak, who cut a dashing figure on stage, seemed to channel the drama through the movements of his body. At times he was heroic and brash, but when things began to unravel for Oedipus, he became a bundle of nervous tics and convulsions. Off to the side of the stage, a research/therapist session took place in tandem with the telling of the myth. Manos Tsakiris’s Researcher managed to make an impact with earnest understatement in the high energy environment. Anastasia Katsinavaki’s Tiresias was a noble figure who got some of the pithiest lines in the entire show.

Even though the stage was full of actors, musicians and their instruments and bits of set, Papakonstantinou maintained a sense of structure by giving each their own space. Grainy videos of billowing clouds and riots managed the trick of providing cohesion without being distracting. The illuminated helmets worn by the chorus were pretty cool.

The program notes hinted at gender-reexamination as a topic, but in opera, casting a woman in the role of a young male hero is nothing new. One only has to read the mythical story of the blind prophet Tiresias, who was transformed into a woman for seven years, to realize that gender bending has been a topic for a long, long time. Papakonstantinou needs to up the ante a bit to make even a ripple in those waters in the era of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Jonathan Van Ness and the like. She is on far surer ground with her penetrating societal observations on human nature.

The title of Elli Papapakonstantinou’s interpretation of Oedipus Rex, adapted from Sophocles’s tragedy, is your first clue that you have no idea what you’ll be getting into. Oedipus: Sex With Mum Was Blinding is billed as an “immersive,” “innovative cinematic opera” – and when you sit down for the show, you realize that no description could have prepared you for the roller coaster you are about to experience.

With 2500 years of stage production behind it, one is hard-pressed to find a truly new way to present the tragedy of Oedipus. But Papapakonstantinou might just have succeeded. Every few minutes, it seems the performance changes tack. One minute, we are listening to a narrator tell us the story of Oedipus’s birth; another minute, Jocasta (Nassia Gofa) performs a bawdy tune called “Mamma.” Another minute, we are listening in on a woman’s therapy session, as her psychiatrist tries to convince her that Oedipal complexes and dreams of killing your father are natural. An emcee (Misha Piatigorsky) painted and dressed like the Joker flits around the stage, fanatically waving a baton at the actors and the audience or sitting down to croon at the piano, all with a wild obsession that would make Heath Ledger proud. How does this play into the larger story, or the myth of Oedipus? Your guess is as good as mine. His performance was certainly entertaining, and not a small amount of unnerving.

But if one were to pin down a timeline, the play largely focuses on the apocalyptic panic in the city of Thebes when the citizens realize they are being punished by the gods for a crime they don’t know how to atone for. There is a chorus of sopranos chanting Latin prayers to the heavens, music so loud you can feel the soundwaves on your skin, and blurry ground shots of a city on fire projected on the screen in the background. But for all the powerful emotions this scene conjures, it’s only one of very many pieces in this multimedia mosaic of a production which seems to delight in tripping around a traditional narrative.

There are so many moving pieces in Oedipus that’s it’s difficult to keep track of them all, let alone follow how they all feed into the larger story. There are so many different stories being told that we don’t even meet Oedipus (Lito Messini) until what feels like the end of the play. Incidentally, Oedipus is one of the most compelling characters on stage – tormented by guilt, inaction, and an impending sense of doom, all of his lines are performed in Messini’s operatic soprano. He is like a romantic lead pulled from a particularly tragic Puccini. In fact, the best moments in Oedipus: Sex With Mum Was Blinding were those that were the most character-driven. One scene in particular, which nearly moved this reviewer to tears, was a tearful ballad sung by Queen Jocasta, who has realized that her world is about to be uprooted and wishes to live for one last peaceful moment with the love of her life before her last shred of innocence is destroyed. The music, an original score by Tilemachos Moussas and Julia Kent, is beautiful and powerful throughout the show, but never more so than in this scene.

Oedipus: Sex With Mum Was Blinding is a conglomerate of many media, narratives, characters, and scenes that ultimately don’t live up to the sum of their parts. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its moments. This production might leave you with a feeling of whiplash, trying to process the multitude of what you’ve just seen. Maybe you walk away feeling sad, or inspired, or just confused. But for better or worse, Papapakonstantinou’s Oedipus: Sex With Mum Was Blinding will be on your mind.

Cph Opera Festival goes avant-garde. 

Avant-garde is originally a military term that describes the vanguard that paves the way for the main force.

So an indispensable element in a war, and therefore also a really good description of the artists who dare to go new ways, do the unexpected, and take new steps into unknown territory. And the Greek ODC Ensemble is precisely exploratory in every step in THE CAVE, and Elli Papakonstantinou's disruptive interpretation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, with punk opera, video art and shadow theatre, is avant-garde at its blackest.

In the equation, those trapped in the cave only see the shadows of what is happening behind them, and the big questions that Plato asked about what are shadows and what is sun, and whether some might just rather see the shadows than the sun, ODC moves forward in time, and neoclassical expressions such as Fake news and Alternative reality now play crucial roles in the cyberpunk opera THE CAVE.

It's a solid, brave, and multifaceted ensemble that tours with the ultra-black show, and right now they even have a guest star in the show, the legendary Blaine Leslie Reininger from  Tuxedomoon – cool to see the old silver punk keep his style and fix his tie, while the significantly younger Greeks ride on the high studs with sunglasses, silver lamé and a bare torso.

THE CAVE is a mix of opera, video, sound effects, shadow theatre and audio snippets from Trump's press conferences, and if you think you're witnessing reality, you'll have to think again. Or should you?

[..]

Elli Papakonstantinou's performance is, in a sense, one of those ecstatic moments. It is a multimedia event in which images, bodies, sounds, and music converge in a seemingly decadent finale. Exaggeration, media abundance, and grand gestures are the theatrical means by which gender is simultaneously liquefied, exhibited, and questioned. The performative and technical media are combined into an impressive sequence of scenes.

The text, which is primarily in English, but also in French and Greek, follows the mythical narrative yet remains firmly rooted in the present, addressing topics such as refugees and climate change. However, it sometimes struggles to assert itself against the abundance of aesthetic devices employed. 

The performance transcends—and fully succeeds in doing so—the boundaries of traditional representation, bringing together theater and dance, opera singing, and a cinematic perspective, all wrapped in a highly distinct sound design. A breath of fresh air of experimentation can be felt. The audience is completely absorbed.

Queerness aesthetic. The marvelous costumes and the hyperbolic makeup of the performers convey the dimension of excess of the celebration. Everything is permitted: free love and its opposite, violence. Do what you desire. Free from social or gender conditioning. This is also a political message coming from a land, Greece, which has experienced and continues to experience critical situations over the last 20 years. Yet, within hardship, the seed of art shapes incredible fruits, and this work by Papakonstantinou is a shining example. Italian theater-makers, take note.

A Dionysus like this, a “molecule that deviates and violates,” who has golden skin but resembles a political refugee, there will always be someone who will be terrified of him, who will define him as an “asteroid capable of destroying everything just as it had been conceived,” while for someone else, he will be an object of desire for which to abandon everything.

The voices—with English and Greek surtitles, often sung—become the bearers of a word that no longer seeks dialogue but is instead suggestion, proclamation, or supplication. While the richness of signs and themes does refer back to the carnal violence and gender fluidity already inherent in the myth, this modernization risks getting lost in a chaotic stage presentation. If in Euripides' version the arrival of the hidden god became the manifestation of nature's power—ecstatic, primal, and multifaceted—here we find ourselves in a world where this force seems to have passed, and we sense a less incisive shadow of it, which dilutes even further in the long performative finale.

[...]

At the heart of Elli Papakonstantinou's The Bacchae, staged at the REF inside the ex-Mattatoio spaces, the classical myth of the Bacchantes is reshaped with a contemporary twist. Archetypal dilemmas—the tug-of-war between desiring and rejecting the unknown, and a divine force that is both liberating and destructive—become a battleground for modern ideas, practices, and aesthetics.

An exploration of the tenebrous world of mythic desire and mythic apocalypses, which speaks allegorically to us of a universe on the brink of destruction and of the End of History. This would come as no surprise to those familiar with the eschatological dimension of Euripides' Bacchae, which concludes with an ominous prophecy of doom. Nor with the corresponding dimension found in many texts of the Old and New Testaments, as well as in Northern, Nordic, and especially Scandinavian mythology. Yet Papakonstantinou's work merely uses the Bacchae as a starting point and follows its own, uniquely distinct path.

"Traces of Antigone"—a bold approach to the myth of Antigone that comments on timeless gender-based violence, written by Swedish playwright Christina Ouzounidis—is not merely a reference to the surge in femicides we hear about more and more intensely in Greece, but "a tragic commentary."

[...]

In the performance, speech, music, and new media compose a landscape within which the action unfolds, without looking to invite or entice. Perhaps one of the warmest remarks written abroad about the show, by the American philosopher Judith Butler, says it all: "I loved the performance and I am grateful that you translated the piece into English and other languages. It is socially powerful and wonderfully experimental. It moved me and made me feel deeply grateful for feminist art that connects our rage with solidarity."

This piece was a collaboration with ODC Athens/VYRSO. Like disPLACE, this piece also addresses the issue of gentrification. This phenomenon has spread rapidly in Athens in recent years, not least due to the financial crisis. From the 1980s onward, large shopping malls on the outskirts of Athens drew away large groups of shoppers, leading to the closure of numerous long-established businesses in the city center. As a result, residents migrated to other parts of the city. Immigrants, bringing their own culture and businesses, settled in the vacant apartments with their now-cheap rents. Call centers and coffee shops opened in the central districts of Keramikos and Metxourgio starting in the 1990s. It wasn't until the 2004 Olympic Games that these districts became attractive again to the "real estate mafia." However, the onset of Grexit brought this real estate boom to an abrupt end.

Director Elli Papakonstantinou , founder and artistic director of the Art Centre “VYRSODEPSEIO” and head of the theatre group “ODC ENSEMBLE”, studied dramaturgy and directing in Athens. In this play, she depicts the chaotic everyday life of crisis-stricken Athens.

Actress Rosa Prodromou , musician Tilemachos Moussas , and visual artist Pantelis Tzimou met on stage in a hybrid performance. They used the dark humor of despair to break down and challenge our prejudices about gentrification and art.

The text for this piece was provided by Tsimaras Tzanatos , the visuals were provided by Pantelis Makkas .

The piece opens with a roughly 10-minute monody in which the notes gecgfg are incessantly repeated, while geometric visuals flicker across a huge projection screen, accompanied by statistics on economic decline, rising unemployment and prices, and so on. This serves as the piece's opening act. The musician Tilemachos Moussas then prances around the stage, working up a sweat and removing his T-shirt. He then drinks water from a PET bottle and begins to gurgle and sing the European anthem.

The singing actress Rosa Prodromou then recounts her move to Athens, her neighbors, the sights, and the demonstrations in Syntagma Square in front of the Greek Parliament. She shows photos of herself and friends from times when things were better for them. After all, we learn, 200,000 artists and just as many scientists have already left their homeland. This performance was sung and recited in English. Only once, when the discussion turns to the sale of the uninhabited Greek islands (of the 3,054 islands, only 113 are inhabited, along with 4 inland islands!), does a heated argument erupt between the musician and the singer. While the musician supports the sale because he simply wants to survive, the singer categorically rejects it.

Couldn't these uninhabited islands be leased for 99 years, as China once did with Hong Kong? My suggestion, sent by email to the Greek ambassador in Vienna, naturally went unanswered…

At the end of the piece, the visual artist Pantelis Tzimou covers the singer's bare torso and arms with clay, who now moves menacingly and with stamping steps on the stage in a mixture of warlike Amazon and French Marianne, until her despair finally erupts in a tremendous scream…

This production was enthusiastically received by the audience. However, it can only be seen one more time, on September 4th at Werk 2.

Some in the contemporary world of Greek theater note the relevance of those ideas today. Elli Papakonstantinou, a director and activist known for her avant-garde interpretations of ancient Greek plays, recently staged “Eros,” a staged multimedia version of “Symposium” by Plato. But real life and theater combined in a way she never could have imagined.

ATHENS – The internationally renowned Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou has been collaborating for the last year with the great Ukrainian ensemble of young contemporary music artists Nova Opera. The rehearsals started in December 2021 with the aim of her new project to premiere in the Netherlands at the O. Festival in Rotterdam on May 21-22 this year with a planned tour to follow of historic sites in Ukraine, specifically, the Kyiv Opera House in June, the Odessa Opera House in August, and the Kharkiv National Philharmonic in September. This international co-production is supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture, The House of Europe, and the Dutch organization The Performing Arts Fund NL.

Eros, directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, is set to premiere at the O. Festival Rotterdam May 21-22, hopefully with the Ukrainian artists involved in the production. Photo: Courtesy of Elli Papakonstantinou

In fact, for the rehearsals in the Ukrainian capital, the director, together with the American visual artist Stephanie Sherriff, set designer Myrto Lambrou, and songwriter Nalyssa Green were set to travel to Kyiv in March – exactly one week after the invasion.

The irony is that the artists on the project, Ukrainians and Greeks, were working on the Platonic Symposium to be presented in the form of an oratorio with a libretto by Elli Papakonstantinou and Louiza Arkoumanea. The work, titled Eros, focused on desire and the relationship between the world of ideas and the modern material world through a philosophical and political perspective.

But, somehow, completely unexpectedly and paradoxically, Plato was found speaking to today’s Ukrainians and the war with Eros.

Unfortunately, the invasion of Ukraine finds the artists- Serhii Vilka, soprano Anna Kirsh, baritone Andrey Koshman, baritone Ruslan Kirsh, Zhanna Marchinska – cello, Andrey Nadolskyi – percussion, Serhii Vilka – keyboard / flute, Elias Spricht – piano, escaping from Kyiv by electric car, trying to reach the Polish border.

Some have succeeded, but Zhanna Marchinska has not yet been heard from, as she is in a city that is heavily bombed.

Elli Papakonstantinou speaks daily with the Ukrainian artists via Zoom in shelters and all the show’s actors are in contact with each other and try to find ways to cross the Ukrainian border. In defiance of the times and the situation, the same Ukrainian artists stated the following: “As long as we reach the border with Poland we feel safe and we will start rehearsals online with you from there!”

Unfortunately at the moment the only sure thing is that the show cannot tour in Ukraine.

However, it will premiere in the Netherlands at the O. Festival in Rotterdam, May 21-22, and the hope is all of the artists from the war-torn country will participate.

Video of Elias Spricht, the Ukrainian pianist and one of the artists set to perform in Eros, in a bomb shelter playing Beethoven’s 9th on a toy piano that belonged to his composition Professor Karlheinz Essl: https://bit.ly/3pF4Jdg.

Odessa Opera House. Photo: Alex Levitsky & Dmitry Shamatazhi, Tokugawapants, via Wikimedia Commons

About Nova Opera

Nova Opera is a formation of young Ukrainian artists whose goal is to find new ways of developing musical theatre. The main activity of the formation is the creation of new synthetic genres (opera requiem, opera circus, dreamOpera, opera ballet) and experiments with atypical musical and scenic solutions. The musical language of plays has no aesthetic limitations, freely combining avant garde and rock, Gregorian chant, and trip-hop, neo-baroque and folklore improvisations. Their work has been performed regularly in Austria, Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands, and the United States, among others.

More information about the O. festival Rotterdam is available online: https://o-festival.nl/en/.

Your poetics are closely linked to gender and women themes. What exactly are you interested in?
I want to create a strong visual world that addresses gender fluidity in context and aesthetics. How are we always already “singular-plural”. I want to destroy the fixed notions and categories of separation inherent to racial capitalism through the aesthetics of a transformative mode of history and time, through the aesthetic imagination as a transformative force. I am trying to create an original language, maybe a meta theatre that is the offspring of social distancing. In seclusion I embroider Antigone as part of my own lineage. “Traces of Antigone” is about tracing the lineage of courageous gender fluid people before us, who stood up and made themselves present. It is about LGDP communities as much as feminists.

Do you think that theater in general talks about gender’s issues?
Not as much as I would like and expect. There is a shift happening and our societies are gradually becoming more inclusive. But this is not a bloodless revolution.  The question I guess as always is: “Who tells the story?” Marginalized communities such as the LGBT people have had their stories told by others over and over. It is a matter of agency. 

Why did you choose the character of Antigone?
The mythological Antigone really stands out as a tragic heroine that has been mostly “wanted” and adored. A true idol, a rebel that defies patriarchy, a super star of the feminist mythology. We undermine this to unveil a more complex reality. In the play of Ouzounidis, Antigone is not the stereotypical rebel. She is a girl of 13 years old, a student in a Swedish school stepping into puberty and encountering all the mechanisms in place that enforce gender canonization. Ambivalence, uncertainty, ambiguity. These are the new ideas that my girly Antigone brings to the world. And as the words fails her, language fails her and she is a girl in a very perplex reality, in search of other words, of another way.

Can you describe the installation-perfomance ?
“Traces of Antigone” is an audiovisual embroidering, a live art piece that unfolds at the same time in parallel both in the digital and in the physical world. The work aims to stitch together the physical with the digital, the material with the immaterial and to mix the two audiences (the digital and the physical one) in the ether of a meta space. This is a weird animal of the internet, where women from their homes or (in a replica of their home on stage) weave together languages, images and sounds.

How is it interactive and digital?
We invite viewers to interact with the performance; in fact, we push them to the public agora, to an experience of going beyond digital and physical dimensions in a genderless space of technology where the public and the private merge into one. And of course, they pip on us. Are we trapped, safe or emancipated? It is up to our viewers to tell, as we grant them permission to invade our most intimate world. Zoom in to details, zoom out to our galaxies. The tagged names on our windows name us and reconfigure anonymity and objectification as our viewers turn into voyeurs. But we also get to expose them! This came as a great surprise when we opened the show. The fact that when they turned on their cameras, we saw our audience in their own seclusion, their private space was exposed as well. It was so great to be able to connect and talk at the end of each show. A network was created from all over the world. More than 50 countries connected and joined our Antigone.

Together with her own theatre group ODC (pronounced odyssey), the Greek director, writer and visual artist Elli Papakonstantinou will make her debut at the Holland Festival with The Bacchae, a queer version of Euripides’ tragedy of the same name. Her work was previously presented at festivals in Europe and the United States, including Rotterdam’s O. Festival. She is very happy to be part of the Holland Festival programme because it ‘showcases the vanguard of modern performing arts’. She currently works with the likes of Ariah Lester, a performer from Venezuela who stands out with his androgynous appearance and countertenor.

What was it about The Bacchae that inspired you?
‘I’d already been interested in Greek myth for some time, with the idea of rewriting them. I really use it to further develop ideas I have. In Greece, adapting the ancient Greeks in such a radical way is considered disrespectful. But I don’t make my work for Greek, but rather international audiences.

‘There’s a scene in the original piece where Pentheus dresses up as a woman. He does this in order to visit the bacchants unnoticed. But when they see him, they tear him apart. This was the spark that led to this performance. This is the only drag element in all the Greek tragedies we know of. It inspired me to read the entire tragedy through this gender perspective.

Why do you keep returning to the ancient Greeks?
‘The ancient Greeks lived in a patriarchal system. Men wrote for men, and it was men who held power. This system is the foundation on which our whole western civilization was built. That’s why I enjoy going back and disrupting them, to expose the fault lines. I see it as a way of disrupting our way of thinking.’

‘I’m talking about the logos, the tragedy’s appeal to rational discourse, where the laws are inscribed. There’s also the mythos, the myth, and by contrast it’s wholly free. It’s the part of the tragedy based on older customs. It’s the collective dream that doesn’t care about laws or rules. Myth reflects people’s true desires.’

‘I seek to create new links with this mythos in my work. I want to explore the potential also present in our society, however constrained by materialistic forces. In the case of The Bacchae, I mainly draw on the myth. So the audience shouldn’t expect to see much of the original tragedy.’

What will we see instead?
‘A post-apocalyptic world with elements from futurism and pop. A family celebrating mother Agave’s birthday. It’s an upstanding, suffocating, politically correct world in which gender and relationships are governed by strict rules and labels. But then, Dionysus, god of wine and pleasure, appears in his ninja pop persona. He lands on this place on earth like a meteorite. Then, things start to happen. The bacchants can no longer control their bodies, they undress and devour king Pentheus. The performance then shifts from text-based to dance and musical theatre.

Is it a hopeful story?
‘Yes, I feel it’s a hopeful piece. What I think is hopeful is that it doesn’t have a traditional American happy end, but that it allows us to see ourselves in a different light. That we can explore our genders. That we have alternatives. That we can truly be ourselves eventually.’

Your work seems to be going from more traditional spoken theatre to musical theatre.
‘I like to work with mixed media. I’m always exploring new genres. During the COVID era, I was busy with digital theatre. I’ve also made ‘location theatre’, for example in former concentration camps. In this instance, I wanted to make the leap from language to a non-verbal world where dance and music take over. I’m interested in that breakpoint, the barrier that comes down. I hope the audience will be tempted to come along into this other world. That they won’t feel intimidated by the madness, but that they’ll see new possibilities, a new way to be free.’

Is that why you’re working with Ariah Lester?
‘I saw Ariah perform a few times in Rotterdam. I love his outrageous work as a singer and composer. He made the music for this performance and also plays in it. With a piece like this, it’s important to work with people for whom queerness is a lifestyle. Ariah plays Dionysus, the pop god who shakes everything up. What’s important to me when I make something together with others: we all see the world in different ways, so everyone brings their own perspective.’

You began your career as a theatre maker in England.
‘I left Greece when I was twenty. I lived in England for 15 years because I was very interested in English theatre. At the time, I had the chance to work with wonderful people like Sarah Kane and others from the in-yer-face movement. I felt at home in that group. English theatre was in full swing. At last, things were changing. Writers like Sarah Kane explored uncharted territory that went beyond realism entirely. We managed to shake things up.’

Is this something you still hope to do with your work?
I’m still looking to break down barriers. The 2011 crisis in Greece was a turning point for me. I was living with my family in Berlin at the time and decided to move back to Greece because I wanted to experience what was happening there. What was happening in Greece at the time was indicative of a feeling taking hold throughout Europe. It was a transition. This time period had a tremendous influence on my work.’

‘When the system collapses, art becomes more important. People started to wonder how they should live their lives. Everyday life is becoming increasingly irrational. What was normal one day is gone the next. All of a sudden, we could no longer use our debit cards because there was a maximum of 40 euros a week. Demonstrations became part of everyday life. I saw a woman among the demonstrators dressed in 1930s fashion and slowly singing an old song. Many people started to have a different understanding of art. No longer as a product to consume, but as a collective place to dream. As a condition for survival.’

You saw the crisis as a way out, an opening for a fresh start.
‘I fully broke free at the time. We, artists I mean, are all part of a system, a culture industry, but you need to know how to navigate it. If this system collapses, you’re wholly free to create. It was very liberating, and not just for me. There was a rock star in Greece who suddenly started to sing old songs. In an interview, he said that he’d always wanted to sing old songs, but that he’d never allowed himself to do so because everyone wanted him to sing rock songs. But all of a sudden, this was possible because no money was involved.’

How did you see this liberation reflected in your work?
‘It’s reflected in The Bacchae. The ancient Greeks had such moments, too. They believed humans come from chaos and subsequently try to control this chaos. I think our modern society needs such crises to remind us of the chaos we all emerge from. Control and chaos always exist side by side.

Among the theatrical performances that animate Rome, at Romaeuropa, Elli Papakonstantinou reflects on the meaning of presence and absence.

Art , it continually confirms, does not give up, even in this second phase in which society is once again rigidified by the resurgence of the pandemic, pushing forward with its new ideas and visions, while rightly maintaining extreme attention to safety. This time we're talking about Romaeuropa , the performing arts festival now in its 35th edition, which ensures "a sign of presence and hope for artists and audiences," naturally adapting its offerings and exploring new digital formats, which have now become a safety net for many artistic projects.

On October 13th and 14th, Traces of Antigone will have its world premiere , a reinterpretation of the ancient tragedy by Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou , a perfect example of resilience: the production was in fact conceived, built and rehearsed entirely during the lockdown period .
"I had just started rehearsals for the show when we were forced into quarantine. We decided, despite everything, to continue the work with the help of technology, and to meet online day after day. I was deeply moved to understand that the containment of our physical bodies within the digital windows of programs like Zoom directly engaged with the themes of this piece: feeling trapped in a gender identity, the relationship between femininity and domesticity, " says the director. "Here in Rome, thanks to the support of Romaeuropa Festival, Traces of Antigone debuts in a new version that aims to unite the physical and digital dimensions : an innovative format that allows spectators and performers to be present simultaneously online and offline , in the theater and on the digital platform Zoom, creating a meta-space beyond any kind of configuration. An embroidery of the immaterial and the material, absence and presence, certainty and uncertainty."

A response to everything coming to a halt, to the total lockdown we've experienced. The focus shifts to the domestic isolation so many women have experienced throughout history, and the plight of those who feel trapped becomes universal, providing an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of presence and absence .
"This is who we are: 'The Absent Girls,' in memory of all the women before us. Just like our mothers and 'sisters,' we use isolation to our advantage, embroidering the ancient traces of Antigone as part of our lineage. Like the women before us, we make art in isolation. But this time, we do it in public."

The result is a veritable six-point manifesto, called Theater of Seclusion , which serves as a blueprint for the emergence of livestreamed performances .
- We develop, rehearse, and perform the entire piece in quarantine with the help of digital platforms;
- We use only the props, musical instruments, settings, costumes, and technical means made available to us during quarantine; no components will be added later! Home is our set;
- Public space and domestic space merge into a single space. The names that label our virtual windows identify us, reconfiguring anonymity and objectification, always and already, "singular-plural," in elsewhere and otherwise.
- We work in isolation, from our homes, like women before us. Are we trapped, safe, or emancipated? It's up to the spectators to decide, as we grant them permission to invade our most intimate world. Zoom in on the details, zoom out on the galaxies;
- We use all the same basic technologies to harmoniously weave this new-age audiovisual embroidery;
- We invite users to interact with the performance, thus projecting themselves into the public agora.

“Aesthetic imagination as a transformative force.”

In their groundbreaking Queer adaptation of The Bacchae, for Holland Festival

The Holland Festival never disappoints, and this year’s exceptional line-up has stolen our hearts. One of our personal highlights is the The Bacchae by Elli Papakonstantinou, which subverts the classic story of Dionysus – the god of wine, pleasure, and dance – under a free-spirited and zealous lens. Described as ‘a Greek tragedy in the metaverse’, the show is promising a multi-sensory theatrical journey to confront us with questions of what freedom means today. Within the extravaganza, Papakonstantinou proposes desire as a form of liberation and Queerness as a global framework to experience a world with no borders or divisions. Fascinated by the vision, we caught up with the artist to learn more about the concept behind the piece, her process and innovative approaches to performance.

Hey, great to be in touch! Let’s begin with what first inspired you to create a new re-adaption of Euripides’ The Bacchae.

I recently spent a long period in Stockholm commissioned by the Royal Theatre of Sweden, and there I had the chance to observe how regularised relationships played in a “meta” me-too society. It got me thinking. Even in Sweden, where so much progress has been achieved, this canonisation of human relationships creates a kind of new system that aims (again) to regulate desire. I am looking at a feminine future in all its openness and Queerness as a different system of thinking, a system that affirms perplexity, and most of all, uncertainty and ambiguity. I started thinking of the myth of Dionysus who overturns the patriarchal system by revealing the perplexity of desire and connecting us with the deep forces of nature. And then I thought how that would play in today’s world. We talk so much about freedoms, but how much in the becoming of ourselves, how much in real movement are we? I wanted to move beyond any given roles. With these questions in mind, I worked on a text that opens questions rather than answers.

The original Bacchae explores the themes of divine ecstasy, religious frenzy, gender roles, and the consequences of denying or resisting the power of the gods. What initially connected you to this work and were there any moments along the way which reaffirmed this connection? 

Ambivalence, uncertainty, ambiguity. These are the new ideas that my Queer Dionysus brings to the world. Language fails Agave and the Bacchae; the characters live in a perplex reality, in search of other words, of another way. Divine ecstasy is present anytime we reach out to our soul, reaching out to ourselves. What connected me to the work was the belief that I am divine, and that to fulfil myself means to reconnect with the deep nature of things against the fabricated scar of the patriarchy. The scar of division and duality/ binary. I am not this or that – I can be all these (animals, things, genders etc) at the same time.

Alex Kat

There is a mixture of languages on all levels (also literally). This idea of search for a new, more fluid language is at the heart of the piece.

It is a Queerness that can take all forms without really worrying to converge into one main expression. This is a piece about liveliness, about being being alive!

Described online as “a musical Queer version”, how would you discuss this process, of adapting something into a Queer mode of expression? 

I want to create a strong visual world that addresses gender fluidity in context and aesthetics. How are we always already “singular-plural”. I knit together different means of expression bringing in dialogue a kitsch expression with a “high art” classical opera; I want to destroy the fixed notions and categories of separation inherent to capitalism through the aesthetics of a transformative mode of history and time, through the aesthetic imagination as a transformative force.

Playing with concepts of self-expression, and identity, alongside fear, what would you describe as the pillars of the performance? 

This piece is an invitation to leave behind the fears and anxieties that prevent us from fully expressing ourselves. In a world where social media and technology allow us to present curated versions of ourselves to the world, the pressure to conform to certain societal norms and expectations can be overwhelming. I wish to speak to the universal human experience of feeling vulnerable and uncertain.

Alex Kat

Within this re-adaption, you work with many amazing talents. Can you talk me through this coming together of creative minds? And what this looked like practically, when putting together the piece…

Yes indeed! I feel so blessed and I am learning all the way from these wonderful artists of variant backgrounds who carry with them unique perspectives, skills, and experiences that can help to elevate the work to new heights. During the preparation of the piece it was so amazing to see how they pushed each other to think outside the box, challenge assumptions, and explore new creative possibilities. There is also a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose which can be invaluable in an industry that can often be competitive and isolating. Diversity is at the heart of this team. Working with the French choreographers Sinequanon (Jonathan Pranlas-Descours and Christophe Beranger) was revealing as they managed to move us deep into the matter of the body. The core of the material world is the body. If this piece is visceral, it’s thanks to their creative input. I met Ariah Lester some few years ago, as we were both presenting work at the O. Festival in Rotterdam. I was stunned by his presence and his music skills. His musical compositions give a dark twist to pop music and really fly us to the moon as he embodies some of the qualities of Dionysus: freedom, Queerness and love.

The music is a key point within Bacchae! Described as an “interactive sound design”, could you talk me through this concept some more?

Music and light (video) scenography are essential to my work along with a research on new technologies. In the Bacchae we developed a sonic interactive vibrational device (designed by Yannis Papoutsis). That vibrational device which is based on a geophone technology, translates vibration into sound and visuals (taking the shape of a 2m high seismograph). I was looking for a way to converge the immaterial and untraceable into something visible and audible. A sonic sculpt. It is, of course, a metaphor for the divine, also an imprint of the Big Machine. Ariah Lester composes the songs and music for the Bacchae and Lambros Pigounis did the live interactive sound environments. The two stay in dialogue throughout the show.

And, within this musical sound design, how do you hope this further connects with the audience experience?

Music sets the emotions in a vortex movement, and my intention was that all stage elements spin around music and sound that moves everything. What a joyful apocalypse life is: “before this I was born once a boy, and a maiden, and a plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea” (Parmenides).

How did your relationship with Holland Festival first come to fruition?

It developed throughout the years, as I visited the Festival and the programming director attended my works in many different occasions. I can say that there has been a very profound trust built over the last years. So, I am very honoured and excited that this dialogue takes off!

And why do you think it is important to showcase this piece within the context of the Holland Festival? 

Holland Festival stands at the forefront of the avant-garde European scene. I love its wide spectrum of artistic production and I have a strong sensation that I share a common experimental drive with other artists that present their work in this edition. There’s curatorial care to initiate further interconnections between artists and thinkers. This is so great. The Elder Project, for example, is an awesome platform, and I admire Claron McFadden. So cool.

What other performances, shows, pieces are you looking forward to seeing within the programme? 

I will see Idra’s Net. I am a great fan of Meredith Monk and ANOHNI. I will also see Respublika by Lukasz Twarkowski and there is so much more. I wish I could stay in Amsterdam longer, but the Bacchae continues its tour at the Festival de Marseille (France), so I have to go.

From the Filature de Mulhouse to the Festival de Marseille, Elli Papakonstantinou confronts mythology and the present time with "The Bacchae".

From the Filature in Mulhouse to the Marseille Festival, by way of the Espace des Arts in Chalon-sur-Saône, where she is presenting her very "queer" adaptation of  Euripides' The Bacchae  , the Athenian director and activist plays with contrasts and questions the evolution of our societies by confronting mythology and the present day. Deeply committed, she discusses both her creative process and the situation of artists in Greece. 

What made you want to stage this text by Euripides? 

Elli Papakonstantinou:  There is something in this ancient tragedy that resonates with what is happening in the world today, that speaks directly to what our societies are currently experiencing. Euripides ' play  transcends genre boundaries, epistemological boundaries, the boundaries between fiction and reality, between humanity and animality, between the living and the dead, between past and present. Through the character of this god, who rejects the binary nature of our societies, the Greek playwright evokes a state of transition between the two sexes. Neither man nor woman, Dionysus, who returns to avenge the harm done to his mother, navigates between two states, two universes. This is all the more interesting because Euripides wrote this text, the last of his works to have survived, while he was in exile. In it, he evokes a political transition between a world governed by patriarchal rules and a new one that breaks free from those norms. Rereading this work, I was struck by how it resonates with our current reality, where two opposing currents constantly clash, unable to understand each other. Positioned at the juncture of these two conflicting worlds, The Bacchae embodies, in my mind, the desperate attempt to live in a new, unknown, desired, yet not yet tangible reality, and thus carries with it the power, violence, and potential for failure inherent in any uncontrolled outcome. Failure often offers more creative, collaborative, and unexpected ways of being in the world, even as it confronts us with the darker side of life, coexistence, and desire. This is reflected both in the proposed transcription of the work and in the very process of its creation. Order and chaos, darkness and light, constantly alternate until an apparent equilibrium is reached.

Is the "queer" aspect of the Bacchae linked in particular to the fact that in antiquity sexual binaries were not as clear-cut as they are today? 

Elli Papakonstantinou:  Absolutely. When you delve into Greek mythology, you realize that the world was indeed less binary than our Western societies are today. There were no minorities as we understand them now. Moreover, after leaving Athens, Euripides went to Samothrace, where there was an esoteric, mystical school, a current of thought that transcended traditional, binary constraints. Influenced by these concepts of a freer life, the playwright speaks in  The Bacchae of this world, almost without borders. Dionysus disguises himself to visit his mother Agave and his aunts and return to Thebes. He slips into the skin of a trans person, thus triggering a series of events oscillating between violence and hope. 

In your staging, there is a mix of codes between trans identity, sensuality and a kitsch universe?

Elli Papakonstantinou:  Yes, I wanted to play with different aesthetics, using them as a tool that was both political and artistic. The visual is very important in my work because it allows me to shift the audience's perspective, to highlight certain intentions in a text or a work, to go beyond words. So, with  The Bacchae , I found it interesting to play with queer codes: outrageous makeup, flashy costumes, shifting from an operatic aria to a pop melody. By invoking a whole range of contradictory codes on stage, it allowed me to create a universe of all possibilities, without polarization, where everyone can live as they see fit and where everyone accepts each other. For me, that's the very definition of what the word "Queer" encompasses. The goal was also to break free from conventional frameworks, to propose another paradigm where it's possible to live according to one's desires and wants without having to hide. Our era has broken free from certain gender norms, but it's not so simple when we see the rise in homophobic and transphobic acts in many Western countries, which goes hand in hand with a retreat into isolationism. We live in an increasingly polarized space where opposing sides cannot reach an understanding and are becoming increasingly irreconcilable. 

In your show, which ingeniously blends visual, choreographic and theatrical art, you combine desire and barbarity on stage, as if ultimately the only response to incomprehension was violence?

Elli Papakonstantinou:  The performance is like a wound, a scar that carries the protagonists away. Pentheas is branded by his inability to accept the binary system imposed by society. Envy and desire lie dormant and can only break free from their patriarchal and conformist constraints at the cost of a profound rupture. In fact, the play is structured around an axis that divides it at its center. The first part is very oral, very theatrical; the second allows the bodies to express themselves. But it is also a play about healing, about overcoming the scar.  

You are a socially conscious artist, and the situation for artists in Greece has become increasingly precarious in recent months. Can you tell us a little about it? 

Elli Papakonstantinou:  This is a pivotal moment. Elections are currently underway. The hope of seeing the law changed, though rather futile, is one of the major issues for the future of culture in my country. Since December 2022, everything has gone wrong. The proclamation of a presidential decree that lowered the art degree (a minimum of three years after high school graduation) to the level of a secondary school diploma ignited a firestorm. The consequences for artists and art students are dramatic. They affect everything from remuneration and future pensions to difficulties in pursuing higher education. It's a huge erosion of rights and, in my opinion, a provocation against us. For almost six months now, demands for the repeal of this law have been the driving force of Greek cultural life. Discussions are ongoing. Of course, it's unlikely the government will back down, but we still hope for a more favorable revaluation of our art degrees in the long run, rather than the one initially announced.

In practical terms, what does this mean for artists?

Elli Papakonstantinou:  This is a complete and utter exclusion of artists from the university system. None of us can teach at the university anymore. It's a way to demotivate, marginalize, and discourage young people from pursuing this path. Especially since it coincides with the government's announcement of a minimum wage cut, meaning the entire sector is weakened. It's a real catastrophe, because in Greece, there's no intermittent employment system. To make a living, you have to take on multiple contracts. And since, in parallel, the government has also decided to reduce subsidies for independent companies, it's going to become increasingly difficult to be an artist and create in my country. Art should be one of the fundamental elements of our democracies. This is less and less the case. At least, not for politicians. It's a way to prevent people from seeing things differently, from thinking, and to control the narratives. This is a very worrying trend, one that is spreading to all Western societies. In Greece, at the time of the crisis, only private institutions could produce shows. Everything staged during that period was very conservative. There was no talk of community, integration, or assimilation, but rather of polarization, of repeating narratives that ultimately all said the same thing. Art must be free and independent. But that's a utopia. 

You perform in France and throughout Europe. Is it important for you to export your art and expose it to other perspectives? 

Elli Papakonstantinou:  Absolutely, it's crucial. I'm a feminist, I question the notion of binary thinking, I venture into marginalized subjects that aren't so easy to discuss in Greece. So, to make myself heard, it's necessary to transcend borders, and for my own reflection, I need to see how my work is perceived by other eyes, other mindsets. What's interesting to observe, depending on the country, is that it's never the same places that are sensitive or shocking. When I created Traces of Antigone, a digital performance, the notion of borders was completely absent, since the audience, whether Indian, American, or Italian, came to the work, not the other way around. It's quite fascinating to observe this shift in thought and body. 

“For so many years, Europeans believed that fascism was over, but the recent ‘refugee problem,’ Euroscepticism, the financial crisis, and more have polarized our societies and completely overshadowed this belief that we live in free and inclusive societies,” observes Elli Papakonstantinou. The stage director runs the art space Vyrsodepseio and the ODC ensemble in Athens; her unconventional, interdisciplinary, and political theater productions tour international stages.

“I visited the memorial and was shocked,” says the theater director. “What surprised me was that the camp was built so close to everyday urban life. I wonder: How much of this ignoring of what’s happening around me resonates today?” Her focus isn’t so much on the past, but rather on sharpening our awareness of the present: in the face of a cold corporate world and the rise of right-wing populism, reminding us of the importance of compassion. Her piece poses questions – big ones, small ones, philosophical ones, rhetorical ones. Alongside the actors, a choir of elderly men from the surrounding area sings: “It’s important to me to engage in a dialogue with the local community,” she explains. Her inclusion also extends to the audience: she wants to involve them in unexpected ways – they will eat together, that much can be revealed. It’s meant to be a holistic experience, and this is achieved through music: “It carries the dramaturgy and connects the questions to everyday life.”

The world of theatre is waiting and perplexing for its future, trying to cope with the unprecedented crisis that culture is experiencing in general. But art, believes Elli Papakonstantinou, “must continue to exist in this era. And this will happen in new unexplored fields. We must go where we’ve never been before.’ Director and writer, she learned early on to move independently, to utilize technology, to talk to a multinational, multicultural audience.

“I learned to move through the cracks where the system is cracking,” she tells K. She’s also suited for crises. “In moments like this, art is meaningful. Where people around us and ourselves are looking for a ‘’why’’, I always get energized.” This is how she left the West End in 2011 and off London’s West End, where she worked for a decade, to return to Greece during the financial crisis by linking her name to the “Vyrsodepsion”. A place in Botanikos area that became a hub of art and collective intervention in the city.

In recent years she has been active mainly abroad and now during the lockdown period she has been working on four projects. She directs performances, writes works, meets daily with her digital partners, zeroing in on vast distances. Her schedule is full. On the 3rd of March, her piece “Hotel AntiOedipus” in collaboration with IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) will be presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. On the 10th and 12th of May, “Traces of Antigone” (Amazon Prize 2020), a production played both in a digital and a physical version, will be played at the O.Festival in the Netherlands. In the summer at the Avignon Festival she will present “Kindly Ones”, an anti-fascist work played in the places where there were European concentration camps. It started in 2018 from Mauthausen, while in 2022 it will reach Auschwitz. Avignon will be presented at the Camps de Milles concentration camp in Aix-En-Provence. Elli Papakonstantinou, however, also works for the Royal Theatre of Sweden, which commissioned her to write for the Ensemble of the First Stage and to direct on the Stockholm Main Stage a play based on Euripides’s Alkestis. The musical feminist work “Alkestis” will be completed in Sweden. 

VYRSODEPSEIO

“I’m multi-faceted  and that’s why I’m everywhere,” she catches up with the question. What motivates her? “In my case, it’s not the “how” but the “what.” Like when we made “Vyrsodepseio” in a time of crisis, the people who created it were looking for and finding a way to do things. In these cases it’s like walking around with a lit candle in your hand and praying it doesn’t go out. What motivates me is not current events. It’s an affirmation of humanity. That we’re indeed  going to make it.” 

The pieces she writes and directs draw from the ancient myth “a common place where basic questions that concern us today are asked”. She admires the artist’s model of the Renaissance . “In the Renaissance great artists also dealt with technological issues, such as war machines designed by painters, etc. Along the way, technology has been underestimated in relation to art because knowledge has generally been fragmented, when in fact it is one. You can’t worry about the scene without being interested in its mechanism. You can’t be interested in language without being preoccupied with the language machine.”

MAUTHAUSEN

One of her most interesting performances is those in concentration camps, like Mauthausen. “I went, stayed there, had access to archives, discussed with historians and researchers how the local community is dealing with the changes that are happening today in Austria, what those who are still alive say, or their descendants about what happened in the Nazi camps. Part of the investigation is what collective trauma means. When you ask where they come from and they don’t say from Mauthausen, but from Leeds, an hour away, it means a lot. Working on the project, I found that areas where the camps were built at the time are now constituencies of well-known representatives of European fascism such as Marine Le Pen.” 

The director keeps the main throughline, but the show is enriched with elements that draws from the records of each place. “Space always has a story to tell, the architecture as much as the community that surrounds it, the prejudices and lies of people. The show always begins with the Furies from Aeschylus’s “Oresteia”, continues with texts by Iakovos Kambanellis, other writers and her own.  “It is important for the public to come to these camps, because Europe wants to forget. Unfortunately, many in the new generation are ignorant about history.”

The world is changing, our children are being educated in the digital world.

Elli Papakonstantinou is “revisiting” her works, as in “Hotel AntiOedipus” that will be presented in Centre Georges Pompidou. “A digital game of identities for avatars and solitary individuals” based on the opera “Oedipus: Sex with Mum was Blinding”. It premiered in a physical  performance at BAM in New York, now performed via zoom from five different time zones. It emerged after six months of research at Stanford University and collaboration with researchers, neuroscientists and psychologists on the subject of free will and new technologies. “With the lockdown I saw the text more through the perspective of the anti-Oedipus that treats the Oedipus complex and identity as fixed. It is another way of thinking  that goes beyond duality, the terms of male – female, father – mother, good – evil etc. At Stanford the researchers created the possibility for the viewer to be able to choose their own avatar, i.e. a digital other self and navigate a digital place that functions like a hotel with many rooms”.

As for the feminist musical  “Alkestis” which she is currently writing for the Royal Theatre of Sweden, she will continue processing it once she goes there. But she stresses that she has been paid by the Swedish state since June to present a performance a year and a half later. She believes that in Greece we have “terrific human resources”.  Abroad things are more structured and maybe that’s why people’s hearts are boxed. They have a different mindset and time management.” 

Digital theatre is not new to Elli Papakonstantinou. “It’s also a place, something alive. It’s an intangible scene, people are there, you meet with them but you don’t touch them. The world is changing. Our children are educated in the digital world, everything happens there – even their parties.” She also believes that “there is a new Agora in the ancient Greek sense. Every time there are discussions after the performances, it is a meeting place.”

 The crisis in the theatre is another matter. She believes that “the Greek artist is ready for Scottish showers at all times”. I ask why she is more active abroad and not so often in Greece anymore? “Maybe the language I use is not interesting people here.” She contacted cultural organizations, suggesting that her work be played, “but they don’t understand them because they can’t place them somewhere, it’s something new. It’s easier to accept streaming.” 

Bitterness? “A strange feeling” she laughs. “My projects have been funded by the Ministry of Culture over the years and it is important. Now I’d like to find a way to present them in Greece, like the show about the Holocaust. We have to deal with this part of our nature and our younger culture. See what’s happening in Thessaloniki. The denial and resistance towards the Jewish issue. Maybe we live in a country that just wants to forget, to let her sleep. A country that wants her ancient myths to serve her modern myths. I’m interested in now, I’m only interested in my contemporaries. Maybe I went too far with staying abroad, and somehow I have to focus on balancing things a little bit.”

ATHENS  – Greek Director Elli Papakonstantinou will present her latest works at the Avignon Festival and the Royal Theatre of Sweden. She continues her remarkable artistic journey on an international level, consistently directing on some of the world’s great stages, as well as for historic non-theatrical spaces, unconventional political projects, winning awards and constantly experimenting with new forms. The anti-fascist production The Kindly Ones, which had its world premiere at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp memorial in Austria, will be presented at the Avignon Festival, July 13-16, while her latest play, Alkestis, premieres at the Royal Theatre of Sweden on December 2. 

Papakonstantinou “rewrites” and directs Euripes’ play in a commission by the Royal Theatre, with an exceptional ensemble of Swedish actors. Among them is Per Mattsson and Kinkci Bramberg who were frequently under the direction of Ingmar Berman, while Melinda Kinnaman, the protagonist of the successful mystery BBC TV series Modus, holds  the lead role of Alkestis. Papakonstantinou’s play will open the new theatrical season for Mattias Andersson, the Artistic Director of the Royal Theatre.

She spoke with The National Herald about her latest projects, how the pandemic affected her work, and what she is working on next.

TNH: What inspired these latest projects?

Elli Papakonstantinou: Everyday life, politics, pain inside of me and all around me, lockdowns, my favorite ancient myths, poetry and the art of others, a deep faith in humanity, a trip to Mauthausen Concentration camp that shocked me, femicides and MeToo, moments that spark the beginning of an idea. The desire to tell an ancient story with new words. Sometimes, I am commissioned, some others I try hard to find support. 

With The Kindly Ones, which I will present at the Avignon Festival and La Manifacture on July 12 and 13, I explore notions of history as present and collective trauma. Performed in concentration camps and SHOA Memorials all around Europe – starting from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria in 2019- this show is inspired by the Greek myth of the Aeschylean “Eumenides” that I transcribed in reference to the far-right and extremist uprise in Europe. In Avignon, the performance takes place at the Concentration Camp Des Milles. The piece brings collective trauma and inclusion at the epicenter. It embraces texts by Iakovos Kambanellis – a survivor of Mauthausen Camp- but also further texts by prisoners of Camp des Milles in France such as the visual artist Marx Ernst.

At Mauthausen, I had access to local records, conducted interviews, collaborated with researchers and for the French performance I was the recipient of a very prestigious residency at the Centre National des écritures du Spectacle (La Chartreuse).

The Concentration camps and the surrounding areas have a life of their own. We cannot bypass the fact that Aix-en-Provence, the town closest to Camp Des Milles, is the electoral district of Marie Le Pen and Mariani, where the far right party is expected to win. 

History weighs heavily on the local community despite all efforts to move on. Bringing audiences together in such charged times and places turns historical reflection into a communal living experience.

The world is in a serious transition and many certainties are shaken. The Greek myths provide the platform to rest, dream, and reflect upon ourselves. I like these extreme stories where we see human beings that have become so much bigger than their lives that they brush onto gods. These are the kind of stories that can speak of our times and it’s a great challenge to transcribe them and to present them to international audiences. I feel truly blessed and humbled to encounter such a response to my work.

TNH: How has the pandemic affected your work?

EP: It was a truly challenging time. I worked non-stop. There was a lot of uncertainty, cancellations, and reprogramming. But at the same time, working with new technologies, I launched myself into the making of a new language, what I call “cinematic opera.” I digitally revisited my opera, Oedipus: Sex with Mum Was Blinding, that premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York in September 2019 developed in collaboration with Stanford University and the Center for Computer Research in Music & Acoustics (CCRMA).

Drawing inspiration from Deleuze-Guattari and the idea of fluid identity and the ever evolving self, as well as gaming, facial recognition and augmented reality (AR) technologies, I created an interactive new digital performance titled Hotel AntiOedipus. The show premiered at Centre George Pompidou in Paris in collaboration with IRCAM this past March and is currently on tour.

Another digital work was Traces of Antigone, written by the Greek-Swedish Christina Ouzounidis. A piece on femininity created for Zoom as an alternative stage. The show was developed completely under the extended quarantines and is currently touring the world in both a physical and digital format: Romaeuropa Festival, (Italy)- IRCAM/Centre Pompidou, Paris (France), Currents New Media (USA), O. FESTIVAL (Holland) etc. 

TNH: What are you working on next?

EP: I am currently writing and directing a new play, titled Alkestis that is commissioned by Dramaten, the Royal Theatre of Sweden and the new artistic director Matthias Andersson. It is a great challenge to direct the Dramaten Ensemble consisted by Sweden’s top actors -some of them known for their long collaboration with Ingmar Bergman. I am writing a play that draws from Euripides' Alkestis but I am writing it though a feminine perspective. This is the same story but as we have never heard it before. Gender politics has always been a central theme in my work. The premiere of the show will take place on December 2.

Elli Papakonstantinou has given artists, and activists, a platform from which to express themselves. her work, her art, is created not to provide answers in these politically charged times, but rather, to open expectations to endless possibilities… Internationally acclaimed Elli Papakonstantinou is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the ODC Ensemble. Born in Athens, she studied at the Greek National School of Arts and the Royal Holloway, University of London. After a number of years working in London, she returned to Greece where she co-founded the ODC Ensemble, and then Vyrsodepseio.
This weekend in Athens, the much anticipated Revolt Athens will be on stage. The musical is an impressionistic journey through the sociopolitical problems of Athens today. The production was conceptualized and directed by Papakonstantinou. We had an opportunity to speak with Papakonstantinou and learn more about how current affairs in Europe are being translated on her stage.

Tell us a bit about your recent project, “Revolt Athens”?
I conceived and directed this show for the ODC Ensemble with the intention to create a poetic performance on chaotic daily life of crisis-struck Athens. Re-volt Athens is an impressionistic journey through the sociopolitical problems of Athens today, in a crisis, which is pan-European.
My intention was to create a poetic mixture of genres and of tragedy and comedy and to reflect the contrast between Greece’s fame as an idyllic tourist destination and its fight for survival through increasing poverty among the population and hoards of refugees. The show is in English as it is created especially for a foreign audience that would dare to peep through the keyhole of catastrophe and hopefully reconsider stereotypical approaches and clichés about the Greek crisis.

Why did you choose to present this performance for only European audiences?
I believe that art can be a powerful means for a deeper understanding, if it is a lasting experience that touches the audience.
There is so much that has been written and said about the Greek crisis! The accumulation of information, figures and other data is awfully overwhelming but I very much doubt that people in Europe really understand how these numbers affect real people’s lives. In Re-volt Athens I try to draw the line between data and human factor and to create a real experience for the audience that can somehow convey a deeper understanding of the situation.
These days there are many different narratives and political agendas on the table regarding Greece and the Southern European crisis, or, the war in Syria and the flood of refugees towards Europe. I am only reminding my audience that there are more ways to think about the Greek crisis, connecting it with a much wider and deeper crisis of values and ideas in the Western culture. Figures and analytics is just indicative of what is really happening in real people s lives. These are actual events that affect real people.

Can you tell us about your theatre company, “ODC Ensemble”?
In 2002 I established ODC Ensemble. It is a highly acclaimed company active in the field of contemporary and experimental art. We create hybrid art involving citizens/activists in non-theatrical spaces (thus intervening in wider public space).
Our works takes place inside and outside of buildings, where the audience moves following the action, thus questioning traditional frontal relationships with the audience. ODC Ensemble creates engaged art, out of the box, in unexpected spaces like a windowsill on Broadway (New York) or a residential building in Athens, or some industrial space, or so on. In March 2011, we procured our own space, Vyrsodepseio – it was the largest 19th century tannery in the Balkans. We transformed it into a multi-stage, versatile space for performing arts. The space is situated at the fringe of Athens, in a neglected post-industrial area. Vyrsodepseio is a member of International Networks Trans Europe Halles (TEH) and IETM and runs under the Auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture.Why did you choose experimental theatre?
I like the freedom of experimentation; it is for me a way to be creative to search for new forms, new ways of expression or even to revisit old forms. It is a synonym of freedom for me. In my work the context of my art defines how and with what means and with which collaborators I will experiment each time. It is an open process that sometimes produces unexpected results.
Art for me is a kind of false equation. I mean, I usually start working on a performance with a false equation in mind. For example, creating a narrative with no words (as in Skin, Vyrsodepseio) or lighting only with natural light (as in Richard II, Vyrsodepseio) or staging Woyzeck as post bank concert (Woyzeck Quartet, Hellenic Festival). But for each one of these aesthetic choices there is always a political contextual reason.

You have lived and worked abroad for years. Why did you choose to come back to Greece?
I missed my language and I’ve realized that I’ve also missed my roots, my maternal language, the sun… But, I returned because of the crisis- I wanted to fight though art and activism for a better future. I guess I love my country very much. I also believe that it is more fun to play with fire than to watch it from a safe distance. The crisis opened up new potentials, new possibilities to think about art, its content, for whom and creative processes. Crisis is the optimum condition for me to redefine myself as an artist.

In your opinion, how has the economic crisis affect art in Greece?
Economic crisis had a great impact on cultural sector in Greece. Of course, it’s been devastating as far as infrastructures and subsidy system is concerned. There is more than a phenomenal 90% unemployment in theatre sector at this very moment resulting to poverty among artists. In the Art industry, subsidies stopped entirely (since 2011), heavy taxation was imposed on non-profit companies and artists, Institutionalized art took over, lobbing and monopolies.
However, at the same time Art became gradually absolutely essential for a bigger part of the population with an overwhelming rise in audiences and performances and an overall absolute booming in all art sectors, be it music, theatre or the visual arts. There is so much going on right now in Athens and some of this work is really great. On the whole Greek artists reconsidered the context and the aesthetics of their work and are more daring and extravert than before connecting with art structures around the world. Athens is definitely attracting many foreign artists and structures, like the Documenta that will take place in 2017 in Athens.

What is next for you and for ODC?
In May I am launching a new project called “Happiness Unlimited”, together with Danish artists. My inspiration came from a funny discovery: according to recent ratings, the Danes are the happiest people in the world and the Greeks are the unhappiest. So, I started wondering, could this be for real and if yes, why?
What is happiness today?
Is happiness a reality or just a construction?
Can happiness be a commodity?

It seems to me that in the phase of a serious economic and spiritual crisis, the idea of happiness is still something to fight for in 21st century. Greece has been the cradle of the democratic idea and the Scandinavian countries have applied and realized some of the most advanced social models in the world. So, how do Greek and Scandinavian people live their lives today and how do we reflect on the idea of happiness?
“Happiness Unlimited” is a multiple format performance-installation (workshops, performance salons and a pop-up travel agency) that will address this topic in a citizen participatory and multidisciplinary way. In May, we will launch the first performance salon in the city of Aarhus in Denmark.
I’m also working on a new opera based on the play “Antigone’s Trail” by Christina Ouzounides; this project will be presented in Athens and in three major cities in Sweden after the summer 2016. It is a Swedish-Greek co production and artistic collaboration with Swedish and Greek vocalists, performers and musicians.
My wish is to present Revolt Athens in the USA In 2004, I spent several months in New York and in Princeton University at the Music and Advanced Media Department as a Fulbright Artist developing new media for performances. I’ve also conceived and directed the “Odyssey” at La.Ma.Ma theatre in New York. Both experiences have been very rewarding and had a great impact on my artistic work. I therefore, long for a new opportunity to present my artistic work in the U.S.A. and I hope that this opportunity will rise very soon.

'Simplicity is the problem of our time. Simplicity is sticking labels on things. It should be about fluidity and confusion.' The Greek opera maker Elli Papakonstantinou , whose star has risen rapidly in recent years, presents a contemporary version of the classical tragedy 'The Bacchae' by Euripides at the Holland Festival this year. In that play from 405 BC, the wine god Dionysus (also known as Bacchos) abducts the women of Thebes because the king rejects his divine status. That king, against his better judgment and disguised as a woman, follows the Bacchae, is discovered, and is torn to pieces under the leadership of his ecstatic mother, just like the inhabitants of a mountain village that stood in his way earlier.

The production presented by Elli Papakonstantinou premiered this spring in Mulhouse, France. It is a modern take on the old piece. It is opera, but also a rave; it features pop music and a DJ. That is confusing for people expecting a classical opera. I spoke to the Greek director and asked about her motivation for this choice.

Of all the plays written since 405 BC, why did you choose Bacchae?

'I wanted to create a piece about political correctness and about what is happening in our world with micro-labeling and the MeToo movement. I am really interested in the myths. Not only in classical mythology, but also in how we continue to create such stories. That is how national myths are formed. That combination of ancient and modern myths comes together very well in the story; of the god Dionysus and what is shown in it about queerness.'

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

You should know that Euripides wrote this play after his exile from Athens. He was therefore free to comment on the Apollonian rationality that prevailed in Athens.

Apollonian rationality? With this, Elli Papakonstantinou refers to a concept by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche contrasted the Apollonian with the Dionysian, named after the Greek god Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, and unbridled emotions. The Apollonian stands for clarity, order, logic, and intellectual discipline. Dionysus represents chaos, emotion, intuition, and the irrational.

Nietzsche viewed art as typically Dionysian: not all aspects of the world can be understood through mere rationality. He encourages the exploration of mystical and transcendental experiences.

Euripides felt a connection with the mystics from northern Greece. Such mystical orders still exist there. At the time, they were truly secret societies, and if you became a member, you also had to swear secrecy. They were important as an undercurrent in Greek society. They did not only emerge at the Oracle of Delphi but also represented the animalistic, uninhibited side of society. That is why I was really interested in this piece, to place it in a contemporary context.

You see political correctness as Apollonian and 'queerness' as typically Dionysian?

Yes. We learn to live with rules, corrections, and self-criticism. We internalize our feelings of guilt. In Dionysus, I see the joy of desire and longing. What happens to desire that cannot be described, that does not fit into boxes? What are the consequences of microlabeling for our freedom?

It is of course good to name things and to create new spaces for that, but I think we need to find a more fundamental way to give space to desire in our society. We need to be more open to ambiguity.

FALSE CONNECTION

So, does microlabeling—naming gender identity and (sexual) preference as specifically as possible—hinder our freedom and blind us to the big things in life?

We live in a very transparent world, in which we can let anyone into our personal lives and intrude into everyone's life. This creates a false idea that we are connected to one another. We no longer think esoterically and no longer look at ourselves. After all, man is a mystery. We are not transparent at all. We do not fit into criteria. Do we fit into a micro-label or not? This is how boundaries and duality arise in the world.

With this piece, I seek connection with a great flow of which we are all a part, so that we can continue to evolve esoterically without even having an idea of ​​what we are becoming, without necessarily fitting in anywhere.

We don't always have to feel that pressure in our society to choose a side. I am an activist too, so I know that struggle very well: I also fight for more inclusivity. But for me, it is more about the way we act and how we think about our personal development.

DON'T LOOK UP

Your plea for the Dionysian is convincing, but there is also a downside: in Bacchae, the feast in the mountains also leads to senseless violence. A village is plundered and massacred. How optimistic are you? The performance also contains a clear reference to 'Don't Look Up', the film that made an impression last year by showing how people prefer to look away at the announcement of a major disaster.

I am deliberately not referring to that specific film. It is about the development of pop culture over the last few decades. Humanity is facing a major catastrophe, and we have known that since the 1980s. Even then, such films were a mass-produced product, a part of pop culture.

I wanted to create a real pop project with Bacchae, because I also love pop music very much. I am interested in the way pop culture assimilates these stereotypes into new stories and retells the story in a more progressive way, with the aesthetic of pop.

Then I think it is really worthwhile to examine and understand all those catastrophes and all those ideas about destruction and the end, and perhaps place them in a different context. So yes, as you said: there is violence too. In Europe there is a lot of violence, but at the same time there is also a new way of living.

CONSERVATIVE AND TRADITIONAL

Culture is also about distinguishing yourself from others. You are a renowned opera director, but it is a world where there is much debate about how you perform opera, how you create opera, and how the genre is defined. There is a movement that says opera must be performed as it was written, in whatever way possible. And then there are people who modernize things. Where do you stand in all of this? I saw a multicolored performance. There was beautiful opera singing, there were raves , there were beats , there was noise .

'I love music because it is transcendental. Music can flow from one genre to another in a way that no other art can do so well. I need that for this piece, because I am interested in queerness. What is queerness? The piece raises this question. That is why my aesthetic is free. I can say that I move freely from one zone to another without thinking about how they fit together, or whether they fit together artistically: I simply flow along.'

I really wanted to raise this question for the audience. Perhaps it is sometimes appealing, perhaps it sometimes creates a kind of monstrous aesthetic grotesqueness. I didn't really wonder which category this performance would fit into. Even though everything in our industry revolves around categories.

I find it very difficult to fit into a box. But the opera world, which I love very much, is a conservative and traditional world, where the genre must be respected and reproduced.

AESTHETICS IS A POLITICAL CHOICE

'I actually love the in-between space. Aesthetics is a political choice. It is up to us to break the patterns. As soon as you break the audience's pattern of expectations, you break a pattern in the mind. That is how you create space, a grey space between certainties. That is what this piece brings.'

'I wanted to do this in a playful way. I didn't want to show real violence. That was a political choice for me: I didn't want to show violence against femininity. The piece is not about feminist violence. I wanted to break certainties and create electric shocks, but in a playful way.'

How was this received when you presented it to the actors? It is a very diverse ensemble, from real opera singers to an androgynous pop star like Ariah Lester. How did the classically trained opera singers react to your plans?

It was a challenge to bring along people from different regions, with a different perspective on art and a different way of working. They all had different expectations at different stages of the work. That offered surprises time and again. All our certainties were gone. On top of that came the strikes in Greece, which arose after the train disaster in which so many people died, so there was an extra layer of uncertainty to deal with.

Ultimately, every piece finds a method. As if we were prepared by the universe to work in such a way that we truly lost control. That is the theme: losing control to find something. It is not about foolishness or madness.

UKRAINE

'For me as an artist, that loss of control was educational, also to prevent me from burning out. I was able to connect more deeply. That wasn't my intention, but it happened. And it is not the first time. My latest work was with Ukrainian opera singers, and we were rehearsing when Russia invaded Ukraine.'

So part of the rehearsals took place in shelters, in bunkers, underground. And then they came here. That is how life intruded into art: one day eight people knocked on my door. At that point, it wasn't about art, but a matter of finding musical instruments for them, finding a place to sleep, finding something to eat. They entered our safe world, and you could feel very clearly what art means in this context and what it meant to them. That was moving, because that was all they had. They enjoyed art in moments of complete crisis. That was very important to me. My life has been putting me to the test lately.

FASCISTS

This show is about queerness. Because of your criticism of microlabeling, there is always a risk of being criticized, precisely by the queer world. The divides are stark; before you know it, you are embraced by the far right as a critic of microlabeling. How do you prepare for that?

'I am not opening a dialogue with fascists. I am opening a dialogue with my people. It is really important not to think in black and white. We must remain open to complexity and depth. Simplicity is the problem of our time. Simplicity is sticking labels on things. It must be about fluidity and confusion. This is what queerness is about: bewilderment. We must try to find a new path in life and take new steps. As a possibility, as a potential something that is present and not dead, does not look to the past and lock you into a name, but constantly changes and evolves and is constantly in dialogue with the world, which has not accepted this way of being.'

Current events and developments have pushed Greece to the forefront of international attention. The cultural and artistic sectors are struggling to survive and must constantly imagine new ways to create, innovate and produce art and culture in “difficult times”. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Elli Papakonstantinou, theatre director and artistic director of Vyrsodepseio. In this interview Elli tells the story of Vyrsodepseio, one of the most interesting spaces devoted to contemporary art and creation in Athens. She also speaks of the international collaborations and residency program currently being developed there, as well as her own company, ODC Ensemble, and some of their future projects.

Could you please introduce Vyrsodepseio, the space, its story, and outline your main aims and activities?
Vyrsodepseio, also known as VYRSO, is an independent space for the arts, run for artists, by artists. Vyrsodepseio is a former tannery, a space, where animal skins were torn off. The art produced there tries to keep that tradition alive.
Vyrsodepseio is also the headquarters of my company, ODC Ensemble. Formed in 2011, it is a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary group in constant evolution, maintaining a core of Greek, German and French artists. ODC Ensemble is committed to creating engaged art by building a bridge between activism and the arts. ODC Ensemble has performed all around the world and is a member of international networks and civil society platforms. In these times, when Greece has become a project, an experiment, a work in progress (or regress?), our work is inevitably an experimental project in progress.

But going back to the origins of Vyrsodepseio, first of all, I must say that I’m an artist and theatre director, and that my company is formed by multi-disciplinary artists. So, none of us was a producer, or had any idea how to produce a show or, even less, how to run a space when the economic crisis hit Greece and most paid productions and art programs were forced to come to a halt. 2011 was a year of social upheaval, with demonstrations and riots spreading throughout Athens and defining our everyday lives. Above all, there was great hope that we would be able to reshape our lives and make a change if we all worked together towards certain goals. VYRSO is the result of this belief. It is the result of a collective in situ work –more than 100 people collaborated to create the space and may groups supported this effort, lending us their technical equipment and know-how. The space was launched in 2011 with the first performance, which I directed, META (a performance on catastrophe and the end of Capitalism). This performance was the result of collaboration between Athenian citizens, activists and professional artists. Some performed in the final show, others supported the different aspects of a very demanding site-specific performance. META to my great surprise, turned out to be a huge success and performances ran for almost a year, with more and more people discovering us.
Of course, this kind of network around VYRSO was connected with broader citizen networks in Athens, namely, the “Indignados” occupying Syntagma Square and other citizen platforms. People supporting the ‘VYRSO project’ insisted on backing the structures we created and keeping the space running.

So this is how things happened. Since 2011, ODC Ensemble has been based at Vyrsodepseio, which is, by the way, the largest nineteenth century tannery of the Balkans and a real beauty, a monument, preserved by the Greek Ministry of Culture. The company transformed it into a multi-stage, versatile space for contemporary performing arts, located in the post-industrial undeveloped area of Votanikos, in the center of Athens.
Of course, VYRSO is a grassroots and artist driven project but, at the same time, it is a vibrant cultural cell that greatly helps the growth of innovative hybrid art. It is also an experiment on how to produce art in “difficult times”; an evolving project of synergies and co-operations.
While carrying a rich weekly program, it serves as a platform for networking between artists, activists, international organizations and individuals. It offers a space where companies and artists can rehearse, organize workshops, build and show their plays and performances. Through the seminars, educational programs and residencies for artists from all over Europe, Vyrsodepseio is fully engaged in intercultural dialogue through art. Since its creation, Vyrsodepseio has hosted artists in residency, workshops, master-classes, seminars and educational programs.

ACTIVITIES THROUGHOUT THE YEAR:
Site-specific performance/theatre/dance, artist residencies, new dramaturgy support, live music, seminars and educational programs such as dramaturgy and performance workshop, visual arts exhibitions, community and activist projects, media art, clubs, music and dance festivals and so on.

What is the role of VYRSO in Athens? How do you connect with the city and its inhabitants?
The involvement of local communities and volunteers is essential to the artistic work of ODC Ensemble and Vyrsodepseio. Mixing professionals and amateurs on stage (approximately twenty citizens have joined the company), including communities in the creation process or in the functions of the space is a way to accomplish things together in times where individuality leads nowhere. Also, the company launched a network of volunteers, artists and activists in different disciplines (theatre, music, dance, visual art, film/video, literature and architecture) in order to create an exchange leading towards the generation of new aesthetics.
VYRSO is situated in a neglected post-industrial area in the heart of Athens, ignored by most Athenians until the project was launched. But, in reality, it is a very lively area with a particularly interesting human geography: two gypsy camps and a strong Afghan community coexist with the local sub-proletarians and the so-called white trash. This is not a no-man’s land after all!
In one sense, the VYRSO project is also a means for Athenians to discover ANOTHER city and its inhabitants. Real people live and work in an area from which industries moved and stray dogs bark in the streets at night. The drive to VYRSO is an experience in itself for most of the audience, “preparing” them for an artistic experience intended (as stated in the ODC manifesto) to destroy theatrical expectations. This holistic experience of dissociation wished to launch Athenian citizens into a dynamic political dialogue in order to embrace change and new potential.
I personally detest the term “community work” and its practices stemming from a centralized authority aimed at controlling social deviation under the pretext of “generous pay-back or volunteer work”. VYRSO does no community work, VYRSO is a community work as it is the result of a generalized urge to: A) survive collectively B) create new structures and explore the potentials and power of a new way of political thinking in art production, and also in rehearsals.

Do you develop international connections and projects? What kind of partnerships, networks and international collaborations are you currently developing?
International collaboration is a primary task for me and a lot of partnerships and collaborations have been realized during VYRSO’s short but adventurous life. First of all, VYRSO is a proud member of the Trans Europe Halles network and of IETM. VYRSO actually hosted IETM Athens Plenary 2013. Together with other European partners, over the next four years we will be carrying out two Creative Europe projects. Europe Grand Central is a European partnership of residencies and workshops on the theme of border crossing, while Creative Lenses is a project aimed at mapping and developing exciting new models of art production.
But I am also working very hard to develop independent, sometimes smaller scale, collaborations. For example, together with Barcelona’s Antic Teatre, we have created an exchange platform for Catalan and Greek artists, presenting works in Barcelona and in Athens. Last year, we co-organized a month of Greek playwriting in France with Panta Theatre in Caen: four Greek playwrights and four Greek directors rehearsed with French actors and presented four full new productions.
The political and humanitarian crisis and paralysis in the independent cultural sector is my main worry at the moment. Hoping to generate potential and to help out, in September I will launch a campaign called Share Your Spares. This campaign aims to raise awareness on the critical situation of independent theaters in Greece and to collect spare technical equipment from cultural centers in Europe.

Could you please talk about your new project Doc(K) Artistic Residency?
We have witnessed an ongoing interest, on the part of artists, to visit Greece during this political moment and see how artists manage to maneuver this situation, while also being inspired by them. Since its inception, VYRSO has been offering workspaces and accommodations for selected international artists and companies. We have developed closer relations with some of these artists, which have led to collaborations and common projects. I would like an artistic residency to be, as an experience, a real osmosis and not a tourist agency or a cheap holiday in Athens. Of course, I believe it is important for artists to travel abroad, to disconnect with their everyday life and connect locally in order to develop work. But this is not enough.
So, this year I wanted to give potential VYRSO residents some extra tools and provide this residency with an extra focus. VYRSO is launching a curated artistic residency in Athens. Doc(K) is an artist residency focusing on the idea of using documentation as an art form. The residency is addressed to artists from all areas: visual art, theatre, music, dance, graphic design and media arts. Doc(k) will introduce participating artists to the Athenian art scene and, at the same time, will co-create the metadata of their projects. The Doc(K) residency team will document the process and the final work of the participants, exploring the idea of documentation as a new way of relating with the final work. Doc(K)will conclude in 2017 with the show Doc(K)umenting, presenting all participating artists from Doc(k) International Art Residency Program.

In terms of cultural funding, do you have any institutional support? How do you fund your activities?
All the activities of Vyrsodepseio run under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture, but the contradiction is that, in reality, there is no institutional support whatsoever concerning the space or our activities. That means that there is no funding either for producing or co-producing, and no support, either in kind or technical, coming from Greek institutions. VYRSO belongs, as a space, to private owners.
Unfortunately, this contradiction reflects the broader situation in Greece. Since 2011, there have been no subsidies or funds supporting cultural activities and the independent culture sector is struggling to survive. As an artist, I started looking for possible alternatives to produce art in the framework of civil society and through collaborations. I felt that, instead of receding, art production should play a lead role in the socio-political changes of Greece. With this belief, came the urge to apply unconventional models to cultural production. After three years, enriched by dozens of festivals and co-productions, I now believe that models coming from the art world can be extremely inventive and can also be exported to other fields.
In a sense, Vyrsodepseio has become a brand name linked to innovative structures, production models and political movements, serving as a possible prototype. It is not WHERE we make things move (spatial references are significant as we are based in an extremely underdeveloped area in Athens, BUT do not delimit us, in the sense that we also produce ‘outdoors’ moving to other spaces of equal interest), but mostly HOW we make them move: by means of collaborations and with a broader bottom-up contribution.

Speaking about the future, what are your next projects?

The cultural sector is, of course, going through terrible times with every production now cancelled after five years of austerity, 80% unemployment, the banks shut and the whole economy coming to a halt. At Vyrsodepseio we are struggling against all odds and trying to be inventive and optimistic. In this frame of mind, we are launching a campaign, hopefully with the support of international networks. The idea is that two trucks will cross Europe in October 2015 (from north to south and from west to the east) reaching out to organizations that may have spare technical equipment that they would be willing to give us, even technical equipment considered obsolete. This equipment can receive a new life in our organization and will be crucial for our sustainability. After some filtering, VYRSO will also distribute the material to other cultural organizations in Greece.

As an artist, I am directing ODC Ensemble’s new piece Revolt Athens, a political visual performance which attempts to depict life in Athens. It will be presented at Musiktheatertage Vienna (September 3, 2015) and at Neukoellner Oper Berlin (November 6 - 8, 2015).

I am also rehearsing for the next ODC performance on Antigone and the idea of democracy.

Two of Elli’s creations The Cave and Revolt Athens will tour at the BE Festival for the REP, Birmingham, UK (last year’s First Prize Award) and then at the Copenhagen Opera Festival and the Aalborg Opera Festival in Denmark in August. In Greece, we will see Cave at the Megaron, Concert Hall in October. Elli Papakonstantinou is currently commissioned to direct Kazin Barokk, one of the main productions of Valletta – European Capital of Culture 2018. She is also been awarded with a “Fulbright Artist’s Award 2018-19” and is proudly collaborating with CCARMA of Stanford University on her new creation Oedipus, Sex with Mom was Blinding. At the same time, the bilingual publication Vyrsodepseio, a Θeater in the Years of the Crisis about the artist’s work is released by Nefeli Publishing House, Greece.

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS WITH ELLI

09:00 – 10:00
My alarm goes on. A part of me wakes up, while another half still dreamy, solves problems and repeats made-up dialogues with collaborators or friends. I pat my dog on the head & check my emails on my cell phone, drink coffee and gradually get myself together… I keep notes about the libretto I’m working on at this moment. This takes me to the office, where for the next one hour (until the first phone call) I’ ll be writing.

10:00 – 12:00
This time is usually devoted to production; I talk with the Maltese production of the Cultural Capital of Europe who are producing my upcoming creation Kazin Barokk commissioned by Valetta 18 (due to premier in September 2018); also, with festivals in Britain and Denmark where my production the Cave will be touring in summer 2018. Questions such as: “Why does the Maltese production not respond to the queries of the French actress?” And other crisis I deal with- sometimes personal ones-: “They ‘re racists, is this why I ‘m not wanted?” I exchange emails and I try to keep my head in place with unpredictable situations such as: ”They don’t accept a santour in this aircraft, it would have to go as fright!”

12:00 – 17:00
While transferring photos to Stanford University, I am late for my rehearsal of The Cave. I look out of the window and I can see the Acropolis –send ‘her’ a morning kiss– and in no more than 15 mins I’m at the rehearsal space. In the car, I talk to friends that I love and their voice reassures me. So here I am revisiting The Cave, while reworking another show Revolt Athens that will also go on a tour. The way I see it, every creation of mine is be an open field to keep exploring.

17:30 – 18:30
Chaos at home. My dog comes over me, my daughter reads or plays the violin; at home someone always plays the music, the guitar, the violin or the ‘theremin’, or just makes noise, a lot of noise, which makes me look for quiet corners and small rooms; nevertheless, I must admit I quite like the chaos; Colleagues and friends always come round; people come and go. Someone delivers a thing, another comes to take a sound console or books. Questions like “When do I fly for Vienna? Tomorrow; And where will I stay?” are thrown in the air waiting for an answer.

18:30 – 19:30
Meetings with partners, also continuing the morning work. When I work at home, my favorite habit is to work side by side with my daughter while she is doing her homework. I help her and she helps me with her presence. I water and take care of my plants. This is my idea of meditation.

20:00 – 21:00
Skype with Stanford’s US partners for my new project to be completed in the US next year. Ideas for the designing of the new media. How will the public interact with the new technologies? How can Stanford’s simulated Hagia Sophia’s sound environment be incorporated in the new project? We hung up – “to be continued”.

21:00 – 23:00
With my friends or my family; usually relaxing watching a movie or having a nice conversation.

23:30 – 02:30
The deepest hour. Many ideas are born here, also while I sleep. When it ‘s all silent I do a lot of reading and I write. When I’m directing, I usually work til the early hours of the day. I’ve always been a night bird, and when I ‘m not out, I spend this time of the day to read in a secret cocoon of time.

A multi-layered, multilingual work, not only because it uses New Media...

Furthermore, the writing of the piece constitutes an interdisciplinary intersection of dramaturgy, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, as the work is co-authored by Chloé Tzia Kolyri and Kakia Goudeli, alongside the director herself.

It is within this contradictory and almost combative juncture that Papakonstantinou, in her Bacchae, dares to center desire and the affirmation of life, combined with the most ambiguous entity bequeathed to us by mythology: that of the god Dionysus. In her subversive approach to this work of classical antiquity, the director highlights once more the core themes that permeate her artistic career: power, gender, and politics.

We bear a responsibility to dare to approach each other, to remain alive, and not to terrorize the depths of our desire. It is a complicated matter... The Bacchae open up this topic; they do not answer it, but they open it towards the affirmation of desire.

I sketch Dionysus as a queer deity in constant flux, escaping every shape and contour. He crosses borders—gendered ones, and those between fiction and reality. Neither man nor woman, Dionysus returns to take revenge. Euripides expresses multiplicity and union with the Whole. It is upon this horizon that I meet him to offer another version of the myth.

I see the possibility of becoming our true self in this life, in the here and now, through changes and potential catastrophes. It does not matter; perhaps it is more important to move toward where Dionysus points us. Toward the room of desire, where we do not know exactly what will happen to us if we dare. This path is what the performance records—a movement toward the deepest self.

— You’ve built an impressive career and gained recognition abroad. Yet, you never stop pushing the boundaries.

— I am like that; I am constantly in motion, and I also love to experiment with different languages and formats.

...what I sense moving through the collective unconscious. What I want to "hack," so to speak. I really love this idea of art as a Trojan Horse. Art has the power to break open taboos, to resolve, to heal, and to touch so many areas—every dimension of human existence, which is not just the worldly sphere or politics, but the metaphysical dimension as well.

...I believe that art comes to restore the connection between human beings and their souls.

...with nature, with my readings, with my political views; everything converges, everything builds connections, and everything is born, in a way, out of a singular flow.

...the real and the mythical are one. We can distinguish differences in how they are expressed, but in reality, they feed into each other; they are communicating vessels.

Here, life is lived with your soul exposed. Everything is visible. Everything is open. I am deeply interested in this dialogue within everyday life.

The narrative transcends gender stereotypes, celebrates diversity, and describes the transition from a normalized world to a world of desire, an ambiguous world. My narrative concerns all femininities. Gendered martyrologies, territorializations, transitions, constructions.

[...] there are very few artistic organizations that pave the way toward an "inclusive" policy, and the LGBTQ+ community is treated with caution even within the artistic sphere.

Fermentations have taken place and are still happening; nothing is easy, but it is a way for us ourselves to pass through the ambiguity, complexity, and expressiveness of queer, and to subvert our own selves.

We were embraced by some of the biggest European festivals, such as the Holland Festival and the Festival de Marseille, where both performances were sold out. The French reviews spoke of "a festive vortex," a "baroque Orlando Furioso." In the Netherlands, they noted that the performance "transforms into an ecstatic explosion of energy that no longer speaks through the mind but acts directly upon the senses… stimulating, sexual, but above all evocative…" "All genres have now been shattered: dance, theater, literature, performance, cinema, pop, classical opera."

The reception is deeply moving, as is the way the foreign spectator connects with the Greek myth.

Of course, I don’t believe we are under control. We have fragments within us. Everything is in a state of fermentation...

Often, the image or the music narrates the vibration much more powerfully... I want to create experiences for the spectator.

I knew what I was doing, and I did it on purpose to provoke this hypocrisy and conservatism.

[...] the trauma exists, and that is the opening scene of the play—that is where we start.

[...] they tell me, "we have canceled Bergman"... the North has gone off the deep end. And America too.

How can you, a cis man, speak on behalf of Indians? Schechner was forced to take time, half an hour, to give us his resume, to talk about his Jewish heritage and the difficulties he faced in New York—only to conclude that "maybe I am entitled to share this research after all." And excuse me for breathing.

These are extreme phenomena, and there is a concern that they will come to Greece too. History is being rewritten. People face consequences not through formal systems, but through public outcry and silencing. In this way, different forms of control and rigidity are hidden. Within current systems, eroticism can be lost. Fear can paralyze the body; it is the first thing that gets paralyzed. One freezes. But there is a deep love for the body and a deep love for sexuality.

- Onstage sexuality with no taboos, no restrictions, and free from all the boundaries imposed by society. Today, in your opinion, are we moving forward or, on the contrary, regressing when it comes to this issue?

- We claim to be this and that, but it seems that in reality, we are distanced from our bodies, from our desires. The performance proclaims freedom: not to truly know who we are, but to feel free to experience life—the freedom of the powerful body.