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.