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.”