Lived Aesthetics of Crisis and Performance Politics of Discontent

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

This work was also created as a site-specific promenade performance largely inspired by the site of Vyrsodepseio, making the most out of existing materials and the building’s multi-layered past uses and functions. The concepts of factory/tannery and product/skin operated on a twofold level, both literally (past) and metaphorically (present). Audiences came across an unnerving contemporary factory where not only human skin, but also civic consciousness, cultural conceptions and constructions were processed.

By turns employing irony, black humour, and existential angst, the performance forced us to reflect on the mechanistic and repetitive nature of work in the industrial societies through to the late capitalist era, with its growing monotony, apathy, and alienation. The performance also served as a reflection on anthropophagia (cannibalism) and the integral transformation of modern life into spectacle. At a conceptual level, there was an interplay of spatialities from the industrial to the national, historic, social and cultural spaces. Spaces were often merged and deconstructed in a critical, violent and grotesque way. Among the issues put forward were the conditions of mechanistic production and reproduction, blocked mourning, fear of freedom of speech, and, above all, the dehumanising cynicism which is typical of all power structures and profit-making schemes.

As with After, the intriguing treatment of space and mobility played a key role in gripping the audience’s imagination: the labyrinthine, rather uncertain route from the outdoor courtyard to the inner building; the site-specific, otherworldly visual installations and the sense of boundless, infinite interior, as well as the audience’s constantly shifting point of view. These were important strategies of disorientation, forging at times a contradictory per-ception of the architectural space as dreamy or nightmarish. This atmospheric merging of the outer and inner performance spaces created a strong impression of converging, as well as conflicting spaces, both personal and collective.

Loosely composed as a modular triptych, the piece had an ex-tended prologue taking place outdoors, followed by more live acts indoors. An underground lake was set up in the flooded space (previously foyer). Spectators were carried across by a boatman on a makeshift floating raft, drifting along past a series of brief visual tableaux that came momentarily alive under the gaze of the spectators. This part was meant as a symbolic entrance to the under-world. The same intense visual and physical approach was maintained throughout the piece, with the main factory area functioning as the allegorical space of embodied “human skin processing.” In the final segment, the space was transformed into a dark circus, a phantasmagoria of acrobatics.

In this nightmarish skin factory spectators became in turn slaughterers and slaughtered, feeding in the ghastly chain of human exploitation. Under the hypnotising musical paroxysm of a Cretan lyre melody (played grunge-style by musician/composer Tilemachos Moussas), the space was transformed into a decadent locus of cultural and spiritual massacre, wherein souls, ideas and artworks, as well as all sorts of stereotypes and national symbols were massacred.

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Maria Konomi | Nefeli Editions | 2018