Site Specific Archives - Elli Papakonstantinou

Każin Barokk

Immersive and site-specific performance on gaming and tax paradises, held at the majestic Notre Dame Gate in Birgu. This game-like performance will transform the near 400 year old building into a dark and beautiful maze, to open up a myriad of possibilities conjured by real-time video, live music, Baroque choir and robotics. The die is cast, the card is drawn.

Louisette:
The Backstage of Revolution

Louisette (the title comes from Marat’s pet word for the guillotine), invites viewers to enter the making of a film on the theme of bourgeois democracy and the French revolution. However, during shoot breaks, something is amiss. How do contemporary individuals relate to the tripartite motto “liberty, equality, fraternity”?
The performance drew on texts by Jean-Paul Marat, Heiner Müller, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Nikos Gatsos, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Oliver, Victor Hugo, Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, excerpts from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and contemporaneous legal texts and Travis Stout’s videogame Assasin’s Creed: Unity. It also drew on texts composed during improvisation with the students of special abilities from the special vocational high school of Eleusis. The latter are the true protagonists of this production, working closely together with actors, musicians, and visual artists. This performance of ambulatory theatre, a co-production of the Athens festival and the Eleusis 2021 European capital of culture, is the end product of a fruitful collaboration between the ODC Ensemble and the students of the Special vocational high School of Eleusis and is part of the Europe Grand central project.

Happiness Unlimited

What is a performance salon?
SALON HAPPINESS UNLTD: AARHUS-ATHENS is interactive performance art, feel-good lounge music and sense titillating taste bombs sending the happiness barometer through the roof!
All spiced up with elements from a Greek thinker, a happiness philosopher, a gastronomic geek and a brain researcher – each giving their take on what happiness can be.
Why happiness?
According to UNESCO’s («The World Happiness Report”) the Danes are among the most happy people on the planet, while the Greeks are the most unhappy.
Happiness Unlimited was first presented in Aarhus, Denmark and consequently it was presented at the Benaki Musem in the frame of the exhibition [OUT] TOPIAS (curator Thanos Vovolis). A full scale performance was presented at Bora-Bora Theatre in Aarhus, Denmark in 2018.

Richard II

The spectator floats into visual installations inspired by the world of Francis Bacon and panoramas of a city in tear-gas. What do spectators reserve for their own Richard? Will they lynch the politician? Will they suggest a way out?

ΔΕΡΜΑ [SKIN]

Inspired by the authoritarian state “Leviathan” by T. Hobbes, this is an immersive site-specific performance, structured as a triptych in three different areas of Vyrsodepseio.

In a tannery, the workers came into contact with the skin of animals, offal, germs, blood and contaminated water. The idea of cleansing is a key thread of the dramatic fabric of the show and, with appropriate textual support, the space is used not only as a literal place (as a performance space), but also as a metaphorical space (as a tannery “purgatory”).

Skin is a celebration, a “tribute” to the mechanistic work, monotony and apathy. A poetic metaphor for the current state of Greek society into crisis and the development of a powerful authoritarian state-Leviathan.

ΜΕΤΑ [AFTER]

“META” is a hybrid site-specific performance that emerged through the creation of a network society, through an open dialogue on the role of art today and the need for parallel clusters around a common feeling: something is breaking in our society, something is getting irretrievably lost: “Let’s celebrate!” The performance deals with notions of the “end” – the relation of people to society in a moment of disaster/crisis, the end of the Big Narratives and the period after. In “META”, the simple everyday communication (through the text of the actors) runs in parallel with texts of: Makriyannis, St. John, Aristotle, Plato, Rosa Luxembourg, Roger Dadoun, Fernando Pessoa, Ernesto Sabatto, Pierre Paolo Pasolini, Thierry Paquot, Witold Gombrowicz, William Burroughs, Karl Marx, etc.
The performance was created with the contribution and participation of more than 50 citizens, activists, artists.

Viciousness in the Kitchen

Based on Sylvia Plath’s radio-play “Three Women”, the cast performs in a real kitchen that is “trapped” with sensors. Live electroacoustic music composition here unfolds, interwoven dynamically in the body of the performance in real time. The performers cook throughout the show and at the end, they serve dinner and join the audience.

Streams of Voices

A performance that draws directly from the workshop of the Fourth Summer Academy of the National Greek Theatre and from the pursuit of a new media rhapsodic method for the Homeric Odyssey.