Terzopoulos Tribute Delphi

TERZOPOULOS TRIBUTE DELPHI

Theodoros Terzopoulos, born in Makrygialos in Northern Greece in 1945, studied acting in Athens.

Between 1972 and 1976 he was a master student and assistant at the Berliner Ensemble. Returning to Greece, he worked as director of the drama school in Thessaloniki. In 1985 he founded the theatre group Attis, which he has led since then.

From 1985 to 1988 he was also Artistic Director of the International Meeting of Ancient Greek Drama in Delphi, which included participation from ­Heiner Müller, Marianne McDonald, Tadashi Suzuki, Robert Wilson, Andrei Serban, Wole Soyinka, Min Tanaka, Yuri Lyubimov and Anatoly Vasiliev. He was a co-founder of the International Institute of Mediterranean Theatre and has been Chairman of its Greek Committee since 1991 and of the Inter­ national Committee of Theater Olympics since 1993, for which he has conceived events in Delphi (1995), Shizuoka (1999), Moscow (2001), Istanbul (2006), Seoul (2010) and Beijing (2014), Wroclaw (2016), in 22 cities across India (2018), Toga, Japan, and St. Petersburg (2019). Since the late 1970s, he has continuously developed an individual, heavily codified, intercultural theatrical language. Guest performances of Attis Theater and workshops on Terzopoulos’ working methods take place throughout the world. As a guest director, he has directed ancient tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as operas and works by important contemporary European writers, in theatres in Russia, the USA, China, Italy, Taiwan, Germany and elsewhere.

TERZOPOULOS TRIBUTE DELPHI

TERZOPOULOS TRIBUTE DELPHI

Imprint Terzopoulos Tribute Delphi Edited by Attis Theatre

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Editor: Attis Theatre, Athens, Greece (www.attistheatre.com) Cover photo: Johanna Weber Translation: Articles by Anatoly Vasiliev, Vasilis Papavasiliou, Despoina Bebedeli, Tasos Dimas, Aglaia Pappa, Panagiotis Velianitis, Maria Maragkou, Eleni Varopoulou, Marika Thomadaki translated from the Greek by Maria Vogiatzi.

English language editor: Penelope Chatzidimitriou Copy Editor: Thomas Irmer Design: Gudrun Hommers Printed in the E.U. ISBN 978-3-95749-400-9 (Paperback) ISBN 978-3-95749-401-6 (ePDF)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

GREETINGS

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Hélène Ahrweiler, President of the Administration Council European Cultural Centre of Delphi, Greece Afroditi Panagiotakou, Director of Culture, Onassis Foundation, Greece Erika Fischer-Lichte, Professor of Theatre Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Etel Adnan, Writer, Painter, Lebanon/ France

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TERZOPOULOS’ POEM

MASTERS – DIRECTORS – ACTORS – ARTISTS

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Anatoly Vasiliev, Director, Russia, The Return Eugenio Barba, Director, Italy/ Denmark, No Beauty without Rules, no New Beauty without Breaking the Rules Vasilis Papavassiliou, Director, Greece, Theodoros, a Legacy with no B ­ orders Blanka Zizka, Director, Artistic director, The Wilma Theater, USA, ­Theodoros Terzopoulos at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia Daniel Wetzel, Director, Rimini Protokoll, Germany, Curious Beasty Theo Boy Jaroslaw Fret, Director of the Grotowski Institute and of Zar Teatr, ­Poland, Wrestling with Memory Despoina Bebedeli, Actress, Cyprus, The Eye of Dionysos Sophia Hill, Actress, Greece, The Body at the Anti-chamber of Death Tasos Dimas, Actor, Greece, The Time of Grief Aglaia Pappa, Actress, Greece, Alarme – Amor: the Evolution of an Actor Working with Theodoros Terzopoulos Niovi Charalambous, Actress, Cyprus – The Liberating Method Panayiotis Velianitis, Composer, Music teacher, Greece, The Memory of Sound

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29 31 36 38 41 44 46 48 52 62

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Dimitris Tiliakos, Baritone, Greece, The Wanderer and his Shadow Kalliope Lemos – Sculptor, Installation artist, UK, A Synthesis of Antitheses Maria Marangou – Art critic, Artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, Greece, When Malevich meets Dionysos Johanna Weber, Photographer, Germany, The Dismemberment of Dionysos

TEACHERS OF THEODOROS TERZOPOULOS’ METHOD “THE RETURN OF DIONYSOS

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Savvas Stroumpos, Actor, Director, main teacher of the method, Greece, Corporal Reflections on the Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos – The Question of the Method.

Paolo Musio, Actor, Italy, Here, elsewhere, on the border: where I am when I am on stage with Attis Kerem Karaboga, ˘ Actor, Professor, Department of Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy, Faculty of Letters, Istanbul University, Turkey, The Acting Method of Terzopoulos as a Means of Confrontation with our Age of “Total Decay” Justin Jain, Acting company member, Wilma Theater, Professor of Acting, University of Arts, Philadelphia, USA, The Universal Body: Exploring the Methodology in the United States Li Yadi, Acting Teacher, Beijing Central Academy of Drama, Director, China, An Extraordinary Journey of Attis Przemyslaw Blaszczak, Actor, Grotowski Institute, Poland, My Experience of the Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos Rustem Begenov, Actor, Director, ORTA Center, Kazakhstan, The Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos: my Experience as an Actor and Assistant ­Director Lin Chien-Lang, Theatre performer, Taiwan National Theatre, Theatre Academy, Taiwan, A Journey to the Unknown: My Reflection on the Return of Dionysos Yiling Tsai, Actress, Taiwan National Theatre, Lecturer, Department of Drama, College of Performing Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts, Taiwan, My Journey to the Unknown

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100 106 110

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119 121

125 131 137 146 151

154 158

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Mikhail Sokolov, Actor, Electrotheatre Stanislavski, Russia, The Experience of the Bacchae Juan Esteban Echeverri Arango, Actor, Colombia, The Vibration, a Journey into a Primitive Memory

THEORETICIANS Savas Patsalidis, Theatre Professor, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Eco-Theatre and Tragic Landscapes Freddy Decreus, Professor Emeritus, University of Ghent, Belgium, A Theatre of Energy, a Theatre of Consciousness Frank Raddatz, Author, Dramaturg, Germany, Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Theatre of Verticality Eleni Varopoulou, Theatre Critic, Author, Translator, Greece, Theatre as a Translation: Heiner Müller and Aeschylus by Theodoros Terzopoulos Konstantinos Arvanitakis, Professor of Psychoanalysis, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Primal Phantasies and the Unrepresentable in the Work of Terzopoulos Gonia Jarema, Professor, University of Montreal, Canada, The Voiceless Voice in the Work of Theodoros Terzopoulos Dimitris Tsatsoulis, Semiotics of Theatre & Theory of Performance/ Professor Emeritus, University of Patras/ Theatre Critic, Greece, Glossolalia: from Artaud’s “langage universel” to Terzopoulos’ “Nuclear Rhythm of the Word” George Sampatakakis, Ass. Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Patras, Greece, Eros and Thanatos: the Aesthetics of Enchantment in the ­Theatre of Terzopoulos Penelope Chatzidimitriou, Dr. in Theatre Studies, Instructor in MA in European Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, (Un)livable, (Un)grievable, (Un)mournable Bodies: Violence, Mourning and Politics in the Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos Marika Thomadaki, Professor of Theory and Semiology of Theatre, University of Athens, Greece, Energetic Theatricality and Creative Forms in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Performances

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198 202 210

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Iliana Dimadi, Dramaturg, Onassis Cultural Center, Greece, Attis ­Theatre and the Need for “another” Critical Language Özlem Hemis, ¸ Assistant Professor, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey, The Idea of the Tragic in Alarme / Amor / Encore Avra Sidiropoulou, Ass. Professor at the M.A. Programme in Theatre Studies, Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus, Towards a Poetics of Communality: Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Staging of Tragedy in the 21st Century Katerina Arvaniti, Ass. Professor, Department of Theatre Studies, ­University of Patras, Greece, Prometheus Bound Directed by Theodoros ­Terzopoulos Dikmen Gürün, Professor of Theatre Studies M.A. Programme, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey, Reception of Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Works in Turkey Kim Jae Kyoung, Ass. Professor, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea, Theatre Olympics and Terzopoulos’ Artistic Vision

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PROGRAMME OF THE TRIBUTE

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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GREETINGS

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HÉLÈNE AHRWEILER President of the Administration Council European Cultural Centre of Delphi

An inner and long-lasting relationship links the European Cultural Centre of ­Delphi with the work of Theodoros Terzopoulos. For a long time, the questions and concerns of this great director and outstanding man of the theatre were also the concern and anxieties of the Centre.

Delphi has always been a perfect setting for the presentation of all the remarkable performances of Theodoros Terzopoulos either as research experiments or as ­proposed solutions. Their acceptance by the audience, as well as by experts and critics, has always been encouraging and often very enthusiastic.

I would also like to note that Theodoros Terzopoulos was, for many years, the ­artistic director of the emblematic meetings of Ancient Drama organised by the European Cultural Centre of Delphi.

This year’s tribute is organised as a small token of this longstanding friendship between Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Centre of Delphi. “The Return of ­Dionysos” is the main event of the Centre’s artistic programme for this year. ­Participants are distinguished foreign and Greek academics, researchers and ­artists whom I wish to warmly thank for their contribution.

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The tribute includes an international symposium, a demonstration of the method of Theodoros Terzopoulos, a photographic and a sound installation. The crowning event is the performance The Trojan Women by Euripides, directed by ­Terzopoulos, at the Ancient Theatre of Delphi.

The “Return of Dionysos” is made possible thanks to the Onassis Foundation’s generous contribution. The cooperation of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Phokis has been invaluable. Let me also remind you that 2018 has been declared “Year of the European Cultural Heritage” and Delphi shares these celebrations.

The tribute to Theodoros Terzopoulos is organised, despite the very limited ­financial resources of the Centre of Delphi, thanks to the dedication and the high professional quality of the few associates of the Centre. I wish to thank and ­congratulate them as President of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi.

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AFRODITI PANAGIOTAKOU Director of Culture, Onassis Foundation, GREECE

The body is a very dangerous thing. Myths are, too. And Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre is a theatre wrought from myths and bodies; a theatre beautiful for reasons that transcend aesthetic categories. “Beauty lies in change. That’s the intoxication of things. I always seek a clash, a rupture. I’m not interested in things resting peacefully in their beauty”, he says.

At the Onassis Foundation, we often say we have no interest in beauty per se. Meaning that showing beautiful things to the world just isn’t enough. Because we are not striving simply to produce culture; we want to change culture. Change means ­conflict. Pressing on ahead without a safety net is liberating; it can also be self-­ destructive – unless the freedom comes with knowledge, specifically well-founded knowledge.

A forward-thinking man, never afraid of conflict, Theodoros Terzopoulos is more than the internationally celebrated director with 2,100 performances to his credit.

He laid the foundations of an actor training method that places its trust in the body, in myth and ritual, in Dionysos. For the god of theatre, of life and death, eternal transformation and conflict, always returns to the Attis theatre.

Given his oeuvre and his career, you could almost say that the Onassis Foundation’s entire cultural mission over the last four decades is encapsulated in Theodoros Terzopoulos: presenting Greece at its best, here and everywhere, with humankind and society at its core and art as an engine of change. That’s what Theodoros Terzopoulos does. His work comprises a theatre education in its own right; his method is an act of liberation; his axis, around which the works revolve, is people – always­ people.

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And we are at his side. As a gesture, our support for this Tribute to Theodoros ­Terzopoulos at Delphi is especially symbolic. The first step in a long-term relationship. Because we too have learned a great deal from Theodoros Terzopoulos. Have learned too from what he is doing here: connecting people with one another, connecting generations, making clear to us all that the very future’s future is in fact the present moment. Our job then is just to talk with one other, to follow his guidelines, all of which are rooted in learning how to listen, how to give our full attention.

I consider myself lucky because I have already seen Terzopoulos’ future, my children have seen Terzopoulos’ performances, and that means something for the generations to come. And some of us may sometime meet again and say: “We first met at Delphi, oh yes, with Terzopoulos, oh yes…”

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PROF. ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE Professor of Theatre Studies at Freie Universitat, Berlin, GERMANY Director of the International Research Centre for Advanced Studies on ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’, GERMANY

Dear Theo, I am so deeply sorry that I cannot participate in this wonderful event, held in your honor. As you know quite well, I owe some of my deepest and most important ­experiences in theatre to your productions. The first was the Bacchae and the last, as we both remember, Prometheus in Wroclaw.

The title of this conference is The Return of Dionysos and this is not by chance. As we both know, as a child, Dionysos was dismembered by the Titans and then Zeus put together the fragments of the dismembered body. This is so meaningful for your theatre. In its center is the human body. Since Helmuth Plessner, we are all very much aware of the fact that we are a body, that we are body subjects. On the other hand, we have a body, a body that we can instrumentalize and put to very different kinds of use. The body-subject and the body-object are very closely related to each other. Everyone grows up in a particular culture and gains quite a number of ­different body techniques. Body techniques that are linked to this very particular culture and determined by it. For the actors, moreover, techniques are shaped by the special kind of training. So, what you want the actors to do is to unlearn the specific body techniques they have acquired so far. We can say that you ask them to dismember their body and then to put together the fragments piece by piece in a new way, creating a completely new body-object. But since the body is nothing without the body-subject and because they influence and are related to each other, this way also, another body-subject comes into being. This is in fact, the journey which Dionysos made in a certain respect.

This is not only a method that shapes a new body, body-subject and body-object, but is also one which forms the basis for the co-operation of actors hailing from very different cultures. Because all of them have to do the same. But what comes out of that, the result, is by no means a homogeneous body. They do not do the same, ­although they have undone the formal body-object in a very similar way and a­ cquired

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a new one, as well as a new body-subject. This is one of the great aspects of your work with actors: that actors hailing from such different cultures and performance cultures are able to collaborate with each other in such a fruitful and promising way.

This is also the basis for another thing, which is particularly important to me. That this is a new approach to Greek tragedy. As we all know, since the late nineteenth century, people in Greece, in Germany and in Europe in general, were more or less convinced that Greek tragedy is “universal” and therefore transmits universal meanings and values. This is, of course, of great doubt to us. What happens now is that your method, when you apply it to Greek tragedy, “universalizes” Greek tragedy in a way that is completely new. Because it is based in the human body and springs from the human body. The link between the body and the word, the logos, is a completely new one. The logos is not something inscribed into the body, but which comes out of the body, grows from the body, emerges from it and then through the breath, which is also a part of the body, is conveyed to the world and onto the spectators. One might call this a universal proceeding, but it has nothing to do with the universalism, cherished so much since the eighteenth century.

Theo, I want to thank you very much for the experience you allowed for with your productions, for the new insights you enabled me to make into theatre as well as into Greek tragedy. I hope very much that you will continue to create new works in this way, but of course in very different manners, as you used to do and that I shall also have the opportunity in the future to witness them. So, once more, congratulations on this great event, which you more than deserve and best wishes for your ­future projects.

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ETEL ADNAN Writer, Painter, LEBANON

I’m deeply sorry that I cannot attend the tribute to Theodoros; a tribute he mostly deserves. I love his job because he looks to the East. It is authentic and, while it is modern, it is deeply rooted in the tradition. It unites the old with the new, creating an authentic form. When you listen to Theodoros singing oriental melodies, you realize his relationship with the tradition. You feel that in his work nothing ends, it goes on forever, because his work focuses on the nucleus of the body.

I do not visit Greece often, but Theodoros is always in my mind, I love him very much, because he is authentic and his work is collective and profound. I love him, as if we have known each other for a long time. When we meet, I speak Greek better. His voice reminds me of my father’s voice and I am moved.

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THEODOROS TERZOPOULOS’ POEM

You now arrive, and I am eager to participate in your beautiful celebration.

You now arrive to remind me that the Word is the Earth and that Knowledge is Conscience that Passion is its Removal and Harmony is its Contradiction.

You now arrive at the homeland and I linger around you eager to participate in your beautiful celebration.

Crash the Mirror, you say, And the fragments will give birth to a new image.

Looking in your eyes hallucinations possess me the journey of Transgression begins.

You arrive now when I am ready To offer my Body to the sanctum of the Uncanny!

An evening in Delphi When the mountains are bleeding.

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Photo page 19

Theodoros Terzopoulos, Erdogan Kavaz at the Ancient Theatre of Delphi, The Trojan Women rehearsal (photo Johanna Weber)

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MASTERS DIRECTORS ACTORS ARTISTS

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The Return ANATOLY VASILIEV Director, RUSSIA

I will speak about Terzopoulos and my generation – since we are almost the same age. I first came to Delphi in 1995, invited by him. Our acquaintance and relationship have been decisive for my relation with Greece. For twenty-three years now – from 1995 until now – I have been feeling connected with Greece.

I saw his performances in Delphi in 1995 and it was a formidable experience. The most striking memory I have was walking through the night, climbing a mountain and then suddenly beholding the amazing view of the ancient theatre of Delphi and seeing the performance. It was a remarkable performance, with a new, utterly different ­expressive language. I had never seen such a performance. For the first time I felt that I had been transferred to an ancient world and that experience was stunning. I was thinking that if this world always existed, if our European civilization maintained fragments of this ancient civilization, then we would be able to talk about a great culture.

Instead, now we only have the European culture and I, as a Russian, am a part of that culture. We have not maintained the tradition of the ancient Greek theatre, unlike the Japanese or the Chinese who have preserved theirs despite the revolutions. And then, along with my enthusiasm, I felt sad because I realized that it required a human feat, the feat of a director and a small troupe of actors, to represent it and say: “This exists.

Embrace it. Embrace us.” And the most important: “Preserve it.”

Then, I visited Delphi many times and there it was decided that Moscow would host the 3rd Theatre Olympics. Once again, I owe this to Theodoros. To be precise, I owe a lot to Theodoros. On the occasion of the Theatre Olympics, we had proposed an adventurous idea to the Moscow government: to build a new theatre building, based on my theatre concept and the designs of a fellow architect, scenographer and artist, who also knew Delphi very well. But to make this happen we needed money and the support of the Moscow government; and we only had two years until the Theatre Olympics. So we needed an eminent and prestigious person to support this endeavor and this person was Theodoros. We all sat around a big conference

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table along with the Moscow government, and then Theodoros stood up and said that he, as a Greek director and the Chairman of the International Committee of Theatre Olympics, was convinced that the government should build a theatre for Vasiliev. And Theodoros’ word had a great impact in Moscow.

Here I would like to make a parenthesis to say that I speak about Theodoros not only on my behalf but also representing Yuri Lyubimov, who had visited Delphi several times and was a friend of Theodoros and Alla Demidova, who has played in many of his performances and sends her greetings to Theodoros, this great man.

Well, the theatre was built and its architecture was based on the ancient Greek principles. There was not a single Italian stage in the theatre. I remained in this theatre for only a few years, namely from 2001 to 2006. The Moscow government gently asked me - actually, not only gently but ordered me - to leave the theatre and the city. I was not angry, I do not hold any grudge against the government, but I said farewell to Moscow forever.

If you ask why this happened, it happened because of my devotion to the ancient theatre. I started working on the ancient theatre, the internal drama, metaphysics, the ancient dramaturgy. My last premiere in Delphi was Homer’s Iliad. I also presented here Heiner Müller’s Medea Material.

It was then that the Moscow government claimed that this approach was not new; this was not theatre for the people. And yet, this is the most powerful idea. This is what Theodoros, Grotowski, Barba and I have been working on. So, is this theatre for the people or not? How could I explain to the government that this is real, authentic theatre for the people? Everything else is bourgeois theatre. What do we mean when we say “people” and “bourgeoisie”? These two concepts are not identical.

Time passed by and Theodoros came once again to Moscow, this time invited by the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky. Here, I would like to make one more parenthesis to say that I started my career at the Moscow Art Theatre and continued at the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky. The artistic director of Electrotheatre, Boris Yukhananov, is a former student of mine. He invited Theodoros to direct for this stage, where I had also directed in 1977 and 1981. So, I went to the theatre to see the Bacchae directed by Theodoros with Russian actors. And I was happy to see the return of Dionysos.

Before closing my short speech, I would like to thank Theodoros Terzopoulos not only because he is an exceptional director – which is the topic of our meeting today – but also because he is a great person.

Thank you very much.

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No Beauty without Rules, no New Beauty without Breaking the Rules EUGENIO BARBA Director, Italy / Denmark

On my way to this conference, I met a flock of birds who asked me: “Are you going to Delphi, the city of oracles? Be careful, do not listen to them, because they don’t bring luck. And, please, deliver this message to Theodoros Terzopoulos”.

(Julia Varley delivers the message singing bird sounds) I will translate their message.

There is one aspect in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ work which is peculiar. It has nothing to do with the professional, but it is fundamental in shaping cultural ­surroundings. I am talking about his need to create shelters. He creates and ­organizes these shelters within institutional frames and names them with fine-sounding titles, like the International Meetings of Ancient Theatre in ­Delphi, or the International Institute of Mediterranean Theatre, or the Theatre Olympics, or the International Meeting of Ancient Theatre in Sikyon. But what does he really do? He stresses out a very essential dimension in our profession, which is the process.

When we speak about theatre, we always refer to the audience, the spectators, the external, the visible part of our profession - the results. However, the most difficult, the hardest part for the most of us, is the process: how to be able to transform an idea, a heritage, a legacy, a text – symbols written on the paper - into something which becomes perceptible signs – intonations, silences, gestures, ­immobility – provoking a personal reaction in the spectators’ memory, senses and neural system. So these meetings about the actor’s individual creative ­process, for which Terzopoulos has his own vocation to organize them, are ­extraordinary events in contemporary theatre. He is an exception and I want to thank him for this.

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Terzopoulos belongs to the kind of people in our profession, who ask themselves “what is theatre?” I don’t know what his definition is, but I believe a p­ ossible answer could be: “theatre is the men and women who do it”. What does it mean ­practically? It means to work individually with every single actor and find a way to make them a source of attraction/reflection for each single spectator. When we think of the origins of the systematic work with the actor, when we look back at the beginning of the last century and refer to the leading theatre reformers, we discover two ways which were developed, in order to stimulate the personal resources of the actor, transform them into creators of a new sensorial dramaturgy and ­establish a new relationship with the spectators.

Roughly speaking, either you could go East or West. You could get inspiration from Asian theatres, anthropological ceremonies or religious rituals. ­Or you could begin with an intellectual analysis of the European tradition for the actor’s technique. The actor starts building the character out of given circumstances, with the support of psychology, the new science that was developed at the beginning of the last century. This new method was partially shaped by Stanislavsky. This new method was partially shaped by Stanislavsky, who was also aware of Meyerhold’s biomechanics, a method of engaging the intelligence of the whole body, starting from the organism and the unexplored possibilities of anatomy. When I speak of anatomy, I mean body-mind, because it is impossible to separate these two. We are impregnated by the autonomous and multiple activities of our brain. And we should not forget its archaic aspect, the reptilian brain, which separates us from the animals only by two percent.

I will speak about the demonstration I saw yesterday. Terzopoulos was able to discover the hidden resources of the actors, and for one hour and forty-five ­minutes we witnessed them drawing their personal expressive bow to the ­maximum, but in a very controlled way, just like a surgeon or an alpinist who carefully takes one step after the other. It was interesting listening to Terzopoulos’ actors speaking about their experience with him: how they were able to discover their source of energy, this flow of forces that they ignored and how they became capable of shaping them.

The Italian actor Paolo Musio asked “Where am I when I am here on the stage?” He was right, because the actors indeed are here on the stage and at the same time, they are somewhere else. Stefan Zweig gave the answer to the question where the actors are when they are playing, or where the authors are when they are

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writing or where the painter is when he puts one brush stroke after the other on the canvas. And Zweig also explained the reason why they are unable to speak about their creation on progress. Stefan Zweig says: “Because the actor is somewhere else”. The actor is literally in ecstasy and, let’s remember, ecstasy doesn’t mean to be lost somewhere, ecstasy means to be outside of your usual awareness, your daily familiar way of behaving. So, you are somewhere else, which means “there” in your own creative process, but also here, present on the stage in front of the spectators.

Another aspect of the actors’ demonstration indicates how Terzopoulos carried on the tradition of the beginning of the 1960s.The need and longing to reach the primary source was evident when starting a creative process. Sometimes this stimulus may seem simple, almost boring, sometimes it is a sudden illumination.

But its energy becomes the umbilical cord which nourishes the actor’s relationship with the spectator.

The Colombian actor Juan Esteban Echeverry Arango described how, while working with Terzopoulos, he had gone back in time, discovering the archaic, the ancient, the animal side, which is fundamental in our profession.

Why are we attracted to dance? Why do we go to the opera, even though we don’t understand German, if it is Wagner, or Italian, if it is Verdi? Because dance and songs impact the non-conceptual parts of our brain and nervous system, they­ address to our animal legacy and heritage, to the intelligence of our total anatomy.

And this is what today, in part, theatre has lost. Our contemporary “classic” is ­Samuel Beckett, an extraordinary writer who buries the actor and leaves only the head and mouth to speak. Undoubtedly, he is interesting. But when I am here, in Delphi, in the omphalos, in the centre of the cosmos, in this place where the a­ ncient gods were speaking through the actors, then I feel how limited our craft has become.

Our possibilities and our future lies within us, in our animal (dionysian) identity longing to find ways of communicating with the animal dimension of the spectators.

Greek culture managed to be rooted in this and was able to represent it in a unity of the two beings we are - half animal and half human. Some of them were intelligent, like the centaur Chiron, half horse and half man, the teacher of­ Achilles. Think of the Sirens, think of the Sphynx, think of the pure and innocent Minotaurus, jailed in the labyrinth.

In the name of my profession and my theatre colleagues I want to thank ­Terzopoulos because he is creating shelters, where we can meet, discuss and

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glimpse the hidden, secret part of our craft. I want to thank him for his artistic achievements, his strive for excellence, his enduring engagement. There is no ­living technique without responsibility, self-respect and discipline, and all these values we witnessed yesterday at the demonstration.

Therefore, I want Julia to end with a paean, a song to Theodoros, the mentor.

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Theodoros – a Legacy with no Borders VASSILIS PAPAVASSILIOU Actor, Director, GREECE

I will speak as Kostikas about my friend Giorikas1. Theodoros is one hundred ­percent Pontic Greek while I am only fifty percent. So, “honor among Pontic Greeks”, as they say.

Theodoros is a second-generation refugee. He is Pontic but he is also Greek, so we could say that he is “hyper-pontios”2. He exists beyond and above the sea, ­literally speaking. He soars in the sky, he moves flying. In my opinion, the most distinctive characteristic of Theodoros Terzopoulos is the fact that he perfectly ­incarnates the Hellenic identity. As far as I am concerned, the only worthwhile ­definition of “Hellenic” is: “I am Greek, so nothing non-Greek is foreign to me”.

Terzopoulos embodies this characteristic: he is Greek, so nothing non-Greek is ­foreign to him. Theodoros Terzopoulos trespasses the borders; he needs the ­borders in order to transcend them, not to be imprisoned by them and passively ­reproduce them.

This is also true of his artistic identity. The aesthetic equivalent of internalization is the transcendence and elimination of the distinctions between arts. And what better describes the work of Terzopoulos, which he systematically pursues in the last years, is a confession of faith to this emblematic principle of the reality of internalization. In my opinion, this iconic image is actualized in the installations. I have told Theodoros that I wish I wrote and spoke better to dedicate to him a proper piece about his latest works: “The talking installations of Theodoros Terzopoulos”. I am talking about the latest works of Theodoros at the Attis Theatre3. I believe that they perfectly reflect this dialogue, which takes the important form of existential identification, with that which is not typically theatrical – at least in the dramatic meaning of the word – but moves beyond, towards something else, which still seeks its name – if the name has any significance. This attitude, the theatre beyond­

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drama, the theatre that recognizes the primacy of Dionysos – the Dionysos to whom Theodoros appeals is a confession of faith to a power that has nothing to do with the conventions and assumptions of the bourgeois drama – and this becomes clearer and more distinct as years go by.

Theodoros left Greece early: He opened the door and left. This is the reason he can exist. He knows well that modern Greece speaks with two voices. The first voice tells what is obvious: “Look how great I am! Stay here, live and enjoy!” This is the voice of the Siren. And the second one is the voice of Kassandra, who says: “Get up and get out of here! Pick up your things and leave!” Theodoros Terzopoulos knew that he had to “pick up his things” and leave in order to exist and of course experience at first hand the glory and recognition that historically follows the identity of the “re-imported Greek” in modern Greece. There is always a doubt about the accuracy of the criteria. For example, the residents of Thessaloniki doubt that they create something of importance unless they get the confirmation from Athens.

The same applies to Athens on an international scale. They doubt that they create something of importance unless it is internationally acclaimed. Theodoros had this good fortune for which he has worked hard and, above all, believed in from the day he was born as a necessary condition of his life. And that is why today we can honor and thank him.

Thank you very much.

1

Giorikas and Kostikas are two popular names among Pontic Greeks and also popular figures of Pontic jokes. Pontic Greeks are identified as those who originally come from the Euxinos Pontos at the Black sea.

2

The word “hyper-pontios” in Greek means overseas. It is a composite word, formed by the words hyper and “pontos” which in ancient Greek means sea. The author creates a pun with reference both to Terzopoulos’ identity as a traveler (who crosses the seas) but also to his Pontic origin.

3

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The author refers to the performances Alarme (2010), Amor (2013), and Encore (2016).

Theodoros Terzopoulos at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia BLANKA ZIZKA Artistic Director, The Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, USA

I first met Mr. Terzopoulos over the internet. Given our mutual reverence for the live experience, it is a rather ironic meet cute. I was working on the Polish play Our Class, by Tadueusz Slobodzianek, about the city of Jedwabne where in 1941 Polish Catholics, emboldened by the German racial politics, killed all the Jews. After the war, the Polish Communist government lied about it and the city even put up a small memorial suggesting that it was the Germans who killed the local Jews. The play looked at school children (hence the name Our Class), who were spending time together as kids, and later became each other’s executioners.

The play was intense, and difficult. The actors were on stage all the time and played their characters from six years old until their deaths. The play spanned over a long time period: 1925 – 2003. The actors portrayed characters who were either victims having to face death or survivors in hiding, scared and damaged for life; or the perpetrators who lied about these events for the rest of their lives.

I live in Philadelphia, the U.S., and my cast, comprised of white American ­actors, (and I purposely emphasize the word white because in the US white people and people of color have lived different histories) hadn’t experienced in their lives this kind of brutal disruption, and yet they had to create a theatrical reality on the stage that would be persuasive and evoke the complex realities and the tragedy of that historical moment in Jedwabne.

During one of the run-throughs of the piece, I just felt that actors were not with each other, not together. There was no energy and cohesiveness in the company.

I was very much impressed with and influenced by the work of Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor when I lived in Czechoslovakia, and so I started Googling some

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of the workshops that were still happening in the Grotowski Institute. This is how I stumbled upon the workshop led by Theodoros and Savvas in Warsaw at TR Warszawa with Polish actors. He was talking to his actors about energy, focus, ­presence, the collective: all the elements I thought the performance of Our Class that night was lacking. I brought the video to the rehearsal and we watched it with my ­actors and discussed how these principles connected to our work. The performance was very different that night. The choreography hadn’t changed, but the performance went much deeper; actors were present and alert, listening to each o­ ther and creating the piece in the moment in front of the a­ udience. I had in the meantime looked at all the video excerpts I could find of Attis performances and was hugely impressed by the actors’ physical, muscular presence. I don’t think I had seen anything like this since my time in Poland with the Grotowski theater.

Next, I flew to Athens to see the work and watch rehearsals. I caught a performance of Jocasta, watched many DVD’s of previous productions and even some of the early experimentations with endurance that had taken place in the early age of Attis before the current methodology was developed. I was impressed by the ­­largeness and fullness of actors’ gestures, and by the unusual mixture of formality and vibrancy in actors’ performances. During the rehearsals session I was for the first time introduced to the idea of an infinite improvisation. After this experience, I decided to bring Mr. Terzopoulos to Philadelphia, we presented his Ajax, the Madness at the International Festival in Philadelphia. While in a performance, Mr. Terzopoulos offered his first workshop in Philadelphia to a group of approximately twenty actors. After the workshop we decided to go further and bring some of these actors back for another workshop. Finally we chose eight actors to perform in Mr. Terzopoulos’ Antigone, where the Philadelphia group of actors had a chance to perform alongside Attis actors. This group of actors has become the core ­company of The Wilma HotHouse that was established the same year as we ­produced Antigone in Philadelphia. We had an eight week rehearsal schedule for Antigone, the longest any of these actors had ever experienced, but it still was not an easy process, since the Philadelphia actors were both at the same time students of the method and creators of the performance and they performed together with Attis actors who had worked with Mr. Terzopoulos for many years. It had brought some anxiety into the rehearsal room. And I can say that some of Philadelphia actors ­really struggled with Terzopoulos’ principles. It was difficult for them to surrender their ego and sense of originality to the methodology and the work of the collective.

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I realized this was not just a physical difficulty, but a psychological one. In America, the rugged individual reigns. The idea that everyone must make a life for him or herself, relying only on him or herself, is embedded into every aspect of the­ American theater industry.

When I arrived in the United States, actors were all trained in methodologies derived from Stanislavsky: most notably, the Strasberg method and the Meisner technique. In these techniques, actors draw from life experiences to relate to the experiences of their characters, recalling sensations from moments in their past that made a significant emotional impact on the actor. Meisner spoke of finding one’s authentic self, saying, “To be an interesting actor – hell, to be an interesting­­ human being – you must be authentic and for you to be authentic you must embrace who you really are, warts and all.” This focus on the authentic self is telling, and again, very American. The pressure to rely solely on oneself is reinforced by the American theater industry, which is structured in such a way that actors must fit within a set of types in order to obtain a few short months of work at a regional theater or Off-Broadway house. Everyone is asking for a job: the need to please, to satisfy, to be the best, censors you as an artist. This way of working breeds i­ nsecurity.

Perhaps because of this rampant insecurity, and because of lack of time in the rehearsal room, American theater processes are very safe. Actors begin sitting around a table, talking about a play and making decisions in their heads about why their characters do what they do. It is very academic, and it narrows the possibilities of the life of the character. When I was working with actors through this system and I wanted to go deeper, I was often met with resistance. Getting past actors’ ego-­ driven fears and ingrained habits took so much time.

When we began working with Mr. Terzopoulos’ methods, a miraculous thing happened: we began to break through these fears, towards something else. Terzopoulos focuses on the collective, on a group of people, breathing deeply together and moving, especially in case of the chorus in total unity like one living organism, and building a presence together. Actors are asked to take the focus off of the self and onto something else, something bigger, perhaps Dionysos. Their performance is meant for Dionysos, not for the audience. That idea is difficult for American ­actors to wrap their brains around, since for them the tendency will always be to please the audience. American theater has started not as a ritual, or a civic action, but as entertainment, and so even now much of American theater tends to please and distract rather than challenge and confront.

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The Wilma is not imitating the work of Attis. But inspired by Mr. Terzopoulos’ philosophy, the company members are creating the culture of a collective. They ­focus on the other, take support from the other, and the training helps them to ­release energies and create their palpable physical and vocal presence on stage. ­Another key is the concept that everything lives in the body: thoughts, sounds, memories, emotions. Actors do not need to use their brains to remember a past ­experience in order to find the truth of the moment, but rather, through rigorous training, are able to trust the information that is already in their bodies: learn to listen to and act on that information.

All of this has been a journey for our company. Our actors had to (and still have to!) fight their demons in order to be able to embrace the work. It is different from much of what they have learned as actors and people. And yet when they open up to it, they find that it makes a great deal of sense on a much deeper level. In the book The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk discusses how evolutionarily, we are meant to live with and for others. We are meant to be a part of small communities, and we are meant to surrender our egos to the members of those communities.

As we continue to go down this road, we are discovering that it is feeding us in ways we did not expect.

This is his quote: “Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms. Our brains are built to help us to function as a member of a tribe. We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves.

Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.”

The Wilma HotHouse Company is going on its own aesthetic and artistic ­journey. Our work does not look like Terzopoulos’ stunning theatrical events. But the principles behind the work are profoundly linked to the fundamental principles at the core of Terzopoulos’ methodologies. The Wilma Theater is transforming, through the HotHouse Company. Our actors are transforming, from individuals who perform to please the people in power to members of a collective, relying on themselves and one another along the information already in their bodies, to­ become the authors of their own performance.

Mr. Terzopoulos works with the central image of Dionysos, who when he sees his image in the mirror, picks up a stone and shatters the mirror. Out of the ­smithereens, he then re-assembles a new image of himself. This symbol is inspiring not only for actors but also for institutions that too have a tendency to calcify by

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falling into their own routines. There is something revolutionary in this idea of smashing models, which is something that the Wilma Theater is in a process of doing right now.

I am deeply grateful to Mr. Terzopoulos for sharing his work with me and my company and hopeful about where it will lead us.

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Curious Beasty Theo Boy DANIEL WETZEL Director, Rimini Protokoll, GERMANY

Why am I here? I haven’t worked with Theo. I saw three of his productions in r­ ecent years. I don’t know why he has invited me here. I think that the key word is curiosity. More specifically, curiosity about other ends. Whatever I have done with my fellows in Rimini Protokoll has really nothing to do in essence with what Terzopoulos works on. I think that what we have in common is that twenty years ago we used to say that we want to redefine theatre, find another operation system for theatre, meaning that the standard procedures of representation that you see in drama – including the way that tragedy is often performed – do not teach and offer us anything. We want to use the stage as a platform for other, perhaps renewed ways of theatre.

Theo has worked on the body and all those things he has described; he very much works based on breathing, on soma, an aspect which I think we totally ignore; instead, we rather research. He aims to authenticity. I think that the people we put on stage shake, they don’t quite know if they can make it, they just say what they have to say, because they have never had an acting training; so, it’s a kind of authenticity that is based on research; it is perhaps superficial and deals with the superficiality of representation rather than with everyday life.

So, we meet and speak every six months – sometimes there is a longer gap.

Sometimes Theo says to me “I am bored, Daniel, I am fed up with theater, I can’t stand it¨. That is what he says, and it also means that “I am bored with all this work”.

And this is not like he is falling back but it is curiosity again. It’s the curiosity, I think, that brings us together from time to time.

Something that we should also celebrate and really adore in Terzopoulos’ work and personality is that he is very open. I said to him once that when I have to explain who Terzopoulos is, I say that he is a sort of modern Grotowski in a way – when I speak among theatre people – or I say that his theatre is like a version of the Beasty Boys – if they were to become a performance. I said that lately to him and he replied:

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“Oh, Beasty Boys, that’s true, because I met them in L.A.; they came to my party after we had a show”.

So, these are the aspects of Terzopoulos that I would like to point out. Curiosity, openness for the other ends, and being a Beastie Boy.

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Wrestling with Memory JAROSLAW FRET Director of the Grotowski Institute and of Teatr ZAR, POLAND

I will speak about myself, my work and the points we share, as I understand them now, with Terzopoulos’ work. I have tried to organize my speech upon a few important Greek key words. At the beginning, let me bring out some thoughts: “We enter the world to pass through it. We are tested by the world and the world is a place of truth – in any case the world should be a place of truth”. I took this quote from Jerzy Grotowski’s speech The World as a Place of Truth. This ­sentence addressed us, Theodoros Terzopoulos and me, when I was honored to become a member of the International Committee of Theatre Olympics and ­proposed to realize in Wroclaw in 2016 the 7th edition of Theatre Olympics, exactly with this title: The World as a Place of Truth.

The world is a place that tests us, the world is a test. I believe that the very world I really want and I really aim is my body. The body is the first and probably the only test we are passing through. Within those years, that we know each other, I started to substitute the English word truth with the Greek word alitheia. As you know Lethe was one of the rivers in Hades: a river of forgetfulness, of cleansing; the soul had to get through it to forget. A-litheia is what the soul resists to forget, because it is impossible to clean up all that is left behind. This is the deep meaning of the word truth: something that is left to be remembered by us, in our inner spiritual dimension, even post-mortal. I have spoken about this word to explain why I am obsessed with this aspect of truth and alitheia. Teatr-ZAR is the name of the group I have been working with for fifteen years. It is a name taken from the high Caucasus polyphonic songs from Svaneti. The real meaning of Zar is bells. Zar is a funeral song that they used to sing 2.000 years ago in readily arranged lyrics as a pure sound composition of ­vowels, as a form of male lamentation, unchanged over the course of 2.000 years and, of course, changing as people are changing. So, carrying on this tradition of singing, is like creating a column of breath, a ladder, which connects us with our ancestors.

We took it as a material, formula and metaphor of the theatre we want to do.

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So, the second term I want to discuss refers to what life starts with: in English it is breath, in Greek is anapnoi and suggests this beautiful connection between the body and the air, the spirit. In the fifth chapter of Chandogya Upanishad there is a story about the senses. The senses argued which is the most important among them.

And which were whose senses? The seeing of course, the listening, the speech, the mind – understood as a sense - and the breath – understood as a sense. Chandogya argues that the breath was the most important sense, because we live through it, we are testing through it. Today I titled my speech Wrestling with Memory. I would like to add among those senses one more sense: memory. Memory is the greatest factor, the widest and the highest horizon we work with.

After several years of working with the polyphony from Georgia, Corsica, Sardegna, Bulgaria, we were led to a monodic path, to Armenian modal singing from Anatolia. Five years ago, we created Armina Sister, a very big production, the first of a new triptych. So, we studied and reconstructed Anatolian modal singing and together with other singers, invited from Iran, Teheran, Istanbul to join the project, we composed the performance Armina Sister. Soon after, thanks to my ­connection with Theodoros Terzopoulos, we understood that the title will be again Greek: Anamnesis. A forgotten or rarely used word, as I understand, but very ­fundamentally connected to memory. Memory is something active, actually I ­believe it is an action in us, an inner action. Let me read the English definitions of the word anamnesis: a) the recollection or remembrance of the past, reminiscence. b) in Platonism, it is the recollection of the ideas which the soul had known in a previous existence, especially by means of reasoning. c) in medicine it is the history of a patient. d) in immunology, it is a prompt, immune response to a previous ­antigen. And the last explication: e) a prayer in the Eucharistic service recording the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ. Anamnesis is the title of our actual work, which includes Medeae and the last piece, which we will present maybe in two years, Moya. Anamnesis is the title of a triptych as well as of a horizon in our work.

I believe that singing intertwines memory and breath, because the very structure we live in, we work with, especially we sing in is the structure of breathing, the pneumatic structure; and the pneumatic center is the most important center both for our life and our acting on stage.

I dedicated Medeae to Theodoros Terzopoulos. I was given the text written by Dimitris Dimitriades for us. The title of the text is I, Anthropos, so this is another focal point and another connection in Greek with Greek people. Of course, I have

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no intention to jump into the domain, which is represented by Theodoros ­Terzopoulos. I will be devoted to our work and I will try to see other places, other corners, other common horizons. I believe that this anamnesis question in our art is a fundamental issue and I wish to develop it for the next, I hope, mutual project in 2021, when Wroclaw will be UNESCO Capital of Performing Arts. I wish that ­together with Theodoros Terzopoulos we will prepare something of which maybe the working title will be Anamnesis in Art.

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The Eye of Dionysos DESPOINA BEBEDELI Actress, CYPRUS

The first time I visited the Attis Theatre, I felt like I stepped across the threshold of a monastery, austere and unpretentious, with the smell of the well-preserved wood diffused in the space.

Wooden benches, seats, tables ... books on the shelves ... low ... discreet­ lighting and ... silence ... peacefulness … interrupted occasionally by the noise of the small street outside.

I started staring at the framed photographs hanging on the walls ... and the peacefulness imposed by the space turned into a commotion as if that mysterious silence was interrupted by the “silent cries” of the figures in the photos ... the d­ eafening explosions of their bodies. Figures with extreme expressions on their f­ aces and postures of pain, suffering, torture, fear, terror, ecstasy, threat, anger, ­despair, mockery, sarcasm, madness, rage, delusion; expressions reflecting a ­dismembered, fragmented mind. The bodies seemed to be at the center of a v­ olcanic eruption caused by their own tremendous energy.

A few days later, when I went to the Attis Theatre for the beginning of the ­rehearsals for the Trojan Women, I was overwhelmed by unspeakable fear.

I already knew that together with a group of young actors we would start ­rehearsals with a warm-up training involving body, voice and breathing exercises.

When the training was over, I was relieved to find out that the young actors were as exhausted as I was.

A few minutes later Mr. Terzopoulos came in. He jumped onto the stage, with a teenager’s agility.

Charming, enigmatic, with a subtle smile and an inscrutable gaze.

We sat in front of him in a semicircle and he began to explain his method. Then, he proceeded to the analysis of the Trojan Women and his approach to tragedy. I was stunned. Until that time, I had heard extremely interesting reflections on and ­readings of tragedy by the directors I had worked with. But that morning everything I heard was a revelation to me.

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He was speaking softly, almost whispering, completely concentrated and while he was speaking, he was looking at each of us with a penetrating, inquiring, electric gaze.

I left the theater seven hours later, sweaty, physically exhausted but in a state of incredible mental excitement. I had no doubt that I would experience something important and unprecedented next to this director at the Attis Theatre.

The first ten days were an ordeal. Five-hour rehearsals with only “three minutes pause” in between, just to drink some water and recover our breath. Afterwards, an interval to eat yogurt and bananas to avoid cramps and then a two-hour rehearsal in the afternoon.

I had memorized a new vocabulary, a previously unfamiliar terminology of the director’s instructions which I had to comprehend, consolidate and integrate into my performance. I felt like I had a pile of black cards in front of me that I should assemble into a dark puzzle: the mourning (of Hecuba) should be deconstructed, oblique, not vertical, un-mourning, energetic, resorting back to the ontological root: Seismic voice – deconstructed memory, embodied speech, aggressive, straightforward. Find the nuclear rhythm of the word and this will lead you.

It is the diaphragm that articulates the speech, not the jaw.

The body gives birth to the speech.

The body releases energy.

The body is a natural machine that produces energy.

It is the body that generates the emotion, not the affect.

Hecuba: memory and oblivion mental clarity and dementia androgenic energy and catatonia Maniac, straightforward, effective speech. ∞ – sarcasm – ambivalence – delusion – Mysticism – transcendence – klausígelos moving schizophrenia.

Hyper-pyramidal movement - parapraxis, twisted arguments.

The logic of schizophrenia.

His own body turned these instructions into flesh, voice, movement as he was showing me the role. I could see all that I had read in his book The Return of­ Dionysos and all that I knew about god Dionysos come to life in his body: the son of a mortal woman and Zeus, who gave birth to him by pulling him out of the sinful, the immoral part of the body – as he calls it, out of the dark triangle, where the ­hidden energy resides and releases the instincts.

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Before the end of the second week, I surrendered myself in faith in an “initiation ceremony”: the worship of my private Dionysos. I surrendered myself and followed him, soaked in his breath, on a painful journey, a mountain climbing with bare feet.

I knew he was taking me to a high mountain and I was determined to climb it as if I had made a vow.

And while I was climbing, the fatigue, the labor did not defeat me. The body became more and more flexible, stronger and more resilient; the energy zones, the voice and the breath were in the service of the difficult, demanding task. I was ­keeping my eyes glued to the technical booth, crushed by the energy of the eye of Dionysos. The fiery iris of his eye was activating me, paralyzing me, brutalizing me, dehumanizing me, deconstructing me and lifting me; it was urging me to transcendence and was throwing me into the darkness of the ontological root of the un-mourning mourning.

He was crushing my mind into a nightmarish game between memory-oblivion and dream.

He was distorting my body … with his gaze, with the fiery iris of his eye.

A taurus and a snake, raging and gentle, beastly and suave, familiar and distant.

My Dionysos made me cry with his outbursts and burst into loud laughter with his unparalleled humor.

Iachos and Bacchus, Lysios and Anthios, Karpios and Dentritis, he released my inner hidden forces. He liberated my body. He offered me life-giving juices and the unspeakable joy of creation. My heart was exulted by the fruit of his vine.

He drew from the pool of his wisdom and spiritual cultivation and enriched my insight, judgement and psyche.

Ladies and gentlemen, I speak in the first person but without distinction I d­ eclare myself a member of a group of actors. We all made the same efforts ... we showed the same devotion. We were “A Troupe”. Faithful followers of our private Dionysos.

What is more important to me is that at that moment of my biological age, I had the chance to encounter Theodoros Terzopoulos in his own “home”, the Attis ­Theatre and live a fascinating artistic experience.

And if there is something that despite my happiness makes me sad, it is the fact that this encounter did not happen years ago.

But wherever I am, I will always feel his vigilant, loving eye upon me.

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The Body at the Anti-Chamber of Death SOPHIA HILL Actress, Greece

The body of the actor in Attis Theatre stands at the antichamber of death, which is the space between life and death, existence and non-existence; it is an intermediate space, a border between the inside and the outside, self and society; it is a place of transfer, conversion and exchange of material and moral substance and quality; it is a junction where time, space, nature, history and memory meet.

The entrance to the anti-chamber of death means the entrance to the polysemous time, the re-construction of the past and the future in a chronic disorder. Both the past and the future become present. The body at the anti-chamber of death is connected to the structural time and is constantly re-shaped through the memories that are deeply inscribed in its core. The body, liberated, discards the socially ­limited time, transforming it from local to universal.

As a child, I lived for some years in Mani; it is a rocky landscape, under the sun, surrounded by the sea. This is the place where I understood the world for the first time. The cultural power of this land is the ritual of death and its only music ­inheritance is the Moiroloi. Moiroloi means “crying for one’s fate” and it is the song that the women of Mani sing to say farewell to their dead. It is a ritual and improvised lament, song, a poem, an improvisation of the body and the voice. It is a kind of composure of the self, the sentiment and the freedom of expression.

This was the first time I experienced the existing practice of the ancient Greek tragedy and the sacred. The second time was when I first saw a performance in Attis Theatre. In Attis Theatre, as well as in Mani, the sacred is not a religious matter, but a historical one, a matter of memory which rests “in the bone”.

My encounter with Attis Theatre and Theodoros Terzopoulos was fatal. I feel blessed for this occasion. Once you cross the “two worlds”, you are never the same, you are always in between and beyond. You look at two different directions. Until

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then, I was feeling in theatre like I was lost in an inner exile and then suddenly I found a space, where truth is claimed through the power of emotion and body symbolism, and where the communication of the pain of existence transforms the dissonance between the self and society into art.

I found a place, where the body, having been separated by the world, achieves to put together its fragments and be united with the universal Whole. I found a place, where the concepts of Death, Love and Life are not biological facts, but poetic phaenomena. I feel grateful and happy that I have been, and still am, able to ­cooperate, communicate and coexist in this way.

I am grateful to Theodoros Terzopoulos and Attis company and I hope that in the future we will continue to experience life through the freedom of poetry.

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The Time of Grief TASOS DIMAS Actor, GREECE

“Loss gave birth to sorrow; sorrow gave birth to emotion and emotion gave birth to art. Through melancholy the tragic hero always seeks to return to the emotion of mourning, which nevertheless is the cradle of emotion. What the sorrow inflames will now be a pleasure for him.”

Thirty years ago, on the occasion of the Bacchae directed by Theodoros ­Terzopoulos, I had the opportunity to discover for myself this journey of nostos and redemption; Terzopoulos and the Attis troupe have been my companions in this journey. It was a difficult enterprise. Back then, I had the tendency to avoid pain.

I avoided pain like the devil avoids holy water. And then suddenly, I found myself as if I had been kicked up there, on the stage of the Municipal Theatre of Volos, doing a replacement for the role of Teiresias. I must confess that at that time, I was struggling with an impending personal loss.

This experience became the turning point for me as a human being, but it also completely determined my artistic career. I became acquainted with a state of ­mourning that was much more intense than what we define as mourning in our everyday life. It was about the discard of the individual, personal, inherent sorrow and the recognition of a universal sorrow – a universal loss that overwhelms you with liberating force. I wish I were a poet to describe this experience, as it deserves it. It does not allow you to get lost in paths of psychological drama and personalization of situations.

It was the absolute redemptive energy of mourning. An incision that offered an insight into the universal.

What I was experiencing penetrated my whole body, from the larynx to the genitals, bringing the body in a condition of total rebirth. This mourning, this dissolution and rebirth transformed the feeling of pain into pleasure. Within this time, I recognized the vertigo of life, the vertigo of light, creation, silence and restlessness.

I was overwhelmed by the very coordination of time itself – you know, time is something we often do not give the attention it deserves. It penetrates and flows from the

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shorter hair of the head to the lower limbs. It is an independent body, it is words, love and affection.

The Time of Mourning, as I experienced it and started researching it thirty years ago together with Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis troupe, is an open time that becomes body-language. The mind is aflame to comprehend something that is familiar and at the same time unfamiliar. I had to go deep inside to enlighten my ­ignorance through my belief in it. I could mention the Persians of Aeschylus, where we worked with the time of anticipation, or Prometheus Bound, where we worked with our internal vertigo, and many more….

Personally, I was always concerned with the same question: The purpose of this quest for me. The question of time and what time is. In this time everything can happen. I remember that my feet were bleeding, the tips of my fingers were torn and the stage was full of blood. I realized this only when the performance had ended.

The limits of my freedom had expanded and I became aware of it only once when I was behind the scenes.

What I would bear as my personal sorrow was then lost. The parts of my body were mourning, but not my soul. The pain becomes power, the opening is transcendental, you must have endurance and tolerance, fight against difficulties; then the body will gain its polyrhythm, voice and potentials. You should reset the speed counter to zero and just follow time faithfully. For me this is the only way for art to become anthropocentric and ontological. The sorrow ceases and the soul rests. You fight for the ‘we’ and for the whole.

I would like to thank Theodoros Terzopoulos, because I had the chance to ­converse and collaborate with him; I am proud of the years I have been joining hands and researching with him and the Attis theatre group, with devotion and love.

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Alarme – Amor The Evolution of an Actor Working with Theodoros Terzopoulos AGLAIA PAPPA Actress, GREECE

“You are doing theatre for the unexpected, the paradox, the unspeakable”, ­Theodoros Terzopoulos welcomes you in the rehearsal with this greeting.

But how can an actor put this into practice?

How can an actor renounce what he/she has already learned and mostly­ abandon the safety of the expressive means he/she uses and reconcile with the inner Unknown?

How can an actor dare to delve into the realms of his/her subconscious and imagination, recognize and accept his/her personal “trauma” and then transform it into artistic material?

It is a painful and time-consuming process, especially for an actor who has not “grown up” artistically through the method of Terzopoulos.

But Terzopoulos knows how to wait. He believes in his choices and waits.

He starts with the most painless: the text.

You quickly realize that the text is of secondary importance to the process. You must first destroy it to extract the idea upon which the performance will be based on.

The aim is not to tell the story; the aim is to relocate the same story into the realm of the non-existent, the imagination and create a new story. This is intriguing.

We have learned to read the texts dramatically and, indirectly, to make autobiographical connotations.

Here, you learn that every subject is just an alibi for the creation of the­ theatrical action.

First you de-mystify and then you create space for what you have de-mystified.

The theatre of Terzopoulos is a game of misinterpretations and misunderstandings.

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The actor is expected to abandon all the interpretative codes he/she knows.

The actor will be asked to deliver a narrative that does not explain because everything that is explained directly falls under the category of drama. There is ­neither description nor commentary of the uttered word. The speech emerges from the subconscious, the imagination, the parapraxis.

He will teach you, contrary to what you are accustomed to, that associations are not your business. It is their business and we just provide the stimuli for them.

He will teach you that sound should not contain emotion or implications.

Blurred memories, blurred figures, narrow passes bear the incoherent thoughts, upon which the interpretation is slowly built.

“The words are governed by deep catalepsy; the behaviors have inscrutable goals. This is the language of decadence”, you will hear him say many times during the rehearsal.

Even the speech must be absurd. Absurd but comprehensible.

Thesis and arsis. Say something and the next moment reverse it. A constant ambivalence.

He will ask you to renounce brain functions that you have learned to use as a safety net and push you to lighten your mind from ideas, words and notions.

“Because the mind”, he will tell you, “is accustomed to showing what the society dictates and you deserve to be avant-garde only if you are immoral. Remember that morality is the veil of society.”

As a conclusion, where does he lead the actor to rely on? On the body.

Because for him the body has no morality, it does not describe. The body contains the ontological dimension of humans. The body bears memories of centuries and can become the tool for functions that go beyond the ordinary.

“The stimuli that the present offers are worthless”, he will tell you. “Only when the memory of the body awakens, can the real revolution begin.”

But in order to begin this great adventure of the revelation, you must accept that your body does not belong to you, that it is not a familiar body. It is a foreign, unfamiliar body, a foreign costume and as such you must use it and offer it. Like the body of an outlaw, a prostitute, or a homeless - like those we see so often recently.

He will teach you that only if you alienate your body, can you make it a tool of self-destruction and make the violence visible.

You liberate your body from every ideology and then it is available for any extremity, whether interpretive or aesthetic.

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I narrate and my body is in a condition of parapraxis, like the body of a person suffering from dementia, as if the body has a strange autonomy, as if the organs do not obey the commands of the brain. In a few and simple words, this is the process of deconstruction.

The relationships of the bodies on stage are never realistic. They are indirect, diagonal, everyone struggles with their shadow.

“The body and its costume are the work of art”, he will tell you, adding that “light has no weight, it is not enough on its own”.

An essential element for a performance directed by Terzopoulos is the “common, shared time”. This time is capable of uniting two, three or more different ­actions. The time will create the space.

So, after the Body, we reach the second main axis in the work of Terzopoulos: the sense of Time, or rather the Opening of Time.

The aim is always Slow Time. Time creates the rhythm, time creates the ­surprises. We seek the moment when words will have a reason to exist.

Time stands still, light moves very slowly. It is only through this sense of time that the interpretation emerges.

Long pauses, slow movements to the wrong directions, oblique actions.

“Towards the audience – ignoring it, towards the wall – penetrating it”, he shouts.

Inside this kind of Time, the body under-functions, everything is redefined, any realistic function is suspended.

This approach of time is a very painful, yet extremely tempting ordeal for the actor. When he/she perceives time through logic in the beginning, the body, the nervous system reacts and refuses to obey. What prevails is the fear of the unknown, or of the emergence of what everyone hides deep inside. At that moment you need absolute faith in the principles of the method. The faith that Time will liberate you from the weight of realism and cleanse you for this process. Otherwise, any doubt will disorient you, and at best, it will create resistance and obstacles.

Very frequently, Terzopoulos talks about “demented behavior”. But what does dementia mean for him and his artistic creation? It is the abolition of social time and the emergence of obsessive time. It is the kind of time that always exists in tragedy.

Long pauses and different speeds. The pause results from the self-concentration and the immobilization of the time. You learn that through self-concentration all unrealistic or surrealistic elements are justified. “Time is in formalin,” he insists.

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Everything moves slowly: the shadow, the light... In this dilation of time, all senses are sharpened, the field of the senses, that once were asleep, broadens. So, an idea or a concept could smell, for example. Many things, which seem absurd in “normal” life, become valuable tools for art and are absolutely justified in the ­theatre of Terzopoulos.

But above all, Terzopoulos’ theater is deeply political. A man with a deep political conscience himself could not create a different artistic work. His relationship with political authority, all these years, has proved it. After all, he considers authority, any kind of authority, as a transcendence of boundaries and an anxious quest for eternity. For him, whoever identifies himself with authority, identifies himself with the idea of death. And whoever transcends the boundaries, is already in the realm of death.

Before closing, I would like to add that I will never forget what he said to me in one of our conversations: – Art must reflect the evil that comes from the future.

– Art is defined by subtraction.

– Your terms in the theater must be ideological and not aesthetic.

Thank you very much, Theodoros.

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The Liberating Method NIOVI CHARALAMBOUS Actress, CYPRUS

Theodoros Terzopoulos’ method has been liberating for me. The process of the complete liberation of the mind created in my body dynamics that were unknown to me so far. During the process of deconstruction, I felt my energy being liberated because of the dynamics that were developed inside my body, constantly using ­diaphragmatic breath for so long that I could recognize words coming out of my mouth without thinking how to emphasize or pronounce them. My nervous system was in such a state of balance and autonomy that made me feel free and capable, from a standpoint of immobility and through constant improvisation, to find the target and achieve the concentration that was required for the performance.

– self-determination – self-orientation – self-restraint – self-control – emotion – physical superiority – target – vibration I can find several words to describe how I experienced Terzopoulos’ method.

Theodoros Terzopoulos is there, ready to identify and guide us, through his ­method and with the help of the beloved Savvas, in order to understand tragedy as a need to remain true to our path, through rituals that our own body and mind have provided for us from the very beginning.

That’s why, through his method, the actor can be completely honest with ­himself and, in addition, with the audience. Because the audience recognizes itself through the actor and cannot be easily deceived.

By deconstructing the body and restoring its function through psycho-motor ­actions, you prepare the mind to accept and convey the deepest concepts of existence

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with a sharp accuracy of emotion and purity. You aim at the highest dimension of human perception on stage and in the way you recognize your entity in this life.

I felt new emotions, I heard my voice differently, I saw my body differently, I lost my vision for a few minutes, but I was perfectly calm and conscious of where I was and how I was within this space. I wasn’t afraid and I didn’t take anything for granted.I just surrendered myself and followed.

Photos page 54–61 1. Photographic installation The Dismemberment of Dionysos, by Johanna

Weber and Alexandros Kokkinos, Exhibition Hall, European Cultural Centre of Delphi, (photo Andreas Simopoulos) The Dismemberment of Dionysos, by Johanna Weber and Alexandros Kokkinos, Exhibition Hall, European Cultural Centre of Delphi, (photo Andreas Simopoulos)

2. Photographic installation

3. Photographic installation The Dismemberment of Dionysos, by Johanna Weber

and Alexandros Kokkinos, Exhibition Hall, European Cultural Centre of Delphi, (photo Andreas Simopoulos, Johanna Weber) 4. Photographic installation The Dismemberment of Dionysos, by Johanna Weber

and Alexandros Kokkinos, Exhibition Hall, European Cultural Centre of Delphi, (photo Andreas Simopoulos, Johanna Weber)

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The Memory of Sound PANAYIOTIS VELIANITIS Composer, Music Teacher, GREECE

It was back in 1991 while Theodoros Terzopoulos was rehearsing for the Persians (the second version) that my teacher Stefanos Vasileiadis, a composer with long experience in theatre, introduced us to each other. He was impressed by his production of Bacchae, which he considered – as he confessed to me once – by far the most striking production of the Bacchae he had seen until then.

Our long collaboration started then and it has been followed by many productions at the Attis Theatre and other theatres: – Heracles Enraged (Attis Theatre, 2000) – Bacchae (Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, 2001) – The Persians (Istanbul, 2006) – Oedipus Rex (Alexandrinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg 2006) – Marios Pontikas’ Cassandra Addresses the Dead (Attis Theatre, 2007) – Heiner Müller‘s Mauser (Attis Theatre, 2009) – Alarme (Attis Theatre, 2010) – Prometheus Bound (Eleusis, Istanbul, Essen 2010) – Amor, based on a text by Thanasis Alevras (Attis Theatre, 2013) – Endgame (Alexandrinsky Theatre, 2014) – Bacchae (Electrotheatre Stanislavsky, Moscow, 2015) – Antigone (Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, 2015) – Encore, based on a text by Thomas Tsalapatis (Attis Theatre, 2016) – The Trojan Women (Pafos, 2017) … and the list is incomplete.

Following the development of Terzopoulos’ method all these years, I feel that for me this has been a life-long learning process, a sort of continuation of my education

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in composition, constantly renewing the philosophical basis which determines the functionality and the aesthetics of the music of each performance.

Attending discussions, rehearsals, the development of the stage design either

by Terzopoulos himself or his eminent collaborators (Jannis Kounellis, Giorgos ­Patsas), the whole poetics of the image and the speech that Terzopoulos dynamically develops, the music is constructed through a dialogue with the elements named before.

In our collaboration with Terzopoulos, I believe that electroacoustic music serves the theatrical act itself more profoundly, not only because of the emancipation of the sound from musical instruments – even from their modern expanded techniques, but also because of the freedom electroacoustic music gives in the ­structuring of sound patterns.

After all, the bodies of the actors themselves are also musical instruments, so we are talking about a mixed technique of coexistence of electroacoustic sounds, natural sounds and speech.

The construction of these sound patterns could not be considered an autonomous music event; this would involve the risk of creating only supporting background music, completely inappropriate, even disastrous due to its music “narcissism”.

The composition of these sound patterns – which we conventionally call ­“music” – is a laborious process; I always enlist dozens of variations of their ­development until we determine, together with Terzopoulos, the most appropriate one. Then, predicting the right direction of its development, he gives key instructions in a very specific and concrete way.

This selection should fully serve the concept and the development of the performance and Terzopoulos’ guidance always aims to the core of the sound concept, eliminating what is unnecessary.

The sound patterns that are structured according to the requirements of each performance could be classified into the following five categories: Ontological sounds that function as sound stimuli to “introspection” for the spectator, so that one is physically isolated from the surroundings and concentrates on the performance exclusively. Such an acoustic state of slow development of ­s­imple (semitonal) timbres that causes fluctuations in psychological intensity is found in The Persians (1991) as an unchanging ison; it is also found in Oedipus Rex (Alexandrinsky Theatre, 2006) in a more complex form of development or in ­Endgame (Alexandrinsky Theatre, 2014) as a “chthonic” constant background.

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Sounds referring to the collective subconscious like the ululation of the B ­ edouins in The Persians (2006), which even after its electronic elaboration and d­ istancing from the recognizable original source preserves the crucial character of an alarming state with the advent of an important event; or the obsessive industrial sound that follows the axis of Pentheus in Bacchae (Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, 2001) etc.

Recognizable sounds that semiotically, as words of a universal cultural code, ­comment on and interact with the dramatic action, like the sound of the army boots during the parade of soldiers in Mother Courage (Alexandrinsky Theatre, 2017), the war sirens and shootings in Prometheus Bound (Eleusis, Istanbul, ­Essen, 2010), the song Summertime by George Gershwin in Antigone (Wilma Theater, 2015), the song Can she excuse my wrongs by John Dowland in Alarme (Attis Theatre, 2010) etc. Sounds like these have made a deep impact on human memory and culture.

Morphologically, more complete compositions like the tango in Endgame (Alexandrisnky Theatre, 2014) and Encore (Attis Theatre, 2016).

Abstract sounds that aid in the punctuation of dramatic action like the instanta­ neous sounds in Amor (Attis Theatre, 2013) or Endgame (Alexandrinsky Theatre, 2014).

All these sounds create substrates of continuity; sometimes they sink to their limit of audibility and non-existence and sometimes they stand out aggressively to produce ruptures in the action. Sometimes, they emerge instantaneously – like bolts out of the blue – and their importance lies not only in their existence but ­mostly in the void they leave immediately after.

During the process of the final selection by Terzopoulos, the sound patterns should serve four necessary conditions: – non-deviation from the core of the concept – homogeneity – absolute economy – recall of the deepest memory through the collective unconscious Thus, Terzopoulos eliminates any decorative elements as well as the risk of a garrulous development, deliberately removing the prospect of an anticipated ­musical development. Besides, the purpose is to conceive and develop the idea ­holistically, not in its individual elements.

When people often ask me how they could listen to my music of the performances, I answer spontaneously: “Watch the show”.

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I would also like to collate the functionality of sound with elements of T ­ erzopoulos’ method: As an invisible existence, sound can “illuminate” the most unfamiliar aspects of ­ourselves leading us to perfection that is absolute silence, the void.

While the concept of music is inextricably connected with the concept of ­organization of sounds in terms of time, tonality, timbre and other musical parameters, we do not handle its development linearly but as a time regression, like the development of the historicity of sound, which dynamically goes through the ­present.

Thus, the deconstruction of music, which frequently results from the shared code we have developed with Terzopoulos in all these years, manifests itself as a continuous repetition of a sound pattern with a slow and perpetual transformation towards its future and final form. It gives the impression of time freezing and us being fixed in a constantly renew present.

This function of sound is found in the repetitive string clusters in Bacchae (Electrotheatre Stanislavsky, 2015) or in Mother Courage (Alexandrinsky Theatre, 2017), in the metal sounds in Prometheus Bound (2010), in the metal sound of the anvil at the opening scene of Mauser (Attis Theatre, 2010), etc.

The repetitive sound interacts with the rhythmic interpretation of the text and is powerfully united with the rhythm and the control of the diaphragmatic breathing of the actors as it can be seen in the chorus of Bacchae (Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, 2001).

These aspects of the common code of communication with Terzopoulos ­constantly raise new ontological and socio-political questions and result in our long-lasting collaboration.

Before closing, I would like to express some of my own concerns in relation to Art as an end in itself. What I realized during my long tenure at Terzopoulos’ ­theatre is that both theatre and music are the mainspring for the actors – and his other collaborators - to renounce their role and consciously function as commissioners of Dionysos in the public.

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The Wanderer and his Shadow DIMITRIS TILIAKOS Baritone, Greece

Watching the performances at the Attis Theatre in recent years and mainly studying Theodoros Terzopoulos’ book The Return of Dionysos, I felt from the beginning a deep connection with him mainly because of the way he perceives art and technique as identical concepts. I began to see this very clear relationship through my own research in the technique of singing, the technique of breathing, the release of the energy entrapped in the body, the activation of resonances and facial muscles not only as an element of expression but of creation and evolution of the sound.

These are the elements that I have been searching for. In my in-depth discussions with Theodoros Terzopoulos, we sought a common poetic-musical point of reference to begin a new collaboration, a journey.

My work on Franz Schubert’s cycle of songs “The Winter Journey”, perhaps the most important cycle of songs of German romanticism, has led our talks to the life of a traveler who moves between the material and the spiritual world, the light and the shadow. A traveler who has no destination beyond the voyage.

The only companion to this trip is his shadow and whatever is hidden there, what has not been said, but also what he has to deal with in the quest for a latent truth. Singing in the Attis Theatre without a piano accompaniment, we began to create a sound frame with the main theme of the wanderer. We chose ten songs by Franz Schubert from the poetry by Goethe, Schmidt and Müller and a popular folk song to present them in the Delphic night. Our aim was not to present it to you, but merely to inform you of this trip, a trip from Metaxourgeio to Delphi.

And just like the wanderer we also have no destination beyond this trip.

I am a traveler open to new influences to get to my inner world, my innermost voice, where all the power and the truth are hiding.

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A Synthesis of Antitheses KALLIOPE LEMOS Sculptor – installation artist, UK

On this occasion I will only attempt to add a tiny stone to Theodoros Terzopoulos’ great body of work that has contributed so much towards our culture and world heritage, by talking about our collaboration and the ground that we share.

I am sure that knowledgeable and experienced fellow speakers will analyze and delve deeply into his method and his oeuvre, and we are all here to listen to and ­enjoy those presentations, while we are going to be given tools to understand more thoroughly the work that has been stirring and moving audiences for years!

It was a few years ago, in 2010, when I had my first encounter with the work of Theodoros Terzopoulos, in Eleusis during the Aeschylean festival; he was presenting his version of Prometheus Bound. My immediate reaction to this experience was as if he was able to stir with a huge stick the sediment that had settled at the bottom of a fathomless lake; and as he was stirring, currents of archetypal memories, images, experiences and feelings started to come to the surface. This was a revelation to me, as I realized that what he was achieving through movement, sound and acting was exactly what I was trying to achieve through sculpture and installation. This realization overwhelmed me and I immediately felt a connection. Since then I have been following most of his plays.

Prometheus Bound synthesized at once so many antitheses, the contemporary and the ancient traditions, formality and order, as opposed to emotional unpredictability, mixture of languages creating a sense of insecurity and chaos, juxtaposed with rhythm and ritual. Here Apollo and Dionysos were both present and harmoniously collaborating as within the human psyche.

As I was becoming increasingly familiar with Theodoros’ method and vision, I started finding the common ground between us. In the first place, the roots of both our practices lie deep in the Greek culture, as well as in Japanese traditions; the pathos of the masks in the ancient Greek theatre, originating from the culture of Dionysos, contrasts with the rigidity and fixed whiteness of Japan’s Noh Theatre.

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I also found that my deep concerns about the injury of human dignity and the ­disregard of human rights were absolutely shared with Theodoros and that, with his method of the juxtaposition of opposites, he is unrelenting in agitating anything that tends to become lazy in our conscience. In his effort to make sure that nothing would be left unclear he combines pathos and ritual, suffering and sarcasm in a ­delivery that accentuates his message. The physicality of the performances that ­characterizes his work, combined with the ritualistic order in a strictly formal architectural stage design hint at the ongoing conflicts of societal life and of moral struggles.

Another idea that we have in common is that sound becomes primary and more important than language in expressing trauma; he therefore emphasizes the sound of words rather than plainly using language and meaning.

The tranquility and acceptance that results feels almost as a catharsis, and is followed by a psychological tension that resembles that of a new discovery. With our collaboration I was delighted to discover that within the calmness and materiality of my robust and solid sculptures and installations, the interaction of a live ­performance affected the audience more viscerally than intellectually.

The crucial point of Theodoros‘ distinguished work is its relevance, in the sense that it matters to the world. In my aspiration that my work remains relevant to the world as well, I see my collaboration with Attis Theater inspiring and immediate.

My work often has a harsh appearance, but it is a result of my effort to be as honest and as close to the truth as I can.

Under Theodoros’ direction, body and form become the main expressive tools.

And through collaborations such as this, my sculptural forms – which often evoke the human body - become alive. And this is something that I also bring to my video art, where I always combine the presence of my sculpture with the performance of an actor.

One such example of my incorporation of the body can be seen in my video At the Centre of the World, where the performer is enclosed in my sculpture Sphere, whereas in a still from my video Irrevocable Transformations, the performer Paolo Musio tries to balance on my sculpture Platform. The third video of the same series shows my sculpture The Cube with Musio acting opposite himself both inside and outside the sculpture.

When curator Maria Maragkou proposed a collaboration on the occasion of the rd 3 International Meeting of Ancient Drama in Kiato in August 2011, Theodoros Terzopoulos conceived the performances Lamentia, Eterna and Esperia, which

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c­ onsisted of three single-actor performances with or surrounded by my sculptures in three austere installations.

The sculptural works that were used in these performances had been created early in 2011 for my project Navigating in the Dark, an exhibition in three chapters that was presented in Athens, Crete and London. The exhibition built on the themes of existential journeys and the passage through life; themes that I revisit ­often in my work, and it explored the relationship between the collective and the individual. Lamentia, a performance by Sofia Hill, featured the sculpture Bear All Crawl. For Eterna, performed by Sofia Michopoulou, I created a site-specific installation that included my works Steel Heads suspended from wooden guillotines made for the occasion. Aneza Papadopoulou, who sat inside my large sculpture Space Within, performed Esperia.

In Kiato, in front of Space Within, actor Paolo Musio also performed Il Deserto, which brings us now to my second collaboration with Theodoros.

The final part of my project Navigating in the Dark took place in London in ­November 2011. The exhibition was installed in the Crypt, a vaulted underground burial space under the church of St. Pancras. It was an installation that was about the a­ fterlife passage. It consisted of three found wooden boats stripped down to ­expose the wood—filled with snakes, human figures and sculptures of crows all made of steel, a hive-like space where white paper sculptures of bees hovered in the air like migrating souls and an area inside the crypt that was made to look like a field of reeds.

Within this setting, Theodoros and Paolo Musio presented Carlo Michelstaedter’s play Il Deserto. Musio, in front of my Wooden Boat with Seven Crows, went through an extraordinary range of emotions in the 45-minute play, with Theodoros in the end singing lamentations coming from his native Pontus on the Black Sea coast. The collaboration was a great success and it was received enthusiastically both by the British audience and critics, with Michael Billington from the Guardian ­pointing that “it provided a frightening sense, reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno, of being suspended between life and death in a subterranean world… reinforced by Lemos’ sculptures, which eerily enhance the action… and suggest some Virgilian passage across the river Styx into eternal darkness.”

A few years passed and, in the end of 2017, I met Theodoros for our most recent collaboration to date. Made specifically for Attis Theatre, my sculpture Hekate

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b­ ecame the latest work to be permanently installed at the entrance of the Theatre.

Hekate, inspired by the ancient Greek chthonic goddess associated with crossroads and entrances to the underworld, takes the form of a relief steel gate with 12 window-like openings. The visitors are invited to interact with the sculpture by­ opening and closing the windows while imagining the view beyond the mysterious darkness.

So Hekate becomes the crucial junction where you are invited to choose your ­­direction; it becomes a point of reference and an opening to the sacred space of the theatre, to a world of mystery. But as Joseph Campbell would argue, “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

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When Malevich meets Dionysos MARIA MARANGOU Art Critic, Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, GREECE

The exact point, where the actors stand on stage, the way they breathe and the ways their bodies manifest themselves in the space of a closed or open-air theatre are ­determined by the performance itself and the principles that distinguish the ­director’s style.

Here, we have the honor to speak about the stage area, as organized by ­-Theodoros Terzopoulos and his actors, who have gone through a challenging ­­training, together with the director, for months. We speak about a director who ­­resists to the stereotypes of mainstream theatre, the allure of the post­modern and the drama that unfolds inside a room.

Terzopoulos chooses to research on the one hand, the great ontological question of human being and, on the other hand, the primary and essential that happens now and reflects the modern era.

In the theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, the body of the actor, after its deconstruction, seeks to develop capabilities to descent into the roots of its deep corporal tradition. This is an elementary principle of the method of the director, who obsessively follows the teaching and the implementation of his personal perspective into a performance.

From the Bacchae in 1986 to the most recent Encore, we run across the mystery of the position and the movement of the body of the actor on the stage of Attis – or any major international theatre: the actor seems to select a specific space, in order to develop the flow of the energy.

Many eminent directors, before working in theatre or cinema, were visual artists.

Theodoros Terzopoulos, closely related to the visual language since his very first staging of theatre, is capable of creating unique visual spaces. Rarely in the past and almost never in the last twenty years has he worked with a stage designer. He himself creates the space for the actors, in relation to the concept of the performance, and he does it so abundantly, that frequently those who do not know him wonder

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who the visual artist is. In a way, the case of Terzopoulos, who treats the performance as a whole, resembles that of Wagner, whose work was not limited to music.

Some of the distinctive features that relate him to the international art movements, especially the Russian avant-garde, from which, nevertheless, contemporary art draws, are the line created by the bodies of the actors (a line that sometimes is crossed) and the introduction of the fourth dimension, namely time. The stage space of Terzopoulos is an autonomous construction, intending to speak for itself, to represent the body with bulimia, even with disrespect, to express its crave for food; a food that draws from the soil and refers to the soil and the creatures that live and breathe in it. The ritual of the movement, an open and powerful work of art, maintains the dynamics of the request for contact with the chthonic and is enhanced by the choices of the director, both in texts that lack the convenience of the flow in narration and in music.

The theatrical space, austere, almost empty, not descriptive at all, is organized with the minimum materials and usually follows an abstract geometric form: a ­circle, a square, a cross, sometimes a triangle define a geometrical austere area, where the body will recognize, experience its possibilities and realize its function, by changing spatial and vital positions.

Theodoros Terzopoulos seems to love constructivism and the principles of the visual language that was developed in the first decades of the 20th century in­ Russia. In a way, someone could say that Malevich loved Dionysos or that­ Dionysos, in his most powerful manifestations (namely, in Terzopoulos’ theatre), adored the black square of Kazimir Malevich.

The director’s close relationship with the visual arts and his choices include his collaboration with the outstanding visual artist Jannis Kounellis. Their collaboration was launched in Düsseldorf in 2001 with the Bacchae by Euripides and continued in Epidaurus with the same performance and other productions in Greece and abroad.

Here, I would like to remind that at the entrance of Attis Theatre a stone by Joseph Beuys and two installations, one by Jannis Kounellis and one by Kalliopi Lemos, greet the audience. Also, that the blessed theatre in Leonidou street has hosted individual art exhibitions, the most prominent among them being the installation of Jannis Kounellis with the meats (2005). And of course, we should mention Jenin, based on the poem by Etel Adnan (2006), a unique journey through the halls and the stage of Attis Theatre, with works, installations and video installations by

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a­rtists, tableaux vivants and the director himself as the narrator. Jenin was­ presented exactly at the dawn of the immigration issue and in an era that we were suspecting the imminent economic crisis in Greece.

Before closing, I would like to mention Malevich’s black square as it first ­appeared in the opera Victory over the Sun in 1913, with Kruchenykh’s libretto in a language that had little significance, Matyushin’s music and Malevich’s sets and costumes.

Most recently, Ruben Östlund’s film The Square refers to a space outside the museum, with boundaries that protect and privilege anyone who respects them.

The boundaries of the circle or the square in Terzopoulos’ theatre liberate the body, in order to listen to the obsession and the motives of an offense that criticizes hypocrisy and abuse of power, stand on the fragile association between violence and chaos, and achieves to capture the spectator, challenging his thoughts while not offering ephemeral pleasure.

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The Dismemberment of Dionysos JOHANNA WEBER Photographer, GERMANY

I was so pleased when Theodoros asked me to make a photographic installation at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. It was a very special challenge for me. The photographic material gathered during the 27 years working with him – from ­rehearsals, performances, workshops and tours in Greece and abroad – is massive.

All material from 1991 to 2004 is in black-and-white film while the following years have it in color and digital form.

The material of the first period was easy to handle as it was already printed in the darkroom. The digital material, on the other hand, was rather difficult to use.

I was trying to manage it by looking at it on the screen without any satisfactory ­result. So I started printing it. I printed many photos and spread them on the floor.

I took one of them in my hands. It was a very expressive image of an actor.

I crumpled it out of curiosity and it became three-dimensional. At that moment I realized that if I wanted to approach the work of Theodoros within this particular exhibition, there had to be a reversal in the way of presentation and selection of photographs. I took five photos and made a rough set up. I contacted my friend ­Alexandros Kokkinos. I was interested in hearing his opinion about this idea.

He shortly sent me a model, proceeded with the idea and made a clear installation in the space. So we started our cooperation. I thank Alexandros for this creative ­dialogue and cooperation.

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TEACHERS OF THEODOROS TERZOPOULOS’ METHOD “THE RETURN OF DIONYSOS” 75

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Corporal Reflections on the Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos – The Question of the Method.

SAVVAS STROUMPOS Actor, Director, GREECE

What is a working method in artistic terms? Can we regard it as a pre-determined and fixed system of practical solutions, where everything is given, explained and forever decided? Or like a holy doctrine, full of ready-made teachings, concerning each task of acting? It is not by luck that from time to time Terzopoulos, in a provocative way, denies the existence of the method itself. By doing so, he aims to avoid the rational mode of thinking, where someone needs to embody a working method only for the sake of psychological reassurance and safety.

The art of the performer is closely related to a permanently open challenge for the practitioner’s bodymind. Many times during the creative process we are ­confronted with chaos; being in a state of bewilderment we feel unable to find a way out of the tunnel. In other occasions, we sense the need to take the risk of totally provoking ourselves, denying all the pre-conceptions, assuming a conflictive stance, so as to experience the opening of a new road through the rupture caused by this conflict. We could say that the performer’s craft is related to a psychophysical ­process of posing questions with one’s bodymind, in constant confrontation with the material we work on. The rehearsals’ period brings about a sense of an­ «unstable stability» of great potential, revealed through time and mainly grasped by the senses in a reflective way, before consciousness becomes aware of it.

Re-considering acting in corporal terms, following the way of negation as far as it concerns the question of the method, we can start tracing the fundamental ­elements of “The working method of Theodoros Terzopoulos”, where the Body holds a central position. This working paradigm suggested by Terzopoulos calls the performer to be corporally-and-mentally vigilant, sensorily aware of each

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moment and actively present in the performative space-time beyond aesthetic ­categories. The acquirement of an uninterrupted flow of energy-and-concentration is the main prerequisite of the performer.

What is the Body?

The importance of the corporal factor in Terzopoulos’ method has nothing to do with the notion of movement. The question is not how to move my body; the ­performer does not search for movements, for actions logically confirmed by the director. Instead, the performer’s task is to acquire a deeper sense of one’s body, beyond the first level of socially determined corporal behavior, within the range of already familiar movements and the possibilities they include. The body of the ­socially determined physical axles is solely able to execute ideas imposed on it ­externally by the director, the choreographer, the playwright, the character etc. ­Terzopoulos often insists: “I work with the body, not with ideas”.

Through the process of the psychophysical training suggested by the method (corporal- vocal training, process of “deconstruction”) the performer experiences a shift in the corporal awareness. While the somatic axles are strengthened, the body is not perceived any more like a sum of flesh and bones. We rather sense it like an open channel of energy. While the training process develops from one step to the next, the familiar limits of stamina are gradually surpassed, the performer is ­activated and mobilized by the air of inhalation-and-exhalation through different tempo-rhythmical breathing patterns of the diaphragm. The performer’s bodymind becomes a global field of energy exceeding the mere quotidian life actions. In ­psychophysiological terms, with each inhalation the internal space of the body ­dilates, while, with each exhalation the air is projected outwards, and the performer’s spectrum of energy broadens. Through time, the performer acquires both an in-body awareness and the ability of projecting physical-and-vocal energy without struggling muscularly or emotionally. In artistic terms, the performer’s bodymind constitutes the material basis of the creative work. All the different modes of expression, all the possible mental states, are conceived neither psychologically nor rationally. Instead, they are engraved within this material corporal basis. The psychophysical approach of the performer’s art is nothing else but the global ­engagement of the performer’s being in the creative process.

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Breath, or-else vital energy In different paradigms of performer’s training, the factor of energy is often m ­ ystified, exactly because it is difficult to speak or think about it. The psychophysical training suggested by Terzopoulos’ method is mainly based on the unhindered circulation of breath throughout the performer’s activated bodymind. Under this sense, energy, or rather the breath, is no longer an abstract factor. During the training process, the performer senses the flow of energy throughout the whole body. This acquirement presupposes a deep connection to multiple sequences of tempo-rhythmical breathing patterns in all three parts of the training as mentioned above. Daily practice is necessary. The road to artistic freedom, where the performer can work on stage as an improvisator, i.e. as the creator of the conditions of a generous scenic presence, passes through discipline. We cannot practice the psychophysical functions ­demanded by the training in a mechanical way, like a daily gymnastic routine. On the contrary, we need to connect ourselves to the fundamental principles of the training anew, each day, each time we practice it. We often say that each inhalation, each exhalation of a training session, is a whole new challenge for a practitioner to carry out. The performer feels liberated from muscular, emotional or rational ­­tensions when experiencing the flow of energy. Their bodymind functions globally, opening up all the creative potential. Metaphorically, we can say that the window to the Unfamiliar is opened.

What is The Unfamiliar? Maybe the hidden and perhaps yet unexplored dimensions of a human being, as well as its hitherto unknown possibilities and ways of expression, which come forth through a deep process of self-revelation, a kind of exploration and excavation from the core of the performer’s bodymind.

The art of concentration The first introductory step in corporal training is a very simple process, and at the same time, a very interesting one. The practitioner stands still with feet open at shoulder length and knees softly bent, focusing on a point ahead, slightly above eye level. The main task is - sustaining the corporal position - to inhale from the mouth and the nose all the way down to the perineum, exhaling from the mouth with the consonant «s» up to the point of focus and beyond. In the duration of each inhalation the performer cultivates the in-body awareness; the inhaled air dilates the space ­inside the body, while the performer senses the soles of the feet rooted at the floor, the pelvic region (triangle) centered and the spinal column vertical, opened and

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a­ ctivated. In the duration of each exhalation with «s» the performer projects the air to the point of focus ahead; at the same time, the spectrum of energy widens.

Through the training and later on, through the creative process, the air of exhalation can be transformed to sound or speech, but a sound or speech stemming from the body. While the performer looks ahead, vision does not shrink to the point of focus. C ­ ontrarily, the performer cultivates the peripheral vision, sensorily including the space behind. In this respect, the art of concentration is not limited to a quiet gaze at the point of focus. Instead, it constitutes a psychophysical process of ­bodymind activation, where the performer stands still, sensing in-body motion and flow of energy while the space around is thoroughly inhabited.

Considering all the above, Terzopoulos’ ever-growing method of work has proven to be a most fertile ground for theater research. It establishes a rare and ­inspirational approach of the performer’s art, which encourages us to confront the futuristic dystopia ahead.

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Here, elsewhere, on the border – where am I when I am on stage for Attis?

PAOLO MUSIO Actor, ITALY

I will try to answer as an actor to the question: “where am I when I am on the stage of Attis?”

It seems to me that if I could fully answer this question, I would be able, at least partly, to explain the nucleus of this extreme experience to those who have not experienced it or to those who have witnessed it as spectators, sitting in front of me, or next to me, while playing in a performance.

As soon as the question is raised, it immediately becomes evident that the ­answer will not be simple. Of course, I am here, in front of you, or next to you, I am standing or squatting, as if I were an animal ready to attack, but at the same time I am elsewhere. Moreover, wherever I am, here or elsewhere, I am always aware that I am on the verge.

Here, elsewhere, on the verge. Having said that, I could still not mean anything, because after all, even if I were mad, I could stand here, in front of you, while at the same time my mind could travel elsewhere, or I could be on the verge, or I might simply dream, absorbed in a deep sleep. Madness and dreamlike condition have a strong relevance with what I am trying to explain, as well as with theatre in general and classic theatre in particular. However, the psychophysical condition of an Attis’ actor during his work has certain features.

First of all, I am here and I could not be anywhere else than here, in this precise spot, in a space, organized by Terzopoulos, following force fields and lines, which channel the energy flows and bring them in conflict or in contact with each other.

I have been placed at that precise spot, where my presence will contribute to the maximum to the ensemble, and I move following a very strict mapping further

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h­ ighlighted by the lights, which, like the blades of knives, create the perfect angle for attack and the absolute respect of a formal cage, as a condition for the truest freedom of expression. If I move a few centimetres forwards or backwards, I come out of the light, as if I am no longer here, or I am here in the worst way, as an­ obstacle to the collective work, as somebody who should not be here. But I am here, my firm contact with the ground, which I maintain in every position, confirms it; the awareness of my weight is the measure for every action and every gesture; the contact with the ground, the push of the air downwards feeds the vertical fountain of energy and its uninterrupted flow will lead the other actors and me to the end of the show, the ritual.

Up, down, right, left, forwards, backwards. I am here, I am concentrated, constantly checking the axles of my body, the verticality, so that I maintain or reach the frontal position; I am careful not to defend myself, to keep my body open, starting from the activated nucleus of the pelvic triangle and the diaphragm. I am here, I smile, or cry, or search – like a maniac - in the emptiness for the lost r­ eference point. I am here, ­naked and exposed to everyone, as if being under a magnifying glass, without conditions, without reservations. I am here as part of a whole, even when I work alone; I can feel the presence of the whole group, which has gathered around the Master through the course of the daily hard work, the affinities between people who seek this adventure of body and thought. I am here listening, following the collective rhythm; I give a signal or continue the one that my colleagues gave. We are all different from each ­other, and yet equals at the same time.

Right opposite to me is the society, also composed by different, and at the same time equal people - just as we are. I am here, alive and present; my deep breath, – with its constantly renewed rhythm, the constant and variable inhalation and ­exhalation – connects me to the flux of the entire universe. The inner rhythm­ divides the space in infinitive points, where the movement of my body develops; every gesture originates from another in a continuous flow, controlled and at the same time capable to dissolve into chaos. My breath is the proof of my presence; it supplies with primitive energy the machine that my body is and gives voice to the instrument I become. Breath is nature, life, an unpredictable wind. It carries me elsewhere. Now I am here and elsewhere.

The light stirs the darkness that surrounds me, the fire penetrates the bottom of my retina through my wide-open eyes, the fire tears it apart into shreds. The light

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emerges, springs from the unfathomable depths of my living body, the breath, the magma of earth, the fire, the air and water, the mask of the tragic “facade”, which is the mirror of my inner struggle, the struggle between the opposites, between chaos and order in extreme alarm. The conflict is in my breath, here and now, the war is in my body and, at the same time, elsewhere and in another time. Inside me and outside of me. I become the battlefield. I, as an entity, mean nothing more. I become Everybody. Finally, this is my true physiognomy. The meeting point of all the things, of which I have memory, and of all the things that have memory of me.

Everybody can inhabit me by simply standing opposite me.

The energy flows through our twinned bodies and it becomes pure, elemen­ tary communication, emancipated from rational control. The words are nothing but froth on the waves, trying to emerge, nothing but that. However, although everybody can inhabit me, feel close to me, here, where we stand, at the same time I am at their opposite, as somebody or something strange, distant and ­untouchable. Elsewhere. Stranger, even to myself, coming from who knows where, back in the beginning of time; through my work on the rhythm and ­breathing, I go back there. It is a place of origin, a secret room where many events happen. It has happened with my so called “daily life”, with the reality of the ­surface of my life, it is a relationship of silent exchange; the flow of lymph nodes orients every gesture, every step of mine. In my secret room somebody is ­screaming, or crying, or laughing, or howling to the moon like a coyote; at the same time, I’m asking the barman for a glass of water. This elsewhere, this secret room is the real scenario in which I move, when I work in Attis theatre. That is the place and that is the play.

In Terzopoulos’ theatre, my gesture coincides with what is happening in the secret room. I raise a veil and a veil is raised there too. Alternatively, I wave my hands together or pat my chest there and the same is happening now on the stage.

The eyes searching in the darkness are the same, and the light they are looking at is the same. Being here and being elsewhere are both contemporarily conceivable, present, evident. A crack opens up in the cement of things tightly enchained by causes; the facts, their effects and other events reveal themselves according to a new logic similar to the dreams, with which I learn to know my freedom.

I perform a vocal and physical “partitura” according to certain codes, within a strictly defined and organized space, and I am free. My freedom drives me to the border. This is the game between two polarities: nucleus and borders. The access

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to the nucleus is being systematically denied to me; this is the condition, the field of the tragic, and I feel myself constantly driven to the border. It is the shape of the spiral in its circular movement; it is inside me, in every cell of me.

How many things that I do not know are written there! The whole work is about the intensity of passing the limits, the border of the body; according to that principle, I drive myself to the limit of my stamina and there I discover that energy renews itself, so that I can continue. It all has to do with the intensity of passing the border between the bodies. This is one of the aspects of Dionysos: bodies that try to intertwine with each other, to devour each other, to blend into one.

This is the reality of an embrace in Attis Theatre. This is the meaning of hitting the ground with the whole body, penetrate in it, cancel the ­distance. It is all about the intensity of crossing the limit between the material and immaterial body.

By practicing the body with plasticity, forging it, warming it up, pushing it to its extreme limits, the body becomes a bridge towards the intangible, the perfect ­medium for the individual and collective memory to emerge. At the limit, at the border. Which border is more present in every moment of our lives that that­ between life and death? Where else could be the place of the tragic theatre, rather than in the privileged corner of Attis Theatre? We see life behind the backdrop of death, from an extreme distance. The tragic actor looks at the audience from this distance. Therefore, I find myself being between the living and the dead. To me, the audience, time after time, seems as if consisting of dead people; for them I’m playing now, I am at their opposite now, me, dead for the living, living for the dead. I become a border, a door, a crack, a passage. This border is continuously moving, you will never reach it, it is always opening new distances, in a perspective of­­ infinity. The work of Attis Theatre, Terzopoulos’ proposal, aims to cross any sort of border: physical, material, spatial, temporal, cultural, emotional. It breaks down the borders, from one side and the other, and creates passages, bridges. It is a very beautiful kind for art.

This testimony comes from my direct experience, my practice as an actor, many conversations with Theodoros and an uninterrupted reflection, which continues since my first meeting with him and Attis Theatre.

I participated in the following Attis Theatre’s productions: Antigone by Sophocles (Teatro Olimpico di Vicenza, Epidaurus, Korea, Japan, China 1994/95/97), Eremos by Carlo Michelstaedter (Athens, Lecce, Silanus,

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­ erugia, Vignola, Milano, Genova, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Perm, London, Kiato, P ­Eleusis, Zagreb), Antigone by Sophocles (Philadelphia, USA, 2016).

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The Acting Method of Terzopoulos as a Means to Confrontation With Our Age of “Total Decay” KEREM KARABOĞA Professor, Department of Theatre Criticism and Dramaturgy, Faculty of Letters, Istanbul University, TURKEY

On the eve of World War II, which terrorized all humanity, Freud argued that the tendency for aggression is an innate, independent and instinctual disposition in ­human and constituted the most powerful obstacle to the civilization. He alleged, Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. However, the innate tendency for aggression in human resists the process of civilization. This instinct of aggression is the derivative and main representative of the death instinct (Thanatos) we have found alongside of Eros, sharing his rule over the earth1.

It seems that today we can interpret Freud’s remarks in the opposite way.

“Death is the stuff we build our cities from,” says Heiner Müller in his poem ­“Showdown”2. And as Müller suggested, it has always been the instinct of a­ ggression that shapes civilization. Today’s civilization can only be regarded as the wreckage of a civilization, which constantly rises and evolves by developing. Based on the ­crises nowadays experienced in all countries and hedonist insensitivities in many parts of the world, we can predict that there will not be any remains of this wreckage soon. We are in an age of “total decay” experiencing “the end of the world as we know it.”

As we all experience the same decay, it is of vital importance to review the link between Eros and Thanatos. What ways can we create to orient our understanding of destruction toward life? What can we do with our own tools as artists? As far as I am concerned, these questions make it even more important to analyze the theatre and works of Terzopoulos, which are of great value.

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When the acting methodology of Terzopoulos is considered, at first glance, the actors’ bodies, being liberated from all mental restrictions along with the ecstatic physicality which renders their bodies into instruments of expression, can be likened to the abstract Kunstfigur of Oskar Schlemmer on theatrical grounds. Such a body “permits any kind of movement and any kind of position for as long time as ­desired” and it may adopt inexhaustible possibilities of perspectives, “from the ­supernatural to the nonsensical, from the sublime to the comic”. According to O ­ skar Schlemmer, a Kunstfigur is the result of liberating a human being from the slavery of self-­ imposed limitations of physicality and carrying the movement c­ haracteristic beyond one’s natural potential. In his view, “potentialities of ­constructive configuration are extraordinary on the metaphysical side as well”.3 However, despite being one of the most crucial emerging motifs of the 20th ­century modern art, abstraction has always been, in fact, a double-edged sword. As Schlemmer puts it, abstraction can either lead to meaninglessness or unlock one’s highest potential. When the body is of concern, the question that determines the dominating aspect of abstraction is as follows: “When isolated from all psycholo­ gical and social designations, what is left of the thing we call body?” The answer given by the artist/director will also shape both the expression created and the ­­aesthetical choices on the abstract stage. To illustrate, when Beckett, a great master of abstraction, is considered, seeing the bodies buried or the bodies imprisoned in a tin can without arms or legs, one may conclude that the body’s desire for life and its life energy can exist only in nostalgia. This energy does not serve any other function than eating, drinking or reproducing. The body came to earth somehow and the only genuine act it can carry out is to die as soon as possible, which Silenus with Nietzsche also claims as the best thing to do.

In Freudian terms the theatre of Beckett is a play of pain full of irony performed in the cosmos of Thanatos where the reign of Eros is about to be totally wiped out.

With this in mind and within the context of abstraction, one may think that the theatre of Terzopoulos is similar to that of Beckett. However, in tragedy, neither the act of facing death nor challenging it has the same function as in the cosmos of Beckett where one drifts into meaninglessness. The source of desire in the ecstatic energy bears the wish to create life anew. The struggle with the gods is carried out to wrestle the ‘absolute power’ from their hands. The body longs to become God, or rather attain godliness that it has lost. In this sense, the ecstatic body in ­­Terzopoulos is a primitive body in its pure vulnerability, devoid of all prejudice and

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habits it has come to learn rather than a mechanical abstraction dragged into ­meaninglessness. It is the result of a yet inseparable renewing/destructive energy in the perpetual dynamism of Eros/Thanatos.

The meeting of Eros and Thanatos in the same body, when considered in ­Freudian terms, corresponds to becoming civilized or in Lacanian terms to the stage before transforming into a cultural ‘subject’, that is, to the phase before “the feeling of who I am now”, or should I say more properly, before “ego” is formed. Ego ­emerges by repressing the “primitive I feeling” and separating “who I am” from “who I am not”. That can be associated with the phase of prohibition of incestuous intercourse with the mother and castration anxiety the father instills in the child, when it has been thought in both Freudian and Lacanian terms. Being one with the mother both in her womb and during the oral phase, the child feels complete ­happiness and omnipotence. The moment it is thrown into the world of culture or civilization these feelings disappear. The source of this irreversible ‘first disappointment’ (frustration) and the ‘first trauma’ of the body can be found here.

Culture, in fact, forbids direct satisfaction, Nirvana, and death. Death is the enemy of cultural life, that is to say, of returning to the mother’s womb. Were there no such thing as the inhibition of direct satisfaction from the mother, the biological being would not transform into a cultural ‘subject’. For this reason, ‘The Law of the Father’ is compulsory for Culture and therefore it is universal.4 In the light of the above-mentioned facts, struggling against the gods and challenging their power can both be associated with the longing for reconstructing one’s completeness by revolting against the law of the father. To this end, the body has to remember the ‘first trauma’ that led to the separation of ‘who I am’ from ‘who I am not’. It is the death of Dionysos in his mother’s womb or ‘the first death’ of Dionysos symbolized by his body being torn into pieces by Titans. The human body knows this pain and this is where the deep source of tragic pain resides. When considered politically, it is the pain stemming from being thrown into a culture one does not want to be a part of and being imprisoned by its laws.

This political element in Terzopoulos’ method is closely related to Walter ­Benjamin’s vision of the history of the world, which should be perceived as “the doomsday” and Müller’s concept of “dialogue with the dead”. “We have to dig up the dead again and again, because only from them can we obtain a future,” says Müller.5 Renewal of life can be possible only by returning the rights of the ones who

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have fallen and reimbursing all the things sacrificed for the sake of civilization.

We should destroy the topocosmos that makes some of us murderers and some ­others victims. This is what the playwrights in the golden age of ancient Greece contemplated upon. Jan Kott suggests that the contemporaneity of Greek tragedy stems from the depiction of tyranny of fate, life and the world as well as the rejection of obedience to the world itself, creators and rulers of the world and the gods.6 Terzopoulos has created a theatre based on the rejection of obedience by keeping the reason of state of tragedy, which is the democratization of relations between ­individuals and communities.

Noticing that one’s body has been divided and exhibiting the intense life-­ renewing energy in our body buried in soil are both crucial in this respect. The actor of Terzopoulos must be able to embrace both parts of this double self: ego and ­non-ego. To put it in technical terms, the actor can capture this opportunity either by transcending his physical limits to create new channels for new codes of ­expression or by getting deeper into the impulsive origin of an existent expression.

If the actor manages to cope with this tough duty in his daily training and ­rehearsals, he will then be able to experience the feeling called “pure consciousness” by Indian dancers and actors in his performance.

Zeami defined a similar feeling hundred years ago when he explained the movement beyond consciousness: “A bird poised in the sky with its wings stretched”7.

This poise is never static in the theatre of Terzopoulos. On the contrary, it keeps its mobility and dynamism and is open to produce sudden and unexpected codes. ­Rising in falling – a mobile poise between Eros and Thanatos and contrast in ­balance - revolts against the absolutist topocosmos. The experience of an actor is not only an aesthetical one but also an experience of a human being who consciously sacrifices himself by opposing the values of a narcissistic society. The actor can reach the audience inasmuch as he is sincere in this experience.

In Terzopoulos’ productions, the bodies are presented to destroy themselves by surrendering to ordinariness and to try to liberate themselves by making contact with agonizing memories in the collective memory. The actors travel to ­Hades so as to leave the audience with their shamelessness regarding themselves, the mistake of identifying their body with their culturally acquired identity and their obsession to view the individual only as a mental entity, which Heiner Müller also rejects.

Nationalistic or sexist cultural codes cannot be displayed in such a body as everyone is equal in death and destruction. The tragedy and the Dionysian primitive body

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remind us of this equality and suggest that we can refresh our lives by making use of this information. The aim of a dialogue with the Gods who are ­already dead, the “other” of our own body and victims of tyranny, is to find peaceful and democratic means of communication resulting from shared suffering.8 The theatre of Terzopoulos is a theatre performed with an intense life energy ­embracing a strong desire to create life anew, but one that is closely linked with death, one that is performed on the way to death. It is a theatre that sways from ‘everything’, emanating from the bodily energy full of Dionysian ecstacy to ‘nothing’ in the infinite reflections of Kunstfigur. It is a theatre that brings together the upper hand of the power elite and the lower hand of the sufferers. It is a theatre where the depth of ritualistic time and the present moment of theatrical time merge. In short, it is the theatre of Dionysos that embraces within itself contradictions while unifying them and it is the theatre of Attis, who castrates himself with his own hands just to be reborn every year by flowering in his mother’s soil, the soil of Cybele.

1

Freud, 1999, p. 76-77.

2

Müller, 2001, p. 235.

3

Schlemmer, 1996, p. 29.

4

Tura, 1989, p. 38.

5

Kalb, 1998, p.15.

6

Kott, 2006.

7

Masakazu, 1984, p. xii.

8

Karaboga, ˘ 2019, p. 158.

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Bibliography Freud, Sigmund (1999) Uygarlıgın ˘ translated by Haluk Barıscan, ¸ ˘ Huzursuzlugu, Istanbul, Metis Kalb, Jonathan (1998) The Theater of Heiner Müller, Cambridge University Press Karaboga, ˘ Kerem (2019) “Transcending the Borders Through Tragedy: Terzopoulos in Turkey”, Dionysos in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, ­Berlin, Theater der Zeit Kott, Jan (2006) Antik Tragedyalar ve Çagdas ¸ Selen, ˘ ¸ Yorumları, translated by Ayse Istanbul, Mitos-Boyut Masakazu, Yamazaki (1984) “The Aesthetics of Ambiguity: The Artistic Theories of Zeami”, On the Art of the Noh Drama – The Major Treatises of Zeami, tr.

J. Thomas Rimer, Yamazaki Masakazu, Princeton University Press Müller, Heiner (2001) “Showdown”, A Heiner Müller Reader – Plays, Poetry, Prose, ed.&tr. Carl Weber, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press Schlemmer, Oskar (1996) “Man and Art Figure”, The Theater of the Bauhaus, ed.

Walter Gropius and Arthur S. Wensinger, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press Tura, Saffet Murat (1989) Freud’dan Lacan’a Psikanaliz, Istanbul, Ayrıntı

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The Universal Body: Exploring the Methodology in the United States JUSTIN JAIN Acting Company member, Wilma Theater. Professor of Acting, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, USA

“The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured… others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches… and shall master all attachment.”

This quintessential American sentiment from poet Walt Whitman captures the national spirit that all Americans are driven by: Mastery. We love to acquire, incorporate, take in, and take up. It is both our strength and our curse.

And so when the American actor meets Theodoros Terzopoulos’ approach, it is a radical act of violence. The methodology is intense and turbulent. It forces the actor to confront the self in its most vulnerable and primal moments. It encourages the artist to question everything that came before and to try seeing things anew.

Of the American actor, who hungers to understand, to control, to master their craft, to impose dominion, Terzopoulos asks the opposite. Rather than understanding with the mind, we must have a sense with the body. Seek abandon in the deconstruction of the body, and the function of the breath and voice will follow. The breath is the energy. The play is the material, not the target. There is no target - no perfection or virtuosity, nothing to conquer. Move toward point B, and it moves further away. Yet as the poet Constantine Cavafy teaches us, it is the forward motion that counts: “When you start on your journey to Ithaca, then pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge.”

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In the United States, our theatre education is steeped in the psychological realism of the Russian pioneer Konstantin Stanislavsky. We have adapted his teachings to become naturalistic approaches – Meisner, Strasberg, Stella Adler, Hagen… They teach us that performance is our ultimate goal, that the text, subtext, and character are our pillars. That we must approach our interpretation of the play through beats, actions, and pre-meditated objectives. In order to be present and active, we must be trying to change the other.

Meanwhile, the Terzopoulos method begs us not to change the other, but to be generous. To give, not take or demand. To move through the play toward something greater. That everyone has a responsibility to the collective field of energy through the breath, focus, and concentration. To think with the body, rather than with the mind.

One of the things I love most about Mr. Terzopoulos is his utter disdain for anything Sentimental, Self-indulgent, Disconnected, Apolitical, or Careless. Quite a list, but together these things boil down to one simple word: Sense. In our training, we are urged again and again to cultivate an inner sense of the capital B, Body. This means our corporal body, yes, but it also includes imagination, memory, history, inner life, spirit, and instinct. He wants to put the actor at the center of creation for these things, moving beyond and through the acting teacher, past the director, through the audience itself, to the gods, to Dionysos. He goes for a theatre that is timely, challenging, and generous. He talks about generosity in the training, about being giving of your energy for the other through the breath. But I think this sentiment permeates the work itself. How can the play itself be generous? How can this cause a rift, even a confrontation of self, for the audience?

My experience of this has been quite frequent over the past few years. In January 2015, I did my first 10-day workshop with Mr. Terzopoulos in Philadelphia in the United States. Later that year, I was a performer in his production of Antigone at the Wilma Theatre, where I am a company member. Last summer, I completed the full 30-day training in Athens, Greece. Today, I am an instructor of the methodology both at the University of the Arts and at The Wilma.

It is a unique and special experience to pass this methodology on to others. As a part of the core Acting Company at The Wilma, called The HotHouse, and one of only a few American actors to have both been in a show directed by Mr. Terzopoulos and to have trained at Attis Theatre with him, I often find myself in the leadership position of teaching the methodology to the company-at-large.

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What an intimidating responsibility! Thankfully, we meet weekly and train together throughout the theatre season in Terzopoulos’ approach. This is rather unprecedented in contemporary American Theatre. Indeed, when a show is running, the industry standard is to arrive thirty minutes before a performance. At the Wilma, we meet two hours before curtain to train together, and in doing so have the opportunity to connect with one another in deeper, more profound ways. I see my fellow artists developing technically before my very eyes. Their instruments, like mine, grow stronger and more focused. Perhaps the greatest benefit of all is the instant and palpable sense of ensemble, and thus community. We feel more comfortable and confident with one another to take risks. This deep, in-body listening translates directly to our performances and acting choices. Our need to understand, control, or dominate a scene recedes in service of something greater than ourselves.

At the helm of all of this stands our artistic director and my collaborator, Blanka Zizka, whom you will hear also in this conference. Without Blanka’s vision, I would not be here today and Theodoros Terzopoulos would not have brought his work to Philadelphia.

Though I myself have only taught the methodology for a year now, I have been continually impressed with how the method traverses age, ability, gender, race, and sexuality. No matter who the artist is, this work is about insisting on the moment at hand. Because of this, I am constantly digging deeper. Every time I have to articulate an action, or share a philosophical theory, or even with each breath I take in demonstrating, I confront myself once more. And that is what I find so rich for me in this practice: The work never stops. There is always more to excavate. It liberates me from the need to “understand” or “master”. This is very un-American. As Mr. Terzopoulos so lovingly puts it, “There is no Ithaca.” And Cavafy reminds us: “Keep Ithaca always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way” Sharing these ideas with fellow American artists has been incredibly challenging and rewarding. This method is a fundamental approach to theatre training, company

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building, artistic expression, and selflessness. This includes a great deal of undoing and rethinking ages of cultural bias and core values. It has personally encouraged me to re-evaluate my entire drama school training, the current climate of American Theatre, and to interrogate my own artistic aesthetic.

Samuel Beckett says: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” Well, I believe Theodoros Terzopoulos is a visionary who has done just that. The benefits of his methodology have permeated my life both onstage and off. Terzopoulos marries a deep philosophy to his approach about how to be a better artist, yes, but also how to be a better human, if your heart is open to it, if you remember that Ithaca is not a place to conquer, but to spend a lifetime journeying toward.

Photos page 96–99 Photo 1. Demonstration The Return of Dionysos, led by Theodoros Terzopoulos,

Savvas Stroumpos. Participating the teachers of the method Mikhail Sokolov, Przemyslaw Blaszcak, Juan Esteban Echeverri Arango, Justin Jain, Paolo Musio, Li Yadi, Long Long, Rustem Begenov, Kerem Karaboga, Yiling Tsai, Niovi Charalampous, Evelyn Assouad, Frynihos Theatre Multi-Purpose Hall (photo Andreas Simopoulos) Photo 2. Demonstration TheReturn of Dionysos, led by Theodoros Terzopoulos,

Savvas Stroumpos. Participating the teachers of the method Mikhail Sokolov, Przemyslaw Blaszcak, Juan Esteban Echeverri Arango, Justin Jain, Paolo Musio, Li Yadi, Long Long, Rustem Begenov, Kerem Karaboga, Yiling Tsai, Niovi Charalampous, Evelyn Assouad, Frynihos Theatre Multi-Purpose Hall (photo Andreas Simopoulos)

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An Extraordinary Journey of Attis LI YADI Acting teacher, Beijing Central Academy of Drama, Director, CHINA

I am very honored to be invited to the beautiful Mediterranean sea, the birthplace of dramatic arts, to participate in the symposium “THE RETURN OF DIONYSOS”, an outstanding gathering and a celebration of Mr. Terzopoulos’ meaningful contribution to Theatre Arts worldwide in the amazing period of 33 years. Being able to study with my Master and moreover being invited to take part in such an important occasion to speak before you all, is the most memorable moment of my life so far.

The training process in Attis Theater is of a great significance. I rediscovered myself, found a new sense of drama and a new perception of my life. In those eight years, since the first time I came to study with Mr. Terzopoulos in 2010, Attis not only allowed me to comprehend some physical and spiritual concepts meant to boost up one’s self-perfection and surpass the training methods I knew; it also helped me to discover an extraordinary way to combine acting with stage and ­theatre with life. Furthermore, it helped me to open a door to the exploration of an ultimate and inspiring theatre by returning to nature and simplicity.

The first time I came to study with the Master was in the winter of 2010. It started like a dream. Savvas Stroumpos and Antonis Myriagkos, both actors of ­Attis Theatre, introduced me to the Attis Acting Training System – its content and warming up, agility and deconstruction exercises. Starting from the most simple and basic training, I gradually got into the Attis Acting Training System to experience the training itself and the concepts of performance and creation it contains, called the Basic Principles of Attis Theatre.

An actor embodies life on stage relying on his/her own body and soul, so the most important thing before starting rehearsals and the creative process is to unite the body with the mind and thus act in a natural and harmonious way.

Relaxation was the most important precondition for the training, while concentration was the basic necessity. The actor’s body should be as flexible as water but with great power as well. Being relaxed is the only way to enable power to flow

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through the body. The warm-up in Attis Theater stresses out the high level of ­concentration; an actor is required to focus on his/her body as well as on the partner’s, a synchronization and cooperation with the partner and the environment.

During the training, the actor needs to maintain the concentration, which means one must “empty” his/her mind. This is very similar to the “emptiness” in Chinese traditional philosophy: silence, concentration and tranquility. Once being “relaxed” and concentrated, one can naturally discard distractions and fulfill the training.

Secondly, in the training, breathing is considered the source of power for body movement, while waist and abdomen are the cores. Breathing is elementary for both life and actor training, a foundation of actors’ life and stage presence, it is the source of energy. If an actor’s body is, let’s say a car, all muscles and the skeleton will be its components and parts. Then the abdomen is like an engine, the air ­­becomes its fuel; the air activates the abdomen, which then conveys the power to the whole body. This is the important role, which breathing and the abdomen play in the whole acting training system. For an actor, breathing and activating his/her abdomen should be a natural process, but achieving it is quite challenging.

In four weeks’ time, although the training intensity was increasing, the burden for my body was slowly descending and progress was unconsciously achieved. I started having a deeper understanding on the training system. I discovered some extraordinary similarities between traditional Chinese philosophy and the training system’s demands. Taoism stresses the theory that man is an integral part of n­ ature; it advocates form, artistry and harmony. Mainly it focuses on Yin and Yang - the combination of dynamic and static state.

Of course, accomplishing such kind of training requires adequate muscular power. It allows you to move every part of your body as you wish for, breath in ­different ways, complete movements of various levels of difficulty. It is never easy.

But I realized how refreshing and mysterious the training was for me. Undoubtedly, Attis training system will have a positive and lasting influence on my professional acting career I have been dedicated to for twenty years now.

After returning to China, I often think of the days I spent studying in Attis ­Theatre, and I keep training myself on a daily basis, because now I know that Attis Theatre actors practice the training every day. For example, Savvas and Antonis have been doing the warm-up exercises for fifteen years without interruption. It is in such tireless repetition that an actor’s body can constantly go beyond itself physically and become stronger; at the same time, you learn how to efficiently use your

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abdomen and achieve control through breathing. This is the only way that the training can be accomplished more meticulously, consistently, coherently, persistently, naturally, and aesthetically. In addition, you can clearly understand and grasp the concepts of drama and aesthetic principles underlying in the training. In the process of persisting the training I got the opportunity for the first time to work with Mr. Terzopoulos.

In 2011 Mr. Terzopoulos and Savvas came to The Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, China, to stage Antigone with a class from the Acting Department. This was my first time to closely follow the creation of Mr. Terzopoulos’ directing ­process. Before they came to China, I worked for four weeks with the class of thirdyear students and it was my first time to use Attis Acting Training System in China to train Chinese actors, which was of a tremendous help for Mr. Terzopoulos’ young actors. They grasped the base, but he, being who he is, knew very well that training the students for just a period of time in order to create an Attis Theatre piece was somewhat difficult, that’s why he was willing to teach Chinese acting students how to establish a proper, systematic and high-quality theatre concept.

Just as Mr. Terzopoulos said, Attis training is not just practice, it is a concept. It is the concept and purpose of Attis Acting Training System. The training aims not only to exercise the actor’s body and muscles but, using the body, to open his/her heart, awaken his/her spirit and mind. Through the training the actor can freely use and control his/her body and voice during the process of creation.

After some readjustments made by Mr. Terzopoulos and through the control over the chorus with a few basic physical elements, using the simplest content of the training, the scene was totally transformed. The power released by the actors’ ­bodies and voices stunned everyone. The performance of Antigone made the ­Chinese audience appreciate the combination of ancient and modern through Attis Training and experience the genuine ancient Greek dramatic vibes. But what’s more important is the effect on the acting students – they immersed their knowledge on Attis Theatre’s aesthetics concept as well as the principles and aim of the training. Mr. Terzopoulos guided the students to continuously be aware of their bodies on stage, to focus on their abdomen and find their core position - all during the training and the creation of the performance; thus, they kept their body in a controlled and natural state of relaxation even in this long performance. During the working process, our acting students shaped a creative concept and cultivated ­physical and mental habits.

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Through my work this time I confirmed my belief in the tremendous metamorphosis that Attis Training brings on an actor’s body and mind. In the following four years I did my best on bringing the training to a greater number of Chinese students at the Central Drama Academy of Beijing, from warming up to agility ­exercises, from deconstruction to voice exercises. I myself kept training and thus rediscovered the charm of Attis Training and got deeply affected by the details in it.

Mr. Terzopoulos kept encouraging me to continue my training and this was why I got the chance to come back to Attis Theatre for the second time.

In the summer of 2015 with the kind help of Mr. Terzopoulos I came back together with other actors from Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Poland, Russia, USA and other countries and did a 30-day long course in Attis Training. Being the only Asian in the group I was more than honored and excited to be part of it and share my own experience on the training with actors from all over the world. The workshop we did was divided in five sections: basic exercises, physical agility exercises, voice ­exercises, deconstruction and infinitive improvisation. Mr. Terzopoulos together with Savvas worked with us on establishing a good physical consciousness, activating the breathing function, eliminate body and voice habits, develop subconscious creating abilities by surpassing physical limits, discover the freedom of body and voice in confrontation with the material of ancient tragedy. The Deconstruction and Infinitive improvisation transferred me to a completely different new world.

They made me understand in a better way the creative principle by Konstantin Stanislavsky on using the consciousness to get to the processes of the subconsciousness.

In the 30-day training Mr. Terzopoulos kept telling me not to impose my existing ideas and awareness on the training, let the body find its own control instead.

Changes brought about in such training are favorable and positive. He often ­reminded me that the aim of the training is not to accomplish some magnificent and gorgeous movements. One should never think that way. Instead, through the training we should focus on the body, observe how it works and be aware of every change it undergoes. Each movement shall reach its limits in a controlled and natural way.

Mr. Terzopoulos emphasized that none of the exercises is rigid or fixed, we must develop them all, improve them, set free our thinking instead of limiting the body’s creativity with our will, find out our own body’s patterns.

I had the chance to better verify the principles of those precious exercises in 2016, when Mr. Terzopoulos came once again to my academy to direct Agamemnon.

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This time, I was the assisting director of the performance and got the amazing chance to work directly with him. Like the previous time, he focused on structuring the show and amazed everyone with dealing on his own with all the components of the performance – stage design, costumes, light design, make-up keeping at the same time vigorous and strict artistic energy. This time the stage we used was the big theatre of the academy, which as a space was already a huge challenge for the students. But even with such a challenge, Mr. Terzopoulos kept his style of work: no big set, but the actors’ creativity and expression. Eventually, the control they had over the scenes was astonishing – their physicality was part of the stage space which produced limitless emotional excitement. It reminded me of what Alla ­Demidova said about Theodoros Terzopoulos: “That moment the curtain opens, you know already it is Terzopoulos’ work. That defines a master.”

The opening of the show finished with an explosion of cheerful applause, which for the students was surprising. They didn’t realize what a powerful presence they had on stage. Mr. Terzopoulos had led them through to such a transformation.

Attis Theatre is unique, with high standards and good creative taste. Mr. Terzopoulos and his Attis Acting Training System have a distinct creation style and ­pursuit of drama aesthetics, which is attributed to the strong connection between training and performance. An actor cannot accomplish a performance in Attis without being systematically trained through the Attis’ way.

Attis Acting Training System has constantly evolved through a period from Theodoros Terzopoulos’s theatre studies to his independent work as a director, and the years of developing Attis Theatre. In this system, no exercise remains ­­unchanged, they are all ready for adaptation, innovation and extension; it aims not to enable some magnificent rehearsals or blind repetitions, but a process of creation and sublimation; it teaches how to feel every part of your body through the exercise, experience the tension and relaxation of your muscles as well as the coordination of your joints and muscles as a whole entity. One can flexibly digest and apply what is learnt in the training. Studying with Mr. Terzopoulos was an amazing experience for me – it brought a change that exceeded my expectation and imagination.

It’s been about eight years of studies, training, cooperation and friendship with Mr. Theodoros Terzopoulos, which made me discover a new Drama World.

Throughout this period, I kept asking myself, what does Attis Training mean to me during this “Attis journey”? I must say that the Attis Acting Training System and its drama theories are not limited to theatre art; they are an attitude towards life.

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Attis helped me rediscover the essence of performance and life. If you choose to be a professional actor, you need to be prepared; there is no end in this road. I believe everyone in Attis Theatre will share my view. I want to express my gratitude to all of you. Thank you, Greece! Thank you Mr. Theodoros Terzopoulos, thank you Savvas and Antonis, thank you Attis! Thank you all!

Dionysos is an actor’s belief!

Each actor carries in his heart his own Dionysos!

Returning to Dionysos is the road to finding our creative belief anew!

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My Experience of the Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos PRZEMYSLAW BLASZCZAK Actor, Grotowski Institute, POLAND

My meeting with the method was somehow like jumping into deep water, without really knowing what lies under the surface. I did not have the chance to attend the workshop first, or to hear anything from someone who had worked with or studied this method. My first meeting with the art of Mr. Terzopoulos and Attis Theatre was in 2009, when I saw a performance he presented in Wroclaw in the festival “The World as a place of truth”. That was Ajax, the madness. The performance was performed in Greek, which I do not speak, but I was absolutely captured by the energy of the actors; the powerful, authentic human process I was witnessing; the truth of the actions; and the simplicity (in the best sense) of the set. The performance was speaking in a strong, direct way. I remember that it crossed my mind that I would love to try one day to work this way. I must say that my experience till that moment was mainly in the so-called physical theatre, where we mostly speak through our ­bodies and actions using very little text, or not using any at all. In Zar Theatre, where I still work today, we practice singing, but text work was never our main ­domain.

In 2012, there was an open call for an audition for the new production that Mr. Terzopoulos was going to direct at the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw. I knew I had to try it. The audition was my first meeting with this method, and after these first two or three days, I knew that I had just found something that included the answers for many of my professional questions and desires. I was so happy and lucky to be selected to start working on the Polish version of Heiner Müller’s ­Mauser. So, together with the group of selected actors, we started intensive training and rehearsals for the performance.

Looking at the past, I am not sure whether we were really aware that what we were doing was in fact such a systematic and complex method. We had merely the

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feeling that we were doing a very intense and interesting training, leading us t­ owards the performance – or at least this is how I see it now.

I remember that, close to the premiere, we were so shocked (in a positive sense) that the work with Mr. Terzopoulos is so precise: that he really knows what he wants to get from the actor; that he is working (we used this metaphor very often, in the conversations after rehearsals) like a doctor doing surgery. Making precise cuts, opening what needs to be opened, and cleaning out what is useless and disturbing.

And, most importantly, that he is doing so in a way that actors fully trust him and want to follow him, without doubts.

This is the way I was introduced to the method, and the method was introduced to me. It was a very complex, powerful experience, but I was aware that we had reached just the tip of the iceberg – that there were much more to discover.

During the process of the rehearsals, I could precisely feel how the changes were happening inside me. And this is not a metaphor – it was a physical sensation.

During the period we were working on Mauser, we did training every day, sometimes twice a day, and also the second step of the training – the deconstruction or liberation of the triangle. Through this intensive practice, we started to change the way we move, the way we are connected to our bodies and we experience our breath. One of the first visible stamps of the method is the opening of the pelvis, which – when it happened – changed the way I was breathing and using my voice.

I started to really perceive my body, as if it had just started to breathe in a correct, full way. Before meeting Mr. Terzopoulos, I had a lot of experience in working with the body. As I said, I had worked as an actor in very physically demanding performances. I am also a teacher of martial arts, so the connection to the breath was something I had worked with before. However, the method was pointing out much more subtle qualities, showing a whole range of hidden possibilities. On the level of physical changes, I would like to point out the most visible and significant for me: • The opening, or liberation, of the pelvis. This helped me to stabilize and make my breathing more efficient. Over a longer engagement with this process, it also allowed my voice to start resonating in a lower register than before.

• The activation of the spine. First of all, that brings back the sense of verticality.

Then, it helps to unlock breathing and to eliminate the shallow breathing (for example, losing the breath in speech or singing). Many times, during the train-

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ing, especially in the early period of practicing it, I had very strong cracks in my spine, as it was placing itself into the right position thanks to the vibration we provoked during the deconstruction of the triangle.

• Activation and focus. As the training requires very special focus and activation, you are not allowed to somehow fall inside yourself, or practice it in a self-­ evident way. Our presence needs to be very active, projected out with clear point of focus. After some time of practicing the training, your ability to remain concentrated, with very high intensity of presence, starts to be stronger and stronger. I remember that, in the course of the rehearsals, Mr. Terzopoulos was calling it “the body in a state of alarm”. Thanks to the training, getting there becomes more and more easy, almost natural. It becomes second nature.

After experiencing all of these physical changes in my body – something that ­happened during the period we were working on Mauser - I had another very strong physical experience: the experience of the text, of every single word. Thanks to the work with Mr. Terzopoulos, I experienced for the very first time (and maybe this is the most important discovery for me) the physicality of the text. I started to sense how the words originate in the guts, how they travel through the body, how they hit the inner parts, how they resonate, and how they can open and create greater inner space. More strongly than ever before, I experienced the difference between the text that is memorized and delivered (just spoken or, better, reproduced) and the text that is embodied, that becomes part of my physical process. That was a great and powerful discovery, which changed my way of thinking about the theatre and the function of the text. I need to underline that this discovery was an effect of practicing the physical training, and without the change in my inner connection, it would probably never have happened.

During the training, especially, when I had a chance to work with Savvas, he often used to underline the inner aspect of the training. And he did so in a very physical way. He used to say “try to sense that you are moved by the air of exhalation, or to sense how the movement comes from within”. It is not a metaphor. I could experience it in myself. But I have also seen it many times, when, thanks to the invitation of Mr. Terzopoulos, I came to study his method more deeply in Greece, in Attis, during the summer school. I saw how people, step by step, shifted from an external way of moving, towards something very honest, interesting, powerful and authentic. And it is immediately visible, that the move is not just an external, aesthetical

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realization of the concept, but the visible manifestation of the inner process happening within the performer. The difference is huge. When I recommend to people to participate in the summer school in Attis, I always say, “Go, these 30 days will change your body, and will probably change who you are”.

For me, my meeting with the method, studying it and learning also how to teach the training, gave me a very strong impulse into artistic maturity. It gave me the tools and the courage to start a studio, to work with actors, to become a director. I know that I am on the very beginning of my route but, thanks to the method, I know I have a very precise and deeply human toolbox with me, so I always feel safe in ­going to the unknown. It is a big thing to say, but meeting with the method ­changed my life, and I am very grateful for it. Using this opportunity I have today, I would like to express once more my heartfelt thanks to Mr. Terzopoulos, for ­everything he gave me – and it is a lot. And also, to my teachers and friends, Antonis Myriagkos and Savvas Stroumpos. A huge thank you.

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The Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos: My Experience as an Actor and Assistant Director RUSTEM BEGENOV Actor, Director ORTA Center, KAZAKHSTAN

Salemetsizderme, qurmetti qauym!

(It means “Hello, dear members of the symposium” in Kazakh)

My name is Rustem Begenov, I am a theatre director and producer in an independent theatre company called ORTA, based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I am humbled and honored to be here today and speak about my experience as an assistant­ director to and an actor in Maestro Theodoros Terzopoulos’ performance the ­Bacchae, which he staged at Electrotheatre Stanislavsky in Moscow in 2015.

No need to say that meeting the Maestro, his method and his theatre have been a very important encounter in my artistic life. Therefore, I would like to share some thoughts and lessons I took from that encounter.

I met Theodoros in 2013, when my mentor, great theatre director and teacher Boris Yukhananov took over a hundred-year-old state theatre named after Stanislavsky and situated right in the heart of Moscow and decided to turn it into a center for international directing. Although, the theatre was in very bad technical, reputational and artistic condition, Boris was able to establish a foundation and raise money to restore the beautiful old theatre building, to purchase finest lighting, sound, video equipment and theatre machinery. However, the most important thing was that Boris was able to call the world’s greatest directors to stage performances in this theatre. Only in the first two years, directors such as Heiner Goeb-

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bels, Romeo Castellucci and Theodoros Terzopoulos staged their performances at Electrotheatre Stanislavsky.

I don’t know all the details, but Boris Yukhananov met Theodoros Terzopoulos and they agreed that the very first production of the renovated Electrotheatre Stanislavsky, which was going to open in January 2015, would be Theodoros’ direction of the Bacchae. At that time, I was in my second year at Yukhananov’s school of directing and was very lucky to know English, because Boris proposed me to be Theodoros’ interpreter. And Theodoros proposed me to be his assistant on the staging of the performance. Of course, I happily agreed.

Shortly after the beginning of the training and rehearsals for the performance, Theodoros told me: “You need to join the training, this will help you become a good director.” Of course, I wanted to become a good director, so I joined the training.

And the very next day after that Theodoros told me: “You need to play in the performance as a part of the chorus. Good directors must know what it is like to be an ­actor on stage.” I was scared, but happily agreed.

Then the two months, super-intense, extremely demanding eight-hour-a-day rehearsals started, followed by Theodoros’ assignments regarding the production process of the scenography, costumes and props, as well as interpreting tasks, ­managing meetings and scheduled interviews. It was so demanding, that I barely ­survived. I tried to save some energy by working not too hard in the rehearsals, and postponing as many administrative tasks as I could. But it didn’t work. The more I tried to save energy the more tired I got. And I was looking at Theodoros, who had been living and working way more intensely than that for thirty years by then. And I figured that there must be some kind of a secret. And Theodoros told me the ­secret. He said: “The human body is a limitless source of energy, and the more ­energy you give the more energy you produce.”

And this is what Maestro Terzopoulos has been doing. He has been generously giving energy to everybody around him – actors, designers, assistants, technicians, and, of course, the audience too. Non-stop for more than 33 years. And this is what the theatre of Terzopoulos has been doing – giving energy to the audience. And this energy is not the small, nervous, hysteric energy of little every-day life problems, nor is it the miserable energy of any social media agenda. But it is the greatest energy theatre can offer. It is the divine energy, or, in the words of Theodoros himself, the energy of Dionysos.

Unfortunately, in today’s world people are mostly consumers. By default, ­people tend to take and not to give. They are afraid of giving energy to others, by all

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means they want to save some energy for themselves. Human beings have been turned into survivors, not creators. They try to find any sources of energy in the world – in hatred, in bad news, in fights, in wars. They even try to take energy from others around them. Just like infants looking for mama’s breast. Or like a vampire, like ­Theodoros showed it in one of his recent works – Nosferatu. And this is the most important concept that the theatre of Terzopoulos reveals today, that the human shall be giving and not taking. Even in the theatre, in most of the cases, the actors suck energy from the audience – either because they just want to take energy, or they just don’t know how to be giving and not taking.

And this is what the method of Theodoros Terzopoulos is about. It is a method to open this endless source of energy which is the human body. It is a method, based on ancient knowledge and rediscovered and constantly being sharpened by Theodoros ­­ and his close collaborators that can help actors, and directors, and any artist to be giving great pure deep energy from the stage to the audience.

The premiere of the Bacchae took place in January 2015 and it officially opened the new Electrotheatre Stanislavsky after two years of renovation. And since the premiere, it has been very successful and beloved by the audience, the company and the staff. Maestro’s close and thorough work on the performance with all of the ­departments in Electrotheatre – props department, sewing shop, light department, sound department, administration and, of course, the actors, – was like tuning the engine of the new theatre. Or to put it better, the body of the new theatre. And not only that theatre.

This lesson by Maestro Terzopoulos - that one shall give energy generously and systematically – not only helped me survive that intense production period, but also to go back to Kazakhstan and do theatre there. Because another big ­lesson I took from Theodoros was that all the meanings, all the concepts lie in your roots, which is your native culture. So, together with my wife, actress ­Alexandra Morozova, we started our creative company ORTA. What we do is bringing together artists and professionals from very different fields, to search for new forms of theatre.

The following core principles and skills I have received from Theodoros and from working with him have been crucial in my work: – give always energy and not take – be able to concentrate for long periods on one thing

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– be sensitive for the energy of people around and carefully gather a team of­ people with similar energy – never half-way – if you do anything, do it at your best and if you learn anything learn it really well and deeply – always act structured – chaotic, uncultivated energy is destructive – if you are a director, be as well a producer, an organizer, a psycho-manager – always know what is going on in the world and try to see the roots and not just the surface – always go deep because the future lies in the depth – always be courageous – always keep humor In these three years, our company ORTA released two performances. Those were interdisciplinary projects. The first production involved 30 people, and the second more than 40. Aesthetically, these performances are very different from Theodoros’ theatre. But it would be absolutely impossible to stage them without the lessons I have received from Maestro Theodoros Terzopoulos. I am very grateful and lucky to have this experience, to know and work with Theodoros and his very close collaborator and friend director Savvas Stroumpos. They have been able to share their knowledge so selflessly and so generously for so many years with so many people, that it obviously has already changed and will keep changing the world.

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A Journey to the Unknown – My Reflections on the Return of the Dionysos LIN CHIEN-LANG Theatre performer, Taiwan National Theatre/ Theatre Academy, TAIWAN

In autumn 2016, following the collaboration of Attis Theatre and Taiwan National Theatre, we presented the Greek tragedy The Bacchae at the Liberty Square in ­Taipei. This performance was one of the most unforgettable productions throughout the whole season of our International Theatre Festival. The performing area, which included a central stage and orchestra with a surrounding auditorium, was unified as a whole in order to create the impression of an ancient Greek theatre, to give birth to the ancient tragedy of Dionysos and the people of Thebes, in front of the citizens living in Taipei today.

Even now, two years after the performance, it is still easy for me to recall all those memories rooted deeply inside my bodymind. The weather on that night was typically full of challenges: windy, cold, and the floor on the stage was slippery and wet due to the heavy rain, which ended just before we opened the show. However, when the first drumbeat penetrated through the whole space, all the performers, including the twenty-seven actors and the seven drummers, just stepped forward to the audience without any hesitation or fear.

What made us so strong and willing to take every step with no doubt? Why could we believe in ourselves and step forward into this sacrifice for God, for ­Dionysos, for human beings, for revenge, and for the audience today in our city? I believe that our discipline for the method of Mr. Terzopoulos had provided us a sustainable development of our bodymind, to improve our psychophysical capabilities and eventually to transcend who we are and step into the space, which is unknown and full of possibilities.

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My journey with Mr. Terzopoulos started in summer 2016. In order to have a proper understanding of his method, before we began to rehearse The Bacchae, I attended the international workshop in Attis Theatre in Athens. Through the ­psychophysical training led by Mr. Terzopoulos and Savvas Stroumpos, I have ­discovered the essential unification of human’s bodymind. This allowed me to be more organically open as a performer, to enhance my physicality and embodiment in productions of different styles during these years.

In this method, all the exercises should be combined with a strong will to breathe. Also, always keep a clear focus with feet grounded on the floor, and then simply follow the impulse of each breath to make physical action begin. We specifically worked on the detail to breathe through our mask all the way down to the “triangle”, which is our lower part of abdomen. At the same time, Mr. Terzopoulos provides us an image to enliven our practice of this method; this is the face of ­Dionysos, just obliquely above opposite to us. We are expected to stare at God’s face, even to look into the huge space behind that face, and then, to sense the ­unknown depth, which exists between God and our own body.

This image not only helps us to remove mental distractions and keep focus on the breath, but also creates a magnificent awareness of what we are. In my opinion, if I may use the description by another respectable mentor, Phillip Zarrilli, this is just the moment when a practitioner really is attentive to the breath and stay “inside the doing”. Through the work on triangle and image, I am more psychophysically attentive to the breath. As I keep breathing properly, it creates awareness along the spine line, extending simultaneously to my whole bodymind. And following a ­long-term discipline, this awareness can eventually be extended outwardly into the environment; so the connection between my breath, my own bodymind, and the outer world is finally actualized.

In The Bacchae, I portrayed Dionysos who is in his journey of revenge. My main challenge was to embody the character’s spirit of half-god and half-mortal, and also the process of revenging Thebes. Through the rehearsal, I used my imagination to fulfill the initial desire, personality, and memories of Dionysos, so attempting to transform my bodymind into the character. However, it did not work well at the beginning. Soon we found out that what I tried to do was merely showing the ­behaviors I already imagined in my mind. I was barely engaged in the moment, I was not being present. Later on, I discovered that this might have to do with the tension caused by my acting, which did not belong to the character I portrayed.

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As my given task was to present the nature of each acting score, I paid too much attention on doing this task well and also wanted to give an impressive interpretation of the character. Thus, I had already lost my psychophysical engagement in what was happening on stage. If I kept struggling with what I should do in front of the audience, then I would never find the potential of truly embodying my character’s nature. The result would be no living flow but only tension, for I was just trying to mimic an action with my body rather than doing this action from the inside.

Following this discovery, I went back to the essential principles of our training, and really settled down to work on my embodiment of each acting score, to engage the inner life of each moment, otherwise our rehearsals would again become ­meaningless. I refer it to the breath that is appropriate and can belong to any form.

To find out this specific breath allowed me to embody the quality of each movement, even to inhabit the flow inside a continuous sequence. In this condition, my bodymind-in-motion had been gradually performed without any extra intention.

Therefore, my main approach during this performance was to keep absorbing the living atmosphere around the whole performing area, so to create an active and fluid impulse to stimulate my breath of acting score constantly and deeply. This enlivened circulation of breath helped me to earn the energy I needed to sustain strong psychophysical actions on stage and to represent the presence of my character, Dionysos, in a way that was psychophysically not predictable, but believable.

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My Journey to the Unknown YILING TSAI Actress, Taiwan National Theatre, Lecturer, Department of Drama, College of Performing Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts, TAIWAN

In 2016, I had the great opportunity to work with Mr. Terzopoulos. He was invited by the National Theatre in Taiwan to direct The Bacchae, in which I played the leading role of Agave. Being an actress and an acting coach at the same time, I have observed both my own and the other actors’ training in Taiwan. Our task is to carry on our training after graduation from the drama academy and continuously explore our body and mind.

It has been truly inspiring training in Mr. Terzopoulos’ method because it is such a fundamental approach for actors. By focusing on breathing, concentrating on and exploring the open and deepened body, I learned to locate, reconstruct and activate the corporal axles. With the deconstruction, I challenged myself to emancipate my body and go beyond the physical and mental limits. With the training, we can develop our art to the next level and we are able to provoke deeper questions to the world.

In a post-modern era governed by rationality and a society where people only pursue efficiency, explanation and reward, it is difficult for them to appreciate this kind of training and artistic expression. However, the training process is an absolutely unique journey, if experienced on stage and by the auditorium. People should be willing to give, to sacrifice, as well as to communicate, and this is the beauty of theatre, of art. If we could practice it daily and cultivate it with patience, as it accumulates, it becomes an actor’s second nature. I remember that Mr. Terzopoulos once said that our body is much cleverer than our brain, and I always remind myself of his words in order not to limit myself in my rational mind during rehearsals of any kind of aesthetics. I realize we should let the body discover itself, unveil the secrets of itself by focusing on breathing, and looking from within.

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The rehearsals for The Bacchae were a unique experience for me. Before that, I had never truly felt ready and confident onstage, with good quality of support and strength. During the rehearsals, we explored the unknown both inside our body and outside to the world. We practiced diaphragmatic breathing to open our body, to experience the global activation and then to project the energy out. Speaking of projection, my favorite way of describing it is that we look from within and our eyes and mouths are all over our body. I realized the idea that actors are channels— we feel, receive and project energy as well as feelings from the play in a direct way.

For the past two years, I have tried to carry on the training with my mates and lead workshops with different groups of students, coming from different backgrounds, like theatre, dance, sometimes even with actors, who had no physical training background. Leading the training with different students brings me joy because it is a rewarding experience for myself to see how it works on bodies of diverse training backgrounds. Not surprisingly, I could feel and see how it works on each of us concretely. For myself, as a theatre practitioner, I always want to express Nature, to use my flesh to speak for Life, and therefore I eagerly wish to become an open energetic channel with excellent physical presence. These are the positive stimulation and the important awareness I have gained from Mr. Terzopoulos’ method. I am here in Delphi for the theatre, for this great event for Mr. Terzopoulos. What a precious experience. I am still on the road of pursuing my creative life in theatre and I feel privileged to have an amazing guide, Mr. Theodoros Terzopoulos.

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The Experience of the Bacchae MICHAEL SOKOLOV Actor, Electrotheatre Stanislavsky, RUSSIA

I work at the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky, where Theodoros Terzopoulos staged in 2015 The Bacchae, with me as an actor.

The first time I heard about Terzopoulos’ method was during my studies at the institute. It was at the end of my first year at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute in 2010, when two actors, Dmitry Volkov and Dmitry Chebotarev, introduced to us, as an experiment, Theodoros Terzopoulos’ and Tadashi Suzuki’s training. No one in our institute had practiced these trainings before. It was something completely new. And drawing from these trainings, Dmitry Volkov and Dmitry Chebotarev created a play with us, based on a Japanese fairytale titled “Urashima”. We had started playing it since the middle of the third year of our studies till the end of the fourth year, before our graduation from the institute. We loved this play very much. It was, as you can imagine, an unusual play. We even had fans. After graduation I thought I would never encounter this method and technique again. Then I started working at the Stanislavsky Theatre, which used to be called The Stanislavsky Drama Theatre. That year exactly Boris Yukhananov took over as artistic director of the theatre.

When my classmate Margarita Movsesyan (who also took part in the ­Bacchae), Dmitry Chebotarev (also of Electrotheatre) and me went to the first company meeting, Boris Yukhananov introduced us to Theodoros Terzopoulos and said that he would stage a play in our theatre. We turned to Dmitry and asked him if it was that Theodoros. He said yes. We asked: “Is he really going to stage a play here?” He said yes again. We were very surprised and excited that we would have an opportunity to work with Theodoros Terzopoulos himself. We were so eager to get into this play. Then the audition-training started. A lot of people participated in it and a lot of them dropped out. At the end sixteen of us were left. But that was only the short list. The work with us became more intensive thereafter. And therefore the selection became even more severe. Finally, he concluded to select nine among us.

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When Theodoros had to be away from the rehearsals, he made me responsible for the training. It was an unexpected and very pleasant honor. Since then, I have started getting ever deeper and more consciously into the training. And each time I practice the training, I discover new elements. The training helped me not only in my ­professional activities, but also in my life. And I really would like to get even deeper into it. Though I have been practicing it for about eight years, my desire has not been diminished. On the contrary, it became even more intensive. I am very grateful to the people who introduced this method to me: Dmitry Volkov, Dmitry­ Chebotarev and also Natalia Pavlenkova, the artistic director of our institute, for her courage to take up the responsibility for that experiment. I’m grateful to Boris Yukhananov, because he introduced me to Theodoros Terzopoulos, and, of course, to Theodoros, who allowed me insights into some secrets of his method and this way of being. Theodoros, thank you so much for inviting me here, to the roots.

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The Vibration, a Journey into a Primitve Memory JUAN ESTEBAN ECHEVERRY ARANGO Actor, acting teacher and theatre art researcher, COLOMBIA

It is a great pleasure to write a few words about the memories and experiences I gained during my research and how I turned these experiences into practical acting skills, what I call “the dramaturgy of the actor”. I attended the workshop “The Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos” twice, in summer 2017 and 2018. I was introduced to the Method and its key principles by Master Theodoros Terzopoulos himself and Savvas Stroumpos, a member and collaborator of Attis theatre, the leading teacher, who carries the tradition of his method.

The first day of the workshop in Attis Theater, I arrived early enough to have time to adjust to the space. I wanted to sense myself alone in the space, to remember how much I had been thinking and longing for years to live this moment.

What I experienced there was, and will always be, real. I say “real” in the sense that studying the Method of the Greek Master and practicing its demanding ­techniques had been for me a deep-rooted desire throughout my adolescence and university years.

Although the time I spent there was short, the knowledge I gained is of great significance. It allowed me to set my own guidelines during the creative process; guidelines that were cultivated through daily psychophysical training. It motivated me to learn what is inside the actor’s universe. This is the essence of the performing arts, which is often not perceived at first glance.

The actors, like shamans, sing, enchant the energy that “sleeps” inside their body, in order to wake it up. At the same time, they travel in their memories, collect a large number of images from the depths of their unconscious and transform them into expressive language with their body and voice. This technique works as a development of the collective and individual perception, where time acquires different qualities to the ones already known.

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The wealth of the associations, emerging from the various levels of the imaginary, is transformed into an intimate, primitive dance, a dithyramb performed by bodies that are different and speak a non-verbal dramaturgy that grows and flourishes day by day. This workshop allows the opening of the participant’s yet unexplored inner territories through their connection with the breath. Breathing and its various rhythms give birth to different sounds and movements; panting that turns into whisper and onomatopoeia, and then turns into words, phrases, songs, text.

While the days passed and the study became more rigorous, the connection ­between the body and its primitive memory began to emerge. The body started to become the means and channel and, through concentration, energy was transformed into actions. Familiar expressive reactions became more and more visible.

All pre-conceived theories or ideas we had about the body were gradually abolished.

I realized that, through the Method, familiar aesthetic forms and incorporated blocks – a result of Western culture and the new technological age that has dominated and eliminated the body – started to disappear.

This creative path is a process of self-knowledge and self-determination, the foundations of which are grounded upon the Method and all that it consists of. I feel that it works in depth, with perception and understanding of the body as a whole, throughout the years and decades. The Method of Terzopoulos allows the performer to develop, to move freely during research and improvisation, to explore the endless expressive possibilities and create a unique psychophysical score that bears an ancient power.

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THEORETICIANS

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Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Eco-Theatre and Tragic Landscapes SAVAS PATSALIDIS Theatre Professor, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki; Editor-in-Chief, Critical Stages/Scènes critiques; President of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, GREECE

It might well be argued that Theodoros Terzopoulos is the most celebrated of all living Greek directors. Critics have tried for years to find the precise words for his stagings of the ancient Greek classics which move between what might be called Terzopoulos’ “there-ness” and “then-ness” on the one hand and his “here-ness” and “now-ness” on the other. His explorations into the arteries of text and sub-text have, for example, been called appropriations, adaptations, readjustments and even abbreviations. They have been described as modernist, post-modernist and Artaudian.

Perhaps most interesting in this verbal struggle is not any particular label or “ism” being tried but rather the wide range of intersections articulated.

Which is to say that Terzopoulos’ theatre is not easy to define. His removal of the clichés of standard readings forces viewers to shed automated reactions allowing the imagination to travel far from the safety net of tested certainties, allowing audiences to experience the unexpected images that flood the stage, to see the fragments that continuously spring from the deepest areas of text (and bodies) – the physicalization, land-scapes, language-scapes, memories, histories and truths of his productions. The most memorable moments are made up of fragments, impressive in the materiality of their exposed nudity, fragments and truths coming from both human arteries and national histories.

In the manner of other practitioners of physical theatre such as Artaud and Grotowski, Terzopoulos breaks the codes of realistic representation and pushes performance experience to its very edge, where we are all challenged to participate

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in a kind of stylized ritual, humanity’s most common and innermost heritages, ­essential “animal energy,” areas all capable of uniting both Culture and Nature. In this sense, his stagings are clear examples of what is called Eco-Theatre, a term made popular by Bonnie Marranca in her cutting edge study Ecologies of Theatre (1996).1 Terzopoulos’ performances acquire their most penetrating, poignant edge when performed outdoors. Under stars and sky they encounter the mystique of ­essential nature, the silence of the eternal, the magic of ancient ruins and histories.

It is here that the human animal (human physis) truly meets nature (Physis). It is here that Terzopoulos’ theatre touches the ecological and challenges the essential either/or.

At once local and global, comprehensible and incomprehensible, dark and bright, lawful and lawless, wild and serene, his work releases a flow of images, impressions, sounds, colors, cries, silences and energies which push bodies and space toward a deliberately unspecified “after,” a truly “post”: post-human, post-tragic, post-Godot, post-divide. And the more he delves into the Dionysian polymorphous side, the more he seems to depart from any imposed rigid cultural (and theatrical) order. His method leads the actors’ bodies to an ever closer contact with the essence of materiality, with the very soil they stand and act upon. They become one with the elements: dust to dust.

Terzopoulos frequently portrays this dualism through spasmodic movements: ecstatic body convulsions giving the impression that the actor is somehow trying to re-enter nature, become part of it, discover new paths. Loudly voicing their ancient laments, stretching out or lifting up their hands, bending their bodies, closing their eyes, perspiring, gasping, crying, his actors betray their personal angst to touch (an often abused) nature.

This culture/nature divide2 was certainly the organizing principle for his ­multi-ethnic (Greek, German and Turkish) production of Prometheus Bound in 2010, first staged in an industrial site in the city of Elefsina, a site of classic Attica, World War II, the Greek Civil War, class struggles and workers’ accidents. ­Prometheus bringing fire to humankind was a gift for the polis certainly but it was also hubris against Nature. Proud of his gift, Prometheus brags that he brought every art to man. “Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word—every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus” (Aeschylus l.503-506) Here Terzopoulos introduces an “anti-Prometheus,” an emblematic figure of the Rise and Fall of Humankind. The story of his suffering is seen in relation to

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the exercise of power: the power of the Olympian Gods, the State, the power of Big Capital, of politicians, of rulers. It is also worthwhile mentioning that ­Prometheus’ mother is Earth and his last line a prayer to his Mother and the Sky for salvation, that is, a prayer to Nature (as Cless points out [2010: 19]).3 In the original text, the Chorus is twelve sea-nymphs, daughters of Oceanus; in Terzopoulos’ ­production they are men in rags who resemble “corpses” washed ashore by Ocean/ Nature. They have been tortured, imprisoned and are now back to take revenge.

The Greek word for “ecology” implies the merging of oekos (house) and logos, the coming together under the same roof of two systems – those that people create and those that Nature creates. In that same sense, one can use the word to describe Terzopoulos’ work with the classics. His productions start on a micro-level (text) and then go deep into the psyche expanding to a pan-human scale. Tragedy here meets the eco-system of Nature in a process of transformation, conflict and (wished for) reconciliation.

This explains in part the emphasis he places on both chorus and individual body movement, the attention he pays to firm footing, earthly rooted-ness. The many bodies create patterns of uniformity and disjunction that operate on both a local and a global landscape as in his multi-ethnic production of Euripides’ Trojan Women, performed at the ancient sites of Kourion in Cyprus and then at Delphi,.

The patterns created a nested hierarchy portraying the pain of war expanded to include the solar system itself. As it unfolds, we observe the multi-ethnic diversity of life, its many layers, its habitats and conflicting discourses. Images are strongly foregrounded by military boots which cover the stage floor. The chorus kneels and with their hands simulate the movement and sound of marching bodies. The boots are lifted up and then forced back to the ground as if to try and reunite with the dead who now lie below. Terzopoulos gives his chorus a deliberately elevated role as ­crucial part in the mental and social ecology of the (post)modern world, a clear nod to its fifth-century roots and functions.

Soil is of critical importance in Terzopoulos’ tragic ecology allowing him to ­capture the complex and ever shifting relations between civic law and the laws of nature. In The Trojan Women, The Persians, Prometheus Bound, and Bacchae, among others, he dramatizes the idea that the Earth is first and foremost a political terri­ tory, being (arbitrarily) structured and re-structured by those in power.

Advocates of ecological theatre claim that it is simply “something embodied, ephemeral and affective and that it has nothing to do with the meaning of any text …

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its dramaturgical distribution of organic and inorganic bodies in actual time and space creates sensations and experiences in the here and now”. (Lavery 2016: 230–31).

Terzopoulos’ theatre may not meet all the principles of what constitutes a contemporary ecological play yet it does offer us clear ecological metaphors. Arguably, his productions belong to an expanded field of ecological theatre, as articulated by Read (2013; see also Lavery 2016: 230), that partakes of many forms which do not necessarily have as a prerequisite the erasure of anthropos (humankind) from its central position. Rather, he tries to re-position anthropos in a ruined, post-industrial, post-modern/human world.

In ancient tragedy, the essential battle, the agon, is always seen in relation to a larger eco-system, one impacting the environment. It is impossible to separate ­Antigone’s or Prometheus’ or Ajax’s or Philoktetes’ or Electra’s agon, from nature let alone the agon of Dionysos and his women followers in the Bacchae. Pentheus, this “stubborn purveyor of secular order and law,” as Cless calls him (2010: 26), is punished for trying to subdue nature. Just like Sophocles’ Creon, Pentheus falls “prey to arrogance (hubris),” because he does not act “with reason [logos] and accord with nature [physis],” as Cless makes the point with direct reference to Heraclitus (2010: 18). Indeed, Dionysos and his female entourage are glorified for their ­reverence towards nature. At Epidaurus and Delphi, among other open-air sites, nature itself is foregrounded as an agent of action and also as a host of the laws of theatre and the city, thus stressing further the performance’s ecological and p­ olitical implications rather than “sanitizing” them. 4 Lavery claims as characteristics of the new ecological theatre the physical ­presence and fragility of the performer whose body cannot help but show its ­mortality, its necessary entanglement in both “nature” and “culture,” the explicitly “networked quality” of the stage, in which the human being is always part of a larger assemblage of objects, technologies, and processes (2016: 232-36).

This is also what we encounter in Terzopoulos. The materiality of the bodies that perform his directorial vision are exposed to the materiality of nature,­ betraying what Baz Kershaw claims as “mutual vulnerability” (2007: 238). None of this gets lost in the spectacle itself. It holds a prominent albeit complicated place in his work, an idea best exemplified in the Bacchae, one of Terzopoulos’ most ­celebrated productions.

Dionysos here becomes the ultimate embodiment of life’s dialectics, the law of nature (wilderness) as opposed to the law of Thebes (the city). His victory

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at the end of the play, is followed by the devastation of Thebes, symbolically signalling the end of nature’s reverence as well. Loss on both sides. Nature as object of scientific development, exploitation and control (for more see Cless 2010: 25–28).

Terzopoulos also does not ignore environment and landscape as backdrop or as social, political, and historical comment. His stagings interact with environments inviting us to belong to the planet. By delving deep into myth and body he ­foregrounds the troubled relations between human beings and nature, an idea he invests, as argued above, in Prometheus, who brought us fire, but who also helped rupture our ties to nature. The relationship is clearly full of complications, ­implicating us all in systems we cannot control.

Whether in physical terms or as metaphor, Terzopoulos’ theatre extends the discussion about the nature of eco-theatre as well as the discussion about ­humankind’s “non-separatedness from every other form on the planet” (Arons and May 2012: 5). His theatre, with its emphasis on “animal energy,” its persistent search into the deepest compartments of the human soul and its behavioral p­ atterns, reflects, among other things, recent ecological debates about (re)presentation, (de) construction, (re)acting, civic and natural laws, social and material-ecological ­degradation and, especially, bodies.

By challenging routine modes of thinking, acting and feeling, by distabilizing dividing lines, Terzopoulos’ stagings of Greek classics have altered perceptions of how we exist in the world, how we relate to the rest of humanity’s and nature’s creations. His understanding of theatre, and classical theatre in particular, has made us feel a bit more comfortable with the idea that we are connected to the Earth as well and not just to “a” place on it.

In conclusion: Terzopoulos’ theatre offers questions and provokes new un­der­ standings about both theatre and humankind’s ongoing (and “polymorphic’) ­relationship with nature and the city, both sides of the same word: Physis.

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1

2 3 4

In her book, Marranca wonders what is the ecology of an image, how landscape impacts narrative and how ecology relates to aesthetics. Her examples, mainly drawn from American theatre, include, among others, Gertrude Stein, the music/ecology of John Cage, and Robert Wilson’s and Spalding Gray’s dramaturgy.

For more on that dichotomy see Cless (2010: 17–8).

“O holy mother mine, O you firmament that revolves the common light of all, you see the wrongs I suffer!” (l. 1086–87) “Sanitize” is the verb Arons and May use to stress the idea that says the intersections of performance and ecology” should be “understood in their material (rather than metaphorical) sense […]. the use of ‘ecological’ for rhetorical purposes tends merely to sanitize the term while eschewing its political as well as its material-ecological implications” (2012: 3).

Works Cited Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. Herbert Weir Smyth. Classical Texts Library. https://www.theoi.com/Text/AeschylusPrometheus.html.

Arons, Wendy and Theresa J. May. Readings in Performance and Ecology. London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012.

Cless, Dowing. Ecology and Environment in European Drama. London: Routledge, 2010.

Kershaw, Baz. Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Lavery, Carl. “Performance and Ecology. What Theatre Can Do?” Green Letters.

Studies in Ecocriticism, vol, 20, no 3, 2016, pp. 229-236.

Marranca, Bonnie. Ecologies of Theater: Essays at the Century Turn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996.

Read, A. Theatre in The Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. (Format)

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A Theatre of Energy, a Theatre of Consciousness FREDDY DECREUS Prof. Em. Ghent University, BELGIUM

1. ‘What is it all about?’

‘What is it all about?’(Περί τίνος πρόκειται; 2015: 68) ‘What is human? ‘Where does his body begin and where does it end’, Theodoros often asked. For sure, questions like these belong to the most interesting ones to be raised, although they also are extremely difficult to answer. Ontological and epistemological questions to the highest degree (‘what kind of world are we living in’, and ‘how can we know this reality?), they express a deep concern for human and his temporary stay on earth, bound as he is to remain and wait in the ‘prothalamos of death’.

If I would try to answer these questions in your place, Theodoros, I think that a general answer, first and foremost, has to take into consideration the triple form of your activities.

First, of course, there is this metteur en scène of so many productions (more than 2000 performances of more than 50 productions) who, assiduously and indefatigably, for more than thirty years, toured around the world, from Columbia to Taiwan, from Philadelphia to St. Petersburg and Perm.

Secondly, there is the artist and the critic in you who continuously presented his (artistic and political) opinions in a written form and whose oeuvre was ­analysed in many books, articles and treated in many symposia. I refer here to the interesting studies by Penelope Chatzidimitriou, Avra Sidiropoulou, Eleni ­Varopoulou, Giorgos Sampatakakis and Dimitris Tsatsoulis, also to the extensive interviews you gave in a number of books published by Frank Raddatz, esp.

Im Labyrinth, 2009.

And thirdly, next to the metteur en scène and the publicist, there is this maître d’instruction, this Master(ly) Teacher, who gave hundreds of workshops all over the

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world on the body, on breathing and healing, on the training of the triangle and understanding the energetic zones at work in the body.

Therefore, Theodoros, you are my favourite Kerberos, a three-headed watchdog on the threshold to Hades, the place where all real wisdom finally must come together in order to answer the final questions. Long ago, I started to attend your productions, later on, I discovered the books that were written on you, but only the last decade I had the pleasure and the honour of assisting to the classes you and Savvas gave to a great number of students (esp. to the workshops you annually give in Athens during the month of July and those you offered to the actors of Jan Fabre in Antwerp).

Trying to summarize the achievements you made on these three levels, Theodoros, maybe I can understand them very tentatively along the next two lines, along two revolutionary positions that opened up a new interpretation of this famous waiting room of yours.

As I suggested in the title of this lecture, you redefined the old kind of representational theatre, in terms of ‘a theatre of energy’ and ‘a theatre of consciousness’, two positions that profoundly challenged all received opinions on culture and tradition. By doing so, you also opened up new perspectives that fitted very well recent evolutions both in the ‘human’ and ‘natural’ sciences. As newer times always are looking for newer paradigms of research, just like Vitruvian man once introduced revolutionary views in Antiquity and Renaissance, or like Nietzsche reinstalled man in the centre of the universe, you introduced two important views on human, one to be called ‘pan-energetic’, relying upon ‘sources of unprecedented psychophysical energy’, and a second one exploring radical forms of awareness and consciousness at work both inside and outside the human body. Both conceptions have consequences that really must upset traditional visions of human and that, in some parts of the world, -and to be honest, also in some parts of our own minds-, still heavily disturb most of the received opinions we share. Both fields of research contain some of the hottest potatoes to deal with today in important scientific research areas, think of energy studies, quantum physics, neuroscience and cosmic consciousness theories. The attention you paid to phenomena like human and kosmos, human and memory, human and energy, human and consciousness, let you occupy a position in the general climate of poststructuralism, but also in between science and spirituality, between ancient (Hindu) theories and more recent ones on the Akasha field and the coherence of the universe (Laszlo, 2006).

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As a small illustration of this radical shift, I mention this brief quote of yours, ­Theodoros, one that used to hang above my bed: ‘( l )iberation of the body is political, because consciousness of the body can change the world’ (2006: 169; 170–171)

2. Homo energeticus As you mentioned on so many occasions, ‘the ‘idea of the body is much greater than we think’, since ‘the body is an open universe with open channels’ (2015: Performer, §3). As such, the discovery of the energy-driven human being is a fantastic find that had to wait for more than 2000 years to finally arrive in the heart of Western religion and philosophy. Before the 1960s, the body only was the despised little brother of a divine mind, Westerners had a body (obscured by religion), but they never were a body. They never completely inhabited a body that functioned as a bodymind, or a Gestalt experienced as a field of energy, or again as a multi-faced diamond that shines along multiple channels, fields and waves. Between the many levels of energy produced on the stage, you analysed very carefully the working of ‘kinetic energy’ (texts translated into motions), ‘thermal energy’ (patterns of light, body sweat and heath), ‘chemical energy’ (muscles rely upon changes of glucose) and ‘sound energy’ (sound waves compress the air and hit the ears, spoken words exert patterns of violence...), but also a complete bodymind energy system was detected in your ­explicit theory on the seven energy fields. Here East meets West, prana meets ­Dionysian ecstasis as it is spread throughout the whole body. Body and mind were attuned to one life-force, one that enters a world of subtle energy awakened through assiduous practice, a lifetime long. After years of attuning mind to body, body to mind, after having left the traditional objectifying nature of things for a deeply felt presence and vitality in the moment of the practice, the performer becomes a ­different human being who constantly travels between different modes of incorporation, and due to a process of a constant immersion in an ongoing psychophysical process, the miracle of the Dionysian ecstasis happens.

Yet, your energetic ‘combatant’ (2015: §5. Ho othopoios einai sugkrousiakos, yia na einai machimos) never was based on postmodern grounds, on the contrary, this freedom fighter rediscovered many ancient Greek roots, of Herakleitos’ theory of the eternal flux, over Northern Greek shamanism to the healing practices of ­Asklepios, all signs of the ever active presence of a Dionysos, patron of an ever

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e­ vasive energy who heavily disturbed, from Antiquity on, all cultural clichés of fixed dualism and patterns of frozen hierarchy.

Your deconstructive and reconstructive practice (‘dissolved and reconstituted’; 2015:57) ended in the appeal for a radically changed view on human, to be constructed and conceived in terms of energy, instead of the old ineffective patterns of theocentrism and theoterrorism, of a sterile mind and body dualism, of a transcendental philosophy where gods belonged to a qualitatively other world (be it Mount Olympos or Mount Sinai). In doing so, you also kept an eye on Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Indeed, leading the body from deconstruction to an eternal process of reconstruction, is also taking the never ending road of Tao and flux, and in this sense there ‘always (is a) sense of a gliding passage: ‘I am here and I pass to somewhere else’ (S19), a passage between presence and absence, between here and beyond, between I and not I. Not a coincidence at all that your chapter on the Performer (Ethopoios) as a subtitle has Panta rhei.

This brings me to a number of rather confusing questions. How does it come that this type of knowledge about human and his deepest energetic resources is not known (or not better known) in the West? Why fearing to work with a fully awakened pattern of energy, and why don’t we breath in a better and deeper way? Are we afraid of that little something more, that small surplus of spiritual energy that might come along with each deep breath? Why are we afraid of the psychophysical totality we are created and blessed with? Why are we so afraid of Dionysos?

3. Homo (sub/sibi/supra) conscious Yet, not only changes in energy characterize deeply your freedom fighter, also changes in consciousness are part of the many metamorphoses that the Dionysian Body is aiming at. Your long lasting effort, Theodoros, to understand and modulate the body in a Dionysian way is part of a long struggle to get social recognition and cultural acceptance of an enlarged vision of human. ‘The truth of the body is ontological’, you repeatedly said and this means that the body is challenged to install and position itself as fully as possible within existence as such, not in a classifying or ­indoctrinating way, but as an existential question that investigates all possible ­ontological worlds and kinds of ousia referring to human and the kosmos he inhabits.

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And here some very interesting questions arise that you have been handling the last decades, both in theory and in your daily practice.

Dealing with these questions, I always have to think of the look in the eyes of your performers and students (especially Savvas’ eyes!), when at the end of one week / month / year (mostly however, years) of training, they are able to activate the basic triangles and to surrender to vibrations throughout the whole body, a really magic moment to watch, a frightening experience at the same time, a moment of tremendous beauty at all times. At moments like these, a deep inner calmness reigns over an inner space and time, a time-space (2015: 26), a borderline experience half between order and chaos, between past and present, a notion that does not ­belong to our casual or scientific language and is very difficult to put into words A moment like this is rooted somewhere deeper, in a field of deeper forces, hidden somewhere, somehow, in the unknown limits of the human body. During your training sessions, you travel with your actors on a journey that takes them from the subconscious, over the self conscious to the supra conscious (2015: 9). Since an overall accepted vocabulary does not exist to render those different states of the mind, you needed a lot of metaphors, like these ones: the performer has to ‘come from a depth and go to another depth’, he needs to prepare himself for a ‘descent’ and a ‘dive’, he has to ‘dance the dance of Memory’ and experience ‘the sense of a passage’ (2015:16 - 19. You stimulate your actors to trust and explore the power of their unconscious and subconscious mind, since it functions as the major operating system and storage house of all our memories. But then again, you invite them to go beyond the controlling conscious mind, and to leave the physical awareness of the surface body (and its states of exteroception and proprioception). Indeed, they must explore the ‘archetypal body’, and look for thoughts that connect them to a more universal consciousness. Doing so, you submerge them in the life force that flows through all living beings, a kind of panpsychist experience. When you invite your performers to ‘dance the dance of the forms of Memory’ (2015: 17-18), to go through the body ‘at a breakneck inner speed, like a whirling’ or to become an ‘energetic cataract’ (2015:21-24) and reach the experience of a changed ‘time-space’, then the performer should ‘move towards the horizon’ knowing very well that ‘the horizon will keep going away’ (2015: 26). That means you invite them to travel through the three dimensions of consciousness. It is in this sense that you call upon them to see the ‘shore from somewhere to somewhere else, where you cannot reach the end, because the shore never ends, and neither the passage never ends’ (2015:26).

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Therefore, your theatre is theatre of consciousness where all levels of the human mind are activated, in an ‘agonizing call’ to wake up our sleeping bodies.

Over the years, you tried to express the ‘Unsayable’ dimension of this journey (‘das Unsagbare’) and in order to illustrate this concretely, you used only a limited number of archetypes. Medea surely was one of them, and as you mentioned in Frank Raddatz’ book, Im Labyrinth (Theodoros Terzopoulos begegnet Heiner Müller, ed. Frank Raddatz, Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2009), the fourth and last time you staged a version of this challenging half divine, half human person, definitely was your favourite performance. It was Gazi, 2002, and a naked Medea (Sofia Michopoulou) laid down in one of the jaws of one of the huge and awesome blast furnaces of an old coal factory. The performance lasted for 40 minutes, 80 people stood around you, and apparently, they were all amazed and petrified. As you described this performance much later, it evoked a perfect balance between the subconscious and the supraconscious: ‘The emotional climate of this performance was so perfect, so pure. This was more than Müller, more than Beckett, more also than Aischylos. The evening had something ritual. It was like a psalm. It was pure ontological agony. It was all of this. Purity. The absolute. Yet, it was just a moment of artistic perfection. But during the moment of the performance I was closer to Heiner than ever before. Heiner was no longer alive and still I felt so close to him.’ (Raddatz 2009: 106–107) Thank you so much, Theodoros, for this theatre of energy, this theatre of ­consciousness.

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Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Theatre of Verticality FRANK RADDATZ Author, Dramaturg, GERMANY

To arrange the opus of an artist along a time-line, is a part of the conventional academic custom. The works of a director are stretched between the production of ancient tragedies and contemporary plays. Depending on artistic interest, on individual obsession, musical preference an affinity will be generated to certain playwrights, to certain epochs and certain themes and subjects. But only in a very few exceptions the art of directing is determined by the time line itself. The ­theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos can be clearly identified as such. His theatre is a theatre of verticality. The central categories his theatre is based on are: tragedy, myth, the Dionysian; its ritual – ethnographic approach - creates or inaugurates a world referring more to the ancient Hellenistic culture or to prehistoric cultures than to our present times. Not the category of progress but the category of ­recursion structures his artistic texture. We are confronted with a theatre, which draws its energy, its power, its vectors from a past several thousand years old, perhaps older. His theatre, his method, his form, his principles, get their fundamental inspiration from spaces which are located at the edge of history. It is a kind of theatre, which – we can say with Heiner Müller – fulfils the main task of the theatre-art: to excavate the dead ones.

Terzopoulos’ subsumes his artistic practise under the name of a Grecian divinity – Dionysos, who was revered as a god of wine, intoxication and the art of theatre.

Obviously Terzopoulos method of directing refers to the ancient tradition, but ­furthermore it is linked to a discourse, which grounds modernity.

If we follow the German cultural historian Aby Warburg, the return of the gods occurs in memorial waves, in successive episodes. Their intermittent presence ­depends on the actual relationship of a culture to its own history. The Italian cultural philosopher Roberto Calasso describes the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin

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and the attendance of Dionysos in his lyrics in view – such kind of wave appearing: “As the last of the admitted gods into the Olympus, as a stranger, an Oriental and as a disruptive force, Dionysos infiltrates Germany, after he has not emerged in ­Europe for a long time, since the time, when Pico della Mirandola and Ficino, Polizano and Botticelli have adored him as a god of the mysteries and divine ­intoxication.” Finally, as Calasso states, “Dionysos will enter the stage of the world through a book – The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche”.

The Dionysian will become a central aesthetic category of the classic modernity.

The Dionysian inspires or inflames the art of a whole generation of poets like Rainer Maria Rilke or Gottfried Benn, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot or Paul Valery, to name a few examples.

If Terzopoulos set out in the search of Dionysian clues to connect with the early layers of culture in theatre, his method correlates with a literary practice, which pervades the art of classic modernity. Nonetheless, the Dionysian event is primarily an event of the animal body energy and not an event of spoken or w ­ ritten words.

An attribute of Dionysos is the strangeness. As the so called alienation, the strangeness makes its career in the theatre art of the 20th century. Indeed, Brecht knows the seminal influence of strange elements on stage or in the art, but he transforms the strangeness in the epic theatre into the alienation–effect. The alienation– effect is subordinated to rationality. It is the Apollonian variation of the strangeness. But no doubt, this strangeness is an attribute of the Attis Theatre, but without the Brechtian purpose to dissolve the element of strangeness into knowledge. This ­theatre is in no way a theatrical discourse effect. On that account this theatre is based too materialistic. It is grounded on the presence of the body and will not exist without this real, primarily materiality of the body. These powerful, energetic and ecstatic bodies of the Terzopoulos’ theatre are far more than sweat producing signs or discourse secreting organs of language.

From the perspective of verticality the body is in fact the focus or the interface of the antiquity and the current era. In the field of the body, prehistoric, mythic or cultic layers overlap with the attendance of life in an, as Heiner Müller says, endless or infinite presence. The indefinite, the absolute or the broad present are expressions, which express the current domination of the contemporary over the ­remaining mode of time. As permanent present the blocked time flow is termed, which characterizes the time regime of the wealthy parts of the planet, which is

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called – Weltinnenraum des Kapitals - the inner space of the capitalistic world by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. This is a space, which wants nothing but presence, by transforming the other modes of time: future and past into presence.

After the collapse of the idea of history the status quo is the telos.

In the light of the Dionysian vertical we see, that one of the time arrows points in the direction of the prehistoric era, but the other one is inconsistent pointing to the broad or endless present. Between the Dionysian Terzopoulos’ Theatre and the broad or expanding presence exists hardly concordance, because the absolute presence is not compatible with strangeness. Strangeness is an unexploited potential.

That means movement. Future. The documentary theatre represents the spirit of the time, because it presents the known and not the unknown. Not the production of strangeness and alienation but the production of more present is the aim of contemporary art. “The first thing to note is that the term contemporary art has largely superseded the term modern art for describing the time of our time”, Juliane Rebentisch states. In the post–utopian world, after the end of history it seems that only the present remains as an acceptable point of reference. This present sanctifies the egoism not the collective transgression. Its favourite drug is coffee. A work drug.

The coffee to go is part of the global everyday life, which is focused on the ever more. More efficiency. More growth. More increase. Such kind of reality opposes the Dionysian intoxication, the metamorphosis, the ecstasies and the state of trance, the loss of control and other evidences, which characterize the god of tragedy.

Nonetheless this world with no history exhibits an enormous constructional fault. The end of history indicates that no new regime will change the structures of the global capitalism and its growth-based economy. Or like President Bush said at the world summit conference at Rio in 1992: “The American way of life is not negotiable.” But already in the month of April all resources are used up, which the planet is able to generate in the entire year 2018. To sustain the life style of the Western world we need four planets. Unfortunately we have only one. Therefore it is ­dystopia, what we can call the obscene backside of the eternal present. Future is transformed in one or two generations from a horizon of expectation into a horizon of threat. The oceans become more acidic, the north and the south pole melting, the species extinction is proceeding, the climate change seems incalculable. The ecologic framework for the human acting has been more or less stable in the last eleven thousand years, but we actually encounter on the geological a long-lasting period of instability turnover. Maybe a new geological era has already started. At least­

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science knows already the name of the geological epoch, which will follow the e­ leven thousand years of the Holocene. The Anthropocene, which even has already­ started according to many experts, is or will be the first geological era, in which the activities of a species have an irreversible impact on the ecological household of the planet.

In view of the memory waves, the category of Aby Warburg, the question arises how these altogether changed conditions of the Anthropocene influence the relation to the cultural past. The ecologic instability outlines the image of an earth, which is put in a state of restlessness and beginning to move. This shifting earth is responding to the human activities, concerning the climate, the oceans, the animals or plants or other elements of the biosphere. In the early nineties Michel Serres, a French scientific historian, was asking: “Will the great Pan, son of Hermes, now return in deadly peril?” Pan is a creature of Greek mythology and a member of the retinue of Dionysos, who was revered as a god of wine and intoxication. Pan underlines the threatening side of Dionysian power, like Pentheus, king of Thebes, has experienced painfully for example. Pan, the horned god of flocks and herds, with the legs of a goat, is especially responsible for dance and music, fertility and ecstasy.

Plutarch reported, that during the reign of the emperor Tiberius an Egyptian sailor named Thamus has heard a voice nearby the Greek coast, which told him to announce all over the Roman Empire: “The great Pan is dead.” In the wake of the Anthropocene these protagonists will leave their graves in the temple district of Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy, which embodies the state of an unleashed nature.

In 2015 Bruno Latour, one of the most influential philosophical theoreticians of the Anthropocene, proves emphatically Serres’ statement: “This time the great Pan will come back in its own.”

If we speak at the end of the second decade of the 21st century about a return of the Dionysian wave, this occurrence is situated due to the uprising of alarming planetary powers. Together with the return of Dionysos and his companion Pan, history will experience a renaissance. But a history which has undergone a metamorphosis.

After the temporary end of history the coming era emerges as a cross between ­history and nature.

In the Holocene the natural conditions of the human comedy have been stable.

On the opposite, the announced stage of Anthropocene will be no twilight of humanity, rather a long adventure of some thousand years, in which each participant will get some ugly scratches. Like Bruno Latour says: “It could be enjoyable to live

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in such a period, if it will be possible, to regard this tragedy from shores far away ­beyond history. But in the meantime no audience will exist anymore, because there is no riverbank that has no part in this drama of the geologic history. But without balcony seats the safety will vanish, which is the a priori of the sublime. It is a shipwreck, but without spectators.” It is no coincidence that Latour refers back to the term tragedy, to prime the Anthropocene.

If we prolong the time-arrow of Terzopoulos’ theatre, which points to the ­coming age, we advance in a space, in which strangeness and unpredictability will grow. This fresh ground is founded on arrogance and hubris. A hubris that is inside the episteme and paradigm. A hubris that is convinced to exploit and contaminate nature in a ruthless way without any consequences for human life. The hubris is founded in the anthropocentric viewpoint of the technical civilisation. Where we can identify hubris, tragedy is not far, so that we are again facing the return of ­Dionysos. In the light of the ecological paradigm we can recognize the theatre of Terzopoulos as a twin of a future theatre. This coming tragedy will not excavate the dead anymore, which is the central mechanism of the ritual practise of any culture: It will bury the unborn spirits, which come from the future stating it poetically.

Photos page 142–145 Photo: 1. Symposium, K. Karamanlis Amphitheatre, European Cultural Centre of Delphi (photo Andreas Simopoulos) Photo 2. Symposium, K. Karamanlis Amphitheatre, European Cultural Centre of Delphi

(photo Andreas Simopoulos)

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Theatre as Translation: Aeschylus and Heiner Müller

by Theodoros Terzopoulos ELENI VAROPOULOU Theatre Critic, Author, Translator, GREECE

In his book The Return of Dionysos, Theodoros Terzopoulos contemplates on the origin and future of theatre. Attempting a radical navigation in the realities of body, gesture, movement, physical action, he conceives of and develops the actor’s craft as one capital anthropocentric declaration and he searches for ontological answers. Terzopoulos remains the Greek director par excellence, who has ­ ­consciously appropriated the “alien” in order to compose his “personal” idiom, or has translated the “personal” through the different filters of the “other”. Before approaching Terzopoulos’ theatre from the point of view of an aesthetics of the translation process, I would like to refer briefly to the Return of Dionysos, which is an acting theory and the cornerstone of the theatrical rationale that characterizes the scenic idiom of the director.

The method of Theodoros Terzopoulos has an anthropological denominator.

He addresses “an appeal, a cry against what is lost”, aiming to an actor devoted to the claim of a universal body and magnetized by the spectrum of Dionysos, the god that remains in exile. Among the peculiarities of his method, which derive from its multi-collective and multi-cultural origin, is the pursuit to achieve the taming of the body, in other words, its transformation into a kind of a perfect machine, the result of following a strictly structured, exhausting training. It is a kind of Biomechanics reminiscent of that of Vsevolod Meyerhold, according to which the body is perceived as a self-motored assembly with its individual parts acting as mechanical components, performing every movement with exactitude after being trained to the full abiding by rules based on the principles of Constructivism and Taylorism. Like Meyerhold, a theatre artist fascinated by the idea of freedom conquered through

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constant improvisation, Terzopoulos also reserves a key role to infinite improvisation. The infinite improvisation in his method is the gate through which the actor reaches a space beyond realism. It is a process of psychosomatic research, capable of bringing the body to a state of catalepsy and aglossia.

Through Terzopoulos’ method, the body is deconstructed and the parts of the body become autonomous. The body reveals its sound-generating resources while the diaphragmatic inhalation and exhalation at an accelerated pace and the walking in a collective rhythm open up the way to the ecstatic body. The actors achieve absolute concentration of physical energy, its flow in the whole body at will and its autonomous use by each part of the deconstructed body.

In the 1980s, the Attis Theatre group related its physical research to a ritual experience: the test of fire, Anastenaria, a traditional ritual “remnant of the Diony­ sian ritual” during which the people of Lagkadas, a village in Northern Greece, dance barefoot on incandescent coals. At that time, the interaction of Theodoros Terzopoulos with the Japanese theatre, the method of Tadashi Suzuki – in which the leg and the foot, walking and ways of walking are key factors – and his relationship with other Asian techniques contributed to formulating an imposing stage ­idiom. The historical performance of Bacchae (1987) was a brilliant example of this idiom and of a new ritualistic theatre devoted to Dionysos. It is worth mentioning that all following performances directed by Terzopoulos proved the effectiveness and dynamics of his method on stage. The strong desire for a tireless dynamic actor, an “athlete”, a creative operator of the full potential of their body was always ­fulfilled.

Dionysos is in Terzopoulos’ method the only iconic, enigmatic name that constantly returns, functioning on a metaphorical, psychoanalytical, theatrical and philosophical level. The role assigned to the god of theatre is summarized in the following passage by the director: “The fertilizing Dionysos invites the performer to seek the archetypal body, hidden in the depth of his structure, oppressed and ­repressed by the mind.” The image of a conflicting god who would be able to return, once the fertilizing Baccheia and the transcendence in art are restored, places the method of Terzopoulos and with both his own and his actors’ stage action into the context of the Dionysian culture which had inspired Nietzsche and Artaud in the past. After The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, the cultural theory of Georges­ Bataille and the Theatre of Cruelty by Artaud, the Dionysian intoxication and ecstasy were called upon to put an end to the supremacy of rationality and the chasm

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b­ etween mind and body, aiming for the advent of Dionysos. A Terzopoulos’ actor is trained and prepared to cross the path towards the magic energy of the subconscious and nature; this path had been concealed in the course of cultural fermentations while the body had been alienated from its real powers.

When Theodoros Terzopoulos asked me to translate in modern Greek the texts

by Heiner Müller and Aeschylus, I knew that during the performance my translation would be an autonomous textual corpus, which would appear momentarily ­interwoven but mostly in conflict with another “text”: the text of the physical body and the extreme physical expression that the actors of the Attis Theatre “inscribe” with their bodies in the space. Of course, theatre can be entirely perceived as a kind of translational declaration. Just as the task of translation from one language to ­another is a transcription of phrases to different languages and different linguistic contexts, so does the text, dramatic or not: it entails a transcription, a transferre, the “translation” of human experiences into concepts, stories, dramaturgy, dialogues, forms and poetics. But also, every direction is, in turn, a kind of “translation” of the text into stage corporealities, spatial realities and performative times. However, ­beyond such a general semiotic and symbolic context that could include all drama performances, I would like to emphasize that the stage “translation” of a literary text by Theodoros Terzopoulos has been from the beginning an ultimately generative act. Its creativity consisted of the fact that the actors, liberated from the obligations of imitation, the depiction of meanings and representation, created a brand new world with their own body and energy. Therefore I translated the texts by Aeschylus and Müller in such a way that they could be organically integrated in the performances, which were, after all, sui generis “scenic landscapes”, created by asthmatic breaths, a violent pulse, outbursts and extreme contrasts. Bodies and gestures, words and physical rhythms, sculptural and painting forms, sounds and cries fought against each other in these landscapes.

The bilingual (in Greek and Turkish) performance of The Persians in 2006 has been a typical example of physical theatre with ritualistic content. The Persians, a Greek-Turkish joined production with Greek and Turkish actors, was first performed in Istanbul, at the Byzantine Church of Saint Irene, close to Hagia Sofia, and then at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus. The ritual dimension was pervasive throughout the performance: in the collective movement of the men wearing black, in their kneeling, the physical outbursts, the musical use of the breaths, the inarticulate cries and the vocalisms produced by the perfect instrument of a flexible, strong

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and durable body. The whole performance was structured upon the concept of mourning in all its manifestations: mourning silent and unspeakable, frantic and savage, self-tortured and furious, melancholic and desperate. A traditional mourning melody amplified the sense of the eternal and infinitive sorrow for those who were killed or missing, signifying that wars, conflicts and massacres continue as an endless tragedy for the conquerors and the defeated. The actors, through ritual practices and the appropriation and transformation of “unfamiliar” cultural material, performed Aeschylus’ tragedy as a timeless antiwar tragedy. The core of the performance was the idea that, confronted with death, everyone, friends and enemies, “we” and the “others” are equal. The interchange of proximity and distance, as ­dictated by interculturalism and intertextuality, was part of the translational­ process on a performative level each time an unfamiliar or familiar material­ appeared or was heard in the space.

Nevertheless, the prevailing idea in my translation was that the ancient text is not something familiar but a dense poetic material from distant antiquity, an­ obscure and inaccessible text, which with its dense weave of interpretable and un­ interpretable enigmatic parts, remains largely impenetrable. That is why the translated text, partially integrated in Terzopoulos’ performance with an idiom not­ easily accessible, was a valuable conceptive and acoustic material in this game of proximity and distance. The bodies of the actors collided with it, resisted but also adopted it as a trigger for the death ritual and the Bacchic delirium.

The text in the performance is like a stone that is wet by water but then dries and remains intact as soon as the water is withdrawn. The forenamed metaphor for the performative status of the text bears the signature of Heiner Müller. The ­performances of the Attis Theatre proved that Heiner Müller’s texts require an ­actor-carrier who will transfer them before the audience as “textual landscapes”, without trying to tame or explain them, inducing personal emotions. The rhythm, evident in both the direction and the feverish movement, the vibration and the ­ecstasy of the actors, was the only way for an artist of rhythm like Heiner Müller to be properly translated on stage. Because his texts are primarily rhythmic as they produce a poetic rhythm through the process of thinking and conclude to a rhythmic pause, escalation and intersection each time this process is completed with an aphorism. Theodoros Terzopoulos grasped Müller’s rhythm. He transformed it into physical language. He did not rationalize it, unraveling and explaining the thread of meanings. On the contrary, he brought out the deepest layer of Müller’s

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text and connected it with his own theatrical utopia of a physical ritual theatre which promises the return to Dionysos. At this point, I would like to mention that in German the definition of translation is über-setzen, which means passage, the transfer of one thing to the opposite bank. Indeed, Theodoros Terzopoulos “translated” Heiner Müller on stage, transferred him to the bank of his theatrical utopia, actually at that point where the actors, activating their whole existence, rush with a relentless impetus towards the primary, the archetypal body.

We could approach Terzopoulos’ stage act more easily as a kind of “translational” act if we refer to Walter Benjamin’s translation theory as it emerges from his writings (important mystical philosophical texts), especially the text that refers to the ongoing work performed by the translator. Benjamin claimed that the trans­ lation transfuses life to the text and guarantees its survival. Just as things take ­substance through human language, namely using words and names, so important aspects of the original text take new meaning thanks to their translation. Theodoros Terzopoulos, “translating” Aeschylus or Heiner Müller for the modern stage, ­ensures a new essential dimension for them. Something that we might not hear in their texts resonates in his performances and fascinates us, while something related to the terror of the modern human confronted with the violence of history and the unresolved conflicts emerges in the performance not as a comment or explanation but as an experience of the bodies. Benjamin argued that apart from their differences that have emerged over time and in the vortex of cultural rearrangements, all languages are related to each other because they originated from an original, hidden entity, the “pure language”. In Benjamin’s vision for a linguistic archetype from which the specific and different languages emerged, I would like to bring together the theatrical vision of Theodoros Terzopoulos, who as a director and teacher claims the occult, lost Dionysian body.

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Primal Phantasies and the Unrepresentable in the Work of Terzopoulos KONSTANTINOS I. ARVANITAKIS Professor of Psychoanalysis, McGill University, Montreal, CANADA

Allow me the bias of the psychoanalyst.

Truth resides in multiple, contradictory and conflicting levels. And – to recall the founder of psychoanalysis, Herakleitos – it loves to hide. Each layer of reality is a screen for another one, lying behind it, or below it. A mocking palimpsest.

Hence, theatre (the theatre of life) unfolds on three planes, three stages, three spaces. Traditional, naturalistic theatre presented events in the First space, the room with its fourth wall missing. But this room had a door. The door led behind to another space. This Second space is the space of Terzopoulos. If we imagine a vertical arrangement – a conceptual limitation dictated by necessity pointing to the gravity of the grave – Terzopoulos operates a kathodos, a descent to an underground space of darkness, disorientation, fright – the terror of madness, but not quite ­madness yet. Here, phantoms make their presence, phantoms of dead memories.

Phantoms/fragments of a primordial violence, the violence of creation. Phantoms of a primal trauma, the trauma of creation. Memories engraved on the body, as the mind hasn’t arisen yet. The memory of the trauma – preserved as a primal phantasy in the depths of the Unconscious – is the memory of a birth-death initiatory event at the origin of the I. Birth is indistinguishable from death at this stage of ontological non-differentiation. This is the domain of Dionysos the supreme ruler: procreation and Hades. Birth as an originary trauma of the rupture of the primal One is ­preserved in unconscious memory as a deadly event. It is the birth of the tragic. Tragic d­ ivision of reality, of truth. Terzopoulos’ ontological grief follows from this.

Once division and differentiation take place, conflict arises. The core event in Terzopoulos’ theatre is conflict: man in conflict with god, body battling with mind,

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with language. It is the conflict sustained by the dynamic tension of his triangles from which all energies proceed - energies at once destructive and creative.

This is the universe of convulsive bodies, alienated minds, ghosts “drifting on a raft on a dead sea boiling in its depths”. In the Antechamber. Not the Antechamber of Death, but, rather, the Antechamber of the Void. In the Antechamber, we are ­located on this side of the Void, adjacent to it. Death. Conflict, memory, mourning, the tragic, all belong here, are present, presented (and presentable) on this side of the Void.

The Void is the Third space, the space of the Unrepresentable, the space of Theatre. All theatre is, in the end, a battle with the Void, with the Unrepresentable.

Theatre is a theoria or theasis of what cannot be theatron. It is not about the­ invisible, but about what cannot be made visible. Terzopoulos: “The personages of Attis move around in the atmosphere of an obscure moment … struggling to­ capture what can never be captured.”

It is this Third space of theatre that I wish to comment on.

Freud focused on the Second space, the space behind appearances, which he called the Unconscious. This is a place where the past, not only of the individual but of the entire species, is indelibly preserved. The mind fights it and ‘forgets’ it, but the body defiantly remembers. The mind narcotizes the body for that reason, and Terzopoulos delivers electroshocks to it in order to reanimate it. Identity is ­authentic – said Parmenides – if it is constructed of a “well-rounded truth”, i.e. composed of what is apparent and what is hidden, of what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is present and what is lost. The ultimate aim of the theatrical act is to construct a solid identity, solid enough to be fluid, alterable and indefinable. This seems to me to be the ground of Terzopoulos’ work and the reason for his descent to the Irrational. There, distorted, he finds the traces, the fragments of forgotten selves.

But, here’s the rub: the essence of theatre is, perhaps, not Death, as Müller maintains, but the Un-representable, the Void lying beneath the Irrational. Here are the roots of madness. Here is not the a-symbolic, but the un-symbolizable, not the un-spoken, but the un-speakable. Here is not fright and terror but nameless dread. Here is not αγων, but agony. The Antechamber shares a thin, porous wall, full of cracks, with Nothingness, with the Black Hole that is the nucleus of All and of Nothing. A centripetal force, an irresistible seductive pull draws you into it. This is, ultimately, the non-space that animates Terzopoulos’ theatre, its essential core.

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His is a dangerous, a risky business. But theatre will measure itself here, against the Void, or it will not be.

Freud battled at length with memories, especially memories without content, with failing, tormented bodies embodying them, with the grotesque vicissitudes of their journeys. He sketched a map of that underground cauldron of chaotic forces; he deciphered, in part, its language. But, at the center of it all he found a disc that is un-decipherable. Some day the Phaistos disc will be read, but this one is existentially different. It is the disc that itself makes all the incomprehensible discs aenigmatic. Here psychoanalysis joins hands with poetry. I am referring here to Freud’s recognition that, once all is said and done, once the meaning of life’s dream is ­revealed, there is still left what he called the uninterpretable – unplumbable is his word – “navel” of the dream that is destined to remain, forever, a mystery for ­humans. This ομφαλος is Apollo’s privileged space. Hence, the space of Aeschylos, of Borges, of Sikelianos …

So what does Terzopoulos do with the Chamber of Darkness that haunts his Antechamber? He must give it shape, solidity, presence. He skillfully turns it into a negative hallucination: he embodies absolute Absence with a presence. To paraphrase Lacoue-Labarthe, the only thing you can do with the Void is to theatricalize it. “The Void is synonymous with madness”, Terzopoulos tells us, after he, surreptitiously and at great risk, comes near it following the avenues of the body, after he gains a glimpse of it, following Apollo’s injunction he creates a shape for Nothingness. But he must watch out for Apollo’s envy. This is a privilege granted only to gods.

“An organized landscape, geometry: the whole of classical Greece is nothing other than the ordering of chaos”, Terzopoulos tells Sampatakakis. But do not be deceived by this mirage of symmetry. The visible order is hubris to the laws of ­Nature and so Terzopoulos’ last word can only be uttered – a groan - by Dionysos, who re-establishes the harmony of disorder, the disorder that echoes the eerie shrieks emerging out the Black Hole of Nothingness.

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The Voiceless Voice of Theodoros Terzopoulos GONIA JAREMA Professor, Université de Montréal, CANADA

Αγαπητέ μου Θόδωρε It is with great honour and humility that I partake in this celebration, in this ‘homage’, to use your own words, of your life’s work, of your opus. It is humbling in two ways. First, because we are gathered here in the most sacred and mythical quiet place of the Ancients, where Greeks would come from afar to seek answers to the unanswerable. Humbling, also, because I am only a psycho-neurolinguist invited to speak among experts in the field. I have no knowledge of the art of theatre. I am but a spectator. And as such, I have had the immense pleasure of seeing many of Theodoros’ plays at the Attis Theatre in Athens, of course, but also in Istanbul, in Berlin, in Wroclaw and in Saint Petersburg. At each of these events, I have been swept away from the world of rationality and hurled into the world of overwhelming choking physicality and speechlessness. I would lose my voice. And it is this m ­ uteness, this metamorphosis into the realm of silence that I would like to talk about today.

For my thesis is that Terzopoulos’ theatre is ultimately a theatre of voicelessness. I shall therefore speak of the voiceless voice of Theodoros Terzopoulos. A paradox, perhaps. But then this is the very stuff of theatre: Real-Unreal, the e­ mbodiment of ‘Fort-Da’, of the Other and the Self, of the Spoken and the Unspeakable, a ritual of the drama of paradox.

But let us for a moment consider that other form of ritual, played out in, for ­example, Dodoni or here in Delphi, where one would not listen to utterances as logically concatenated words, but rather to the whispers of the rustling sacred oak tree, or the smoky divagations of the Pythia. Reverting to linguistic ambiguity to deal with the paradox. Its pain. And this is precisely where Terzopoulos carries the ritual to its extreme, as powerfully illustrated in his most emblematic performance, the Bacchae.

Unbearable psychic pain leading to vocalic jumble and, ultimately, s­ ilence.

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This stripping away of the most human of human endowments, language, is ever present in Terzopoulos’ work: projecting one’s gaze inward leads to a return to the pure animalistic self, to a pre-homo sapiens, pre-homo conscience state, away from the painfully abysmal unknowns of the rational, ever-doubting mind. Moving away from the eternal cosmic void unresolvably present in the narratives of t­ ­raditional theatre, Terzopoulos returns to the naked soul, the naked body, stripped of all its veils of disguise, deception, self-deception. But what, then, of the most e­ xquisite achievement of homo sapiens, language, the ultimate disguise, perhaps the ultimate cloak that drapes us within the rationality of syntax and the beguiling ambiguities of deceitful semantics? Terzopoulos attempts to smash the most p­ owerful, the most specific phylogenetic outgrowth of the human species, perhaps precisely to erase the mask of language, the mask of masks. One might see in this endeavour a certain kinship with the poetic act. But whereas poetry attempts to reach a state of proto-bliss by meandering, navigating between the lines, between and beyond words, blurring meanings, confusing semata, Terzopoulos goes a d­ aring step further, he annihilates the Word.

At a workshop organized in Berlin in honour of Theodoros Terzopoulos, I ­presented a talk entitled “Dionysos in Revenge: The Fractured Voice in the­ Theatre of Terzopoulos” in which I drew upon neuropsychological and brain ­imaging evidence to demonstrate that the primeval emotional states remarkably ­somatised by Terzopoulos uncannily reflect well-attested neuropathological states and their cortical underpinnings. I showed how the fractured speech, typical of the theatre of Terzopoulos, can be observed in the utterances of brain-injured patients, or of individuals in a state of extreme fear. We all know someone who, following a stroke, suffers from aphasia, an impairment characterized, at the level of speech production, by frequent word-finding difficulties (or anomia), by articulatory ­problems (or dysarthria), by reduced and effortful speech, and so on. In short, by a general disability to communicate. A most distressing affliction.

But let us return to the Bacchae, to Dionysos in revenge. The drive for revenge is at the very core of Greek tragedy. The relentless need for revenge impels heroes and heroines to perform the most horrific acts, leading to unthinkable—indeed ­unspeakable—destruction. And Terzopoulos drives this primeval force to its­ limits, to voicelessness, to silence.

To illustrate that the extreme physicality of Terzopoulos’ embodied theatre has its counterpart in the neural substrate of human emotions, I used an experimental

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study by Quervain and collaborators published in Science. Using a brain-imaging technique, the study demonstrated that during the enactment of revenge, the brain’s caudeate nucleus is activated.

This nucleus is part of the basal ganglia, a deep brain structure that acts as an interface between emotional states and motor activity.

Advances in brain imaging techniques have revealed that there is a high degree of interconnectivity between brain regions. A number of fasciculi link the neocortex to subcortical regions and to the brain stem.

Interestingly, the basal ganglia are also associated with anticipated pleasure: As satisfaction before retribution, pleasure before revenge. Recall Terzopoulos’ Bacchae, where we witness Dionysos’ ecstatic sense of elation at the mere thought of revenge against blasphemous Pentheus. A subsequent neuropsychological ­experiment conducted by Carlsmith and collaborators showed, however, that punishers ultimately feel worse than the punished. Thus revenge is, in the end, bitter.

It does not lead to satisfaction, to closure. There is no ‘happy end’. The plot has gone full circle: from anticipated euphoria to the act of revenge itself, and finally to horror, expressed in the gaping, silent mouth of Agave.

The euphoric revengeful god. The manipulated and ultimately crushed mortal.

This inescapable vortex that the tragedians hurled at their audiences, fully­ cognisant of fusing the divine and the earthly, phantasy and reality. Projecting out, projecting in. And in his theatre, Terzopoulos captures the essence of the tragedians’ sublime understanding of human emotions, of human desires by an organic tour de force: somatising the psyche to de-somatise the body. Embodiment-­dis­em­ bo­diment, cosmic fusion, supreme physicality.

In this context allow me to make a reference to another of Theodoros Terzopoulos’ poignant productions, that of Heiner Müller’s Mauser, which ­ ­exquisitely exemplifies the omnipresent shift from the broken psyche to the broken body in his theatre. In the performance, the body and the speech of the butcher/ butchered are progressively annihilated. We are witnesses of an execution by the soul and of the soul of revolution, of Man. The body is slowly engulfed into the abyss, dehumanized, no longer able to produce meaningful utterances. Speech becomes a-syntactic, syncopated, logorrheic, neologistic: the very symptoms ­ ­characteristic of neurologically induced syndromes, of language pathology.

This is vintage Terzopoulos, Terzopoulos at his best: extreme, implacable, yet filled with eros.

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So today, I would like to go a step further, without abandoning my stance as a cognitive scientist - keeping in mind, however, that the brain’s emergent cognitive apparatus is but a metaphor, after all. We can only revert to metaphors, whether we are in the fields of philosophy, psychology, or science. I would like to suggest that, by violently muting human, Theodoros Terzopoulos seeks to reach the very core of the human soul, the nucleus of its black hole that exploded into the inebriating ­madness of the Word, generating catastrophic tensions between Eros and Thanatos; cutting out his tongue to recover, dive into, and be carried away by proto-being: a plunge into the underworld, as it were. But Terzopoulos seeks not the dead. He seeks the essence of life itself. And for him the primordial is not the primitive. It is the sublimely creative, the sacred fountain of timelessness and of spacelessness that we crave for, the ultimate giving up, abandonment into the void, the dream where we blissfully fall from the mountain of knowledge: Prometheus bound at last ­unchained. This is the ultimate, most daring act of Terzopoulos. As the artist seeking the essence of form and colour, he pushes the limits of theatre to its minimal core. An act where construction and deconstruction are blurred through the ­stripping of the word, of the delusion that ‘in the beginning was the Word’.

The body-object, in Tadeusz Kantor’s sense, seeks no redemption, no abso­ lution. No indulgences can be bought. And yet, it is this naked agonizing body that holds within the possibility of essence. A return to, a glimpse of timespacelessness.

Terzopoulos, in his radical theatre of mute pain, remains profoundly humanistic.

He rages against all profanities, as his actors’ bodies battle through accretions of ratio to reach the divine: a ritual seemingly of death, yet a sublime glorification of life. Both Apollonian and Dionysian, Terzopoulos daringly seeks the core of chaos, the black hole, the speechless core of being.

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Glossolalia: From Artaud’s “Langage Universel” to Terzopoulos’ “Nuclear Rhythm of the Word” DIMITRIS TSATSOULIS Semiotics of Theatre & Theory of Performance/ Professor Emeritus, University of Patras/Theatre Critic, GREECE

“Glossolalia”, according to Michel de Certeau, “is an art of speech within the bounds of an illusion”.1 It is well known that we first meet the phenomenon of glossolalia in the New Testament and more specifically in what Paul the Apostle mentions: referring mainly to a charisma to “speak in tongues” bestowed by the Holy Spirit to believers – a gift that is not identical with the gift of speaking “foreign languages” the Apostles acquired in the Pentecost – but with the ability possessed by the members of the Early Christian Church to understand each other in an intimate manner by using only their mother tongue. Glossolalia thus goes beyond the known languages and communicates with the use of expressive utterances of unintelligible sounds, similar to the ones used in prophecies, by mediums and Pentecostals2, in psychopathological cases3, and poetic movements such as Dada, Futurism and Lettrism.

However, Paul, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, addressing people who used glossolalia, dissuades them from using it as a means of religious teaching ­pointing out the fact that if during a gathering everyone “speaks in tongues”, then an outsider might see them as “raving ecstatically” (1 Epistle 22-24), indicating as such the difficulty of a third-party observer to comprehend the unintelligibility of glossolalia.

Therefore glossolalia, since it decisively threatens articulated speech – Reason, constitutes a radical action against human cultural-social conventions.4 However, it has been accepted that in its contemporary forms5 it acquires various means of ­expression moving within and fed by the large reserve of paralinguistic signs.

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When the ideologies surrounding glossolalia define it as a primitive language, they simultaneously point to the lost unity that existed in the pre-Babel single language, before the linguistic schism, an “angels’ language” characterised by its pure orality6, meaningless but unifying and as such universal. Something that Khlebnikov, one of the representatives of Russian futurism, also advocates criticising the existing languages as contributing to the division of humanity by leading it to pointless wars.7 “What people now know is just to talk, […] they have forgotten to use their larynx.

Reduced to using unnatural larynxes, they no longer possess an organ, but a huge opening that talks”, is what Antonin Artaud8 wrote.

Antonin Artaud in search of the universal language (le langage universel), allegedly wrote in 1934 a book in a language that was not French but which “everyone could read and did not belong to any nationality”.9 Artaud, using his “glossolalia” (which often breaches some of his other texts creating so heterogeneities10), lays the foundations for the creation of a hyper-cultural theatre. A theatre that deconstructs the notion of the “sign” since it lacks the signified while the use of the words does not depend on their meanings but on the sound attributes they emit.11 Artaud’s “langage universel” intends to make the articulated signifiers understood beyond linguistic and cultural barriers.

For Artaud glossolalia can be understood by listening to the various sounds the voice can perform: the semantic gap is bridged by the vocal modulations. Rhythm, respiration, the energy centres of the speaking subject, and so inner body movements – in a reverse direction – convey meaning to the glossolalic locutions.12 In other words, a retrospective, like an excavation in the biological nucleuses of the body, the Universal body. A fact that justifies de Certeau’s conclusion that glosso­ lalia is not a language, only vocalisation of the subject in a form that pretends to be a language; at the same time it initiates a reception of the emanated meaning beyond language borders.

If Artaud often discusses both gestural and vocal code as alternative systems in the dominance of language in the Western theatre13, placing a lot of emphasis on controlling respiration14, Theodoros Terzopoulos promoted respiration to a basic tool of his trans-cultural theatre. He thus creates his biodynamic/deconstructive method, looking for the actor’s energy power and kinetic actions using breath as a tool, until and as long as it leads to the production of articulate speech. As long as, because the produced signifier of the voice, through various modulations, often ­becomes an independent signified.

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This happens either on a preliminary stage or after the production of articulate speech when the nonverbal, inarticulate or extra-phonemic vocalisations function independently – becoming as such apparent or indirect reference to the “utopian” sentences of Artaud: to the nuclear rhythm of the word that stems from a body in inner motion that produces sound like signs, inarticulate sounds, sounds caused by the mobility of the lips and the tongue.15 Exceeding the traditional ways of verbal communication and touching upon the way speakers of glossolalia think.

Glossolalia, having escaped from the dynasty of meaning “reinvents the quality and function of language, so fundamental for the subject: [...that is], that the body resonates through the rustling voice. Reminding [...] that the subject speaks”, Courtine writes. 16 “For me speech is not its conceptual interpretation, its description […] I am interested, while interpreting a phrase, in finding out where this sound was created, its nuclear rhythm”, is what Terzopoulos says17, while turning the bodies of the ­actors into a loudspeaker.

I am presenting two contradictory examples, as for the direction they follow: The first one from the performance of Bacchae: During the well known scene when Agave realises that the head she is holding belongs to her son, Pentheus, the actress’ body, already in an internal energy vortex, transfers all this energy to her face, concentrating it on the mouth – source of speech through the tongue which starts to vibrate in a hopeless effort to articulate words. What really happens is that the strain of the body obstructs the mouth and the tongue to articulate speech, not allowing breath to find a sound release. The result of that is that Agave’s tongue moves demonically quickly producing inarticulate sounds, as being in a religious ecstasy, speaking in glossolalia, and emanating noises that refer to a bestial and as such primitive, long forgotten stage of communication. Gradually, like a difficult birth, phonetic sounds will be articulated, causing a verbal explosion.

Anthropological studies have claimed that being in a state of excruciating ­emotional or physical pain obliterates language.18 When confronting physical pain, speech becomes inconsistent preserving only its musicality19, while during a mourning ritual the self passes to a stage when screaming becomes autonomous.20 The second example: Terzopoulos, in the summer of 2011, drawing from the performance art of Kalliopi Lemos’ Esperia creates a three-part theatrical per­ formance that converses with it. In the second part, Eterna, again the actress Sophia Michopoulou, sitting amidst suspended huge sculptures that encircle her

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and amorphous face-like totems, posits a barrage of lamenting words composed of confused traumatic testimonies – recollections of wars. Step by step, speech loses any coherence, the words come out disconnected, becoming inarticulate sounds, the signified initially turned into recognizable sounds that finally become unintelligible sounds which do not differ from the most typical forms of glossolalia: a reduction to a pre-linguistic stage caused by pain, but also a post-linguistic phase that is signified by an overflow of “talking”, leading to the destruction of articulate speech.

Neuroscientific studies on people speaking in glossolalia and who are members of the Pentecostal tradition, observed an increased activity in centres of the brain that control emotional functions and decreased activity in areas connected to language.21 This is the reason why the sound stimulation of the body finally seems pre-linguistic, and beyond conventional languages as specific cultural institutions.

“Glossolalia combines something pre-linguistic, related to a silent origin [...] and something post-linguistic, made from the excess, the overflows, and the wastes of language”22, is what de Certeau has claimed.

The performance Jocasta in 2012, presenting Giannis Kontrafouris’ poetic-­ delusional text, leads to similar conclusions. Sophia Hill recites the text as a ­lamenting ritual, treating speech as a sound universe where the signifiers are more important than the signified. The actress produces initially a soft sound, which ­progressively becomes louder giving the impression that it comes from a distant musical instrument. Only when it becomes quite intense, filling the space, does the audience realise that this musical instrument is the body of the actress. As the ­volume increases, the sound resembling a sob becomes louder and louder, achieving saturation, until it borders a lamenting scream and as such acoustic “violence”. It is clear that this is a pure acoustic pre-linguistic expression of the lamenting­ glossolalic body.23 Testimonies of people speaking in glossolalia often attach to its production a liquid quality: “something coming from my inner self, like a geyser starts to bubble, firing water and then flooding like an unrestrained tide”, says one, while another states: “I felt as if a hydrant of words was flowing out of my mouth.”24 What we often witness in Terzopoulos’ method is that saliva is continuously secreted filling the mouth: in the performance Desert – based on the play Persuasion and Rhetoric by Carlo Michaelstaedter – Paolo Musio, in his effort to articulate words, vibrates for some minutes while smacking his lips and moving his tongue, whereas the effervescent saliva glands produce much secretion, as if the energy

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a­ ccumulated in the oral cavity fills the mouth with saliva before the explosion of speech. A pre-linguistic somatization of pain. Tasos Dimas’ performance in The Dancer by Erich Arendt, where the kinetic memory is accomplished in the ­accumulated saliva secretion of the vibrating mouth of a seemingly still body, is a counterpart of the above as for its pre-linguistic wetness and the relevant tongue smacks that reduce the body to a “dramatized space of conflicts”.25 Respectively, the expressive speech of Alla Demidova in Nosferatu at the Perm Opera in 2014 compares, on the one hand, to the vocals of the singers, and on the other, to the lengthy muteness of Tasos Dimas. This voiceless period is accom­ panied by a hyperactivity of the whole face, especially of the mouth, which progressively produces inarticulate sounds before reaching a point of a violent, nearly ­incoherent release of words. The space between, before speech is uttered, refers to “the threshold between muteness and speaking [that] should be reconstituted as a ‘no man’s land’, a space of vocal manipulations, already free from silence but not yet subject to a particular language”.26 As muteness is equal to “I am able not to say anything”27, the paralinguistic of glossolalia is equal to an undoubtedly communi­ cative intention of a still incomplete “I want to say something”.

If in Nosferatu Hill’s voice blends with the music sounds that over-define her every signified turning her into a musical instrument, the progressive removal of speech through its sonification seems to constitute the basic characteristic of the recent trilogy of Terzopoulos, Alarme, Amor, and Encore, a trilogy on power (political, economic, erotic) and on the subjection of the Other.

Thus, for example, in Alarme, to alternate from Greek to English and French makes the attempted dialogue between the two queens rhythmic and the words ­simple sound signs, undermining finally whatever meaning they possess. As the rhythm quickens, the words become independent, lose their semantic support and change to simple signifiers until they are finally totally absorbed by the sound of breathing28: “An orality expecting aurality”, as, paraphrasing de Certeau29, I could say that what interests the most is the action of trying to utter speech rather than the content of the speech. A characteristic example of that is the sequence of words uttered at some point by Sophia Hill as Elizabeth: after the repeated and with ­increased rhythmic intensity “love -- me”, “kill -- me”, hate -- me”, trust -- me”, the acceleration of the exhalation-utterance destroys the verbs allowing only the ­pronoun “me” to be heard repeatedly. Then it reaches a point when the whole body surges forward as if ready to puke the pronoun up as an insignificant sound30,

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i­rrevocably imposing it on Stuart – Aglaia Pappa. Thus the whole body of Elizabeth turns into an authoritarian “I” that resounds/diffuses inside the theatrical space31.

However studies on glossolalic utterances, as the ones found in 1945 in a letter by Artaud, show that glossolalia, when it does not introduce neologisms, functions according to ways of partial or alternate repetition. The existing logic behind the repetition will distort every meaning or lead to escaping but real concepts during the Man’s performance in Amor, who converts the motion of the fingers not into words but into numbers: infinite numbers including their tenths and multitudes, their additions and divisions. The actor Antonis Miriagos rarely articulates a word; on the contrary he utters a “text of numbers”. The speed is such that the numbers become meaningless sounds and alliterations, vocal utterances that end up to being ­extra-phonemic sounds and so to sporadically change into semantically charged phonemes: thus the number “eksi- six” by being continuously repeated becomes “sex-success” until this high pitched vocal sound escalates and reaches a sexual ­climax. The same number though, leads not only from “eksi” to “exit”, to that ­imminent threat of our country’s exit from the group of the powerful European countries, but also to a person’s exit from “life”, directing someone to “a bare life”, a “vita nuda” according to Giorgio Agamben, thus a life deprived of rights. A return to wilderness, to post-communication. The result is that when the Man shouts the word “Amor” as an invocation for his humanization, the repetition will transform and vocalize it, acquiring finally the shape of hungry wolf’s howl. Is it humanization or brutalization through love?32 In the last part of the trilogy, Encore, the inarticulate of the uttered sounds is produced by the two bodies (Hill and Miriagos), which use and consume each ­other. The beautiful can be eaten. A state that refers to Dali’s concept of “edible beauty” (beauté comestible). The actors’ speech numbers asthmatically the bowels until it also dissolves into the smallest sound-morphic units, into meaningless sounds that resemble a bestial inarticulate speech. What is internal becomes ­external. The ancestral beast is eating our rational civilization.

“You are chewing me”, is what they tell each other. Then, bestial sounds similar to meowing or the howling of wolves follow. Sounds that refer to devouring the prey, to fierce hunger.33 “And now what?” the man will ask near the end and after the repeated “once more-encore”, this incessant desire for strife. And the woman will answer, using for the first time clearly articulated, playful and filled with mundane intonations speech,

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that in order to give him an answer she would have to become a child again. I­ mplying perhaps that the answer cannot be given with the use of some articulate Cartesian speech, but through the vocal pre-linguistic universal sounds of a baby found in every language since they precede its specific differentiating structure.

This view coincides with what Agamben has said, in particular with the experimentum linguae he introduces supporting that an infant can construct phonemes of all the existing languages, because, although the child hasn’t acquired yet the skills of articulate speech, what it produces already resembles a language.34 It thus agrees with Roman Jakobson, who quite early observed, referring to “phonological universals” that an infant, who is bubbling, by only making the slightest effort, can reproduce any sound that exists in all human languages.35 Is there then anything closer to a trans-cultural attempt than the quest for an infant “grain” 36 in the voice, as Barthes would have said, as the corporal communication that abolishes any kind of “dyadism” for the benefit of a universal “eurythmia”?37 Finally, as Michel de Certeau had said, “what utopia is to social space, glossolalia is to oral communication: it encloses in a linguistic simulacrum all that is not language and comes from the speaking voice”.38 Terzopoulos may, when he invokes the memory of the body39, ask from his actors to rediscover the memory of the lost sounds, fighting the vocal amnesia imposed on them socially, call them to remember the echo of another speech and something else from the speech: an echolalia40 communicable to everyone, a glossolalia that leads to a trans-cultural theatre, ­making as such the illusion of a universal community reality.

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1

M. de Certeau, «Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias», Representations 56, (1996), p. 29.

2 A.S. Weiss-Ch. Thomas, «La glossolalie et la glossographie dans les délires théologiques», Langages 91 (1988), p. 105–110.

3

A. Tomiche, «Glossolalic Folly», Comparative Critical Studies 5. 2-3 (2008), σ. 165–177.

4

J.-P. Denis, «Glossolalies: vestiges d’une oralité première», Études littéraires 22.2 (1989), p. 100.

5

M. de Certeau, «Vocal Utopias: Glossolalias», Representations 56, (1996), p. 29.

6

J.-P. Denis, «Glossolalie, langue universelle» (1988), op. cit., p. 78 – M. de Certeau, «Vocal Utopias», op. cit., p. 41.

7

Denis, «Glossolalies: vestiges d’une oralité» (1989), op. cit., p. 105.

8

A. Artaud, Le théâtre et son double, op. cit., p. 211.

9 J.-P. Jacot, «Jonction, disjonction: les fragments glossolaliques d’Artaud», Littérature 103 (1996), p. 64.

10 Idem, p. 76.

11 Idem, p. 64 12 Jacot, «Jonction», op. cit., p. 72.

13 Artaud, Le théâtre et son double op. cit., especially in the chapter «Le théâtre de Séraphin», p. 223–31.

14 Idem, ch. «Un athlétisme affectif», p. 199–211.

15 For an analysis of the pre-language stages, see: D. Tsatsoulis “Exiled speech” Paravasis, 11 (2013), p. 245–54. For examples of the different stages from Terzopoulos performances also see, D. Tsatsoulis “Aglossia and lament as the memory of the acoustic body on the stage of Attis Theatre» (Esperia and Jocasta), THEATROgrafies 18 (2013), p. 115–124.

16 Courtine, «Les silences de la voix», op. cit., p. 9.

17 Theodoros Terzopoulos, The return of Dionysus, Attis Theatre, Athens, 2015, p. 43.

18 “Physical pain [...] destroys language [...] To witness the moment when pain causes a ­r­eversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language”, E. Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 1985, p. 4.

19 Veena Das, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain”, Daedalus 125 (1997), p. 86.

20 “Pain is materialized by acoustics of ‘screaming’ and the poetics of the body”, C.N. Seremetakis, The Last Word. Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, Chicago University Press, Chicago and London, 1991, p. 230.

21 For example see: A. B. Newberg & al., “The measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during Glossolalia: A Preliminary SPECT Study”, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 148 (2006), p. 67–71.

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22 M. de Certeau, «Vocal Utopias», op. cit., p. 33.

23 For an analytical presentation of the performance see Dimitris Tsatsoulis: “Aglossia and lament as the memory of the acoustic body on the stage of Attis Theatre” (Esperia and Jocasta), op. cit., p. 115–124.

24 Courtine, “Les silences”, op. cit., p. 19.

25 J.-P. Denis, “Glossolalie, langue universelle, poésie sonore”, Langages 91 (1988), p. 75.

26 M. de Certeau, “Vocal Utopias”, op. cit., p. 38.

27 Ch. Migone, “Bouche...boue...oue/Une somaphonie buccale”, Inter, Art Actuel 98 (2007), p. 18.

28 For further analysis see: D. Tsatsoulis, “Exiled speech. Aphonia, Aglossia and the materiality of language in the theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos”, Paravasis 11 (2013), p. 252–254.

29 M. de Certeau, «Vocal Utopias», op. cit., p. 31.

30 For the concept of ‘asimias’ (the lack of meaning) that corresponds to the voice of birds and also to barbaric languages see: Ilias Spyropoulos: “Asimos, barbarian and divergent voice in Ancient Comedy”, in: the European Cultural Centre of Delphi, II International Meeting on Ancient Drama (Delphi, 15–20 June 1986), Athens, 1989, pp. 156–157. (FORMAT) 31 D. Tsatsoulis, “Exiled Speech”, op. cit., 252.

32 For the full review of the performance see: D. Tsatsoulis, “Bestiality as humanisation”, Eleftherotypia, 20/1/2014.

33 I am using extracts from my full review of the performance published in www.Imerodromos 29/3/2017.

34 G. Agamben, Infanzia e Storia. Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia, Einaudi, Torino, 2001, p. 50-52.

35 R. Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals, Mouton, The Hague, 1968, p. 26.

36 Mention to the term of R. Barthes, Le plaisir du texte, Rappas, Athens, 1973, p. 108–10 & R. Barthes, L’ obvie et l’obtus. Essais critiques III, Seuil, Paris, 1982, p. 236–45.

37 Notion proposed by M. De Marinis, «Rifare il corpo. Lavoro su se stessi e ricerca sulle azioni fisiche dentro e fuori del teatro nel novecento», Teatro e Storia 19 (1997), p. 161–182.

38 «Vocal Utopias», op.cit., p. 31.

39 Th. Terzopoulos, Η επιστροφή του Διονύσου (The return of Dionysus), Attis Theatre, ­Athens, op. cit. p.45.

40 D. Heller-Roazen, Echolalias. On the Forgetting of Language, Zone Books, New York, 2008, p. 11.

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Eros and Thanatos The aesthetics of Enchantment in the Theatre of Terzopoulos GEORGE SAMPATAKAKIS Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Patras, GREECE

As I was preparing this talk, I realized that I have written more than a thousand pages about the Theatre of Terzopoulos, including half a doctoral thesis, a book in Greek, many articles in international journals, a big number of conference papers, quite a few reviews and some programme notes for the Attis Theatre. I have always been interested in p­ lacing Attis Theatre in the context of Modern Greek arts as a political factor which de-stabilized conservative ideologies and traditional aesthetic norms.

At some point, I saw the obsession of Attis Theatre with geometric forms (floor patterns, postures, gestures) as fundamentally related to the basic aesthetic law of ­abstraction and the deduction of things to their skeleton until they are stripped from their flesh and surface (Müller, 1982, p. 43), thereby constructing fictive art-figures (Kunst­figuren) “in bold outline” (Schlemmer, 1961, p. 17).

As far as the Method of Terzopoulos is concerned, its basic functional principle for me is the tripartite law of deconstruction, analysis and reconstruction (anasynthesis) of both the actor’s body and the dramaturgical material in use. More significantly, this Dionysian Method presupposes the creative deconstruction of the ­actor’s daily body and the controlled reconstruction of the body into a new performing self. The actor must also process and de-familiarize (Terzopoulos, 2015, pp. 66) the text that he is going to use in performance, and negotiate with it (as well as with his body). Without any doubt, this is a process of productive “negation” (ibid., p. 47), which seeks to ideologize and recuperate the text according to a directorial concept.

My view has always been that the theatre of Terzopoulos is neither culture-­ specific nor culture-restrictive. It is an anthropological theatre founded on the basic

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laws of the omission and the dilation of the daily body in order for a fictive body to be created (Barba, 1991, pp. 13–20). More or less, the basic objectives in Terzopoulos’ theatre are: (1) to simplify and reduce something down in order to find its “essence”; (2) to extend the range of expression (mainly by constructing new forms); (3) to pay a particular attention to the treatment of rhythm; and (4) to de-familiarize the text and the actor from their “self-evident, familiar, obvious quality” (Brecht as trans­ lated in Brooker, p. 191). The result is an impressive stylization not only in the sense of a non-realist aesthetics, but mainly in a very Meyerholdean sense as a rhythmical synthesis of body postures in motion, that bear the qualities of economy and suggestion (as Pitches, 2003, pp. 50-3, defines the term).

But, now that I’m older, I realized that I tended to forget the things which matter most: first the overwhelming beauty of Terzopoulos’ theatre and, second, its devastating Dionysian humanism. Beauty can be indeed the transformative potential of art, a potential which is continually contested and continually desired: Our capacity to signify beauty has no limits. It is born of a loss which can never be properly named, and whose consequence is, quite simply, the human imperative to engage in a ceaseless signification . . . It is a call to which none of us is adequate by ourselves . . . Only as a collectivity can we be equal to the demand not only to find beauty in all of the world’s forms, but to sing forever and in a constantly new way the jubilant song of that beauty. (Silverman, 2000, pp. 146) The Dionysian beauty of things On a dramatic scale, Nietzsche links will to power with a cosmic vision of the world as “a monster of energy, without beginning, without end / a ‘Dionysian world of eternal self-­creation, eternal self-destruction, in which the force motivating destruction and creation is will to power. The Dionysian intoxicated world of art includes above all music, dance and some types of poetry (the lyrical, the magical, the ritual).

The aim is a blurring of images, loss of everyday lines (which in musical terms means the breaking of melody and above all harmony), and an ecstatic loss of self-identity and conscious control. Nietzsche is also speaking of impulses towards types of cultural production, but equally importantly, he is claiming that each of these drives has a metaphysical meaning, an inherent commitment to a certain way of understanding reality.

By rejecting the real, Terzopoulos reinstates all these forces “which did not ­accept to be civilized”, giving a new structural beauty to Otherness (dementia,

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aphonia, entrapment, enclosure, death, darkness, emptiness, laughter, κλαυσίγελος, chewing, symbolic communion, devouring, howling, growling, snarling). The Beauty of the un-human as the new Human.

Terzopoulos’ worlds are products of a Traumarbeit, a blurring enhancement of things. But in Dionysian dreaming there is always a “semblance of a second, quite different r­ eality” that lies beneath the reality we experience.

During the last decade, the theatre of Terzopoulos acquired the aesthetic ­visuality of a “terrorist beauty”. And rather than defining theatre as an unchanging identifiable object in the real, we might rethink Attis as a culturally conditioned site of morphogenesis, where the forms created the beauty of a cruel aestheticism: the images have a profound purity of line, the colors are honed to sharp resolution, and the bodies portrayed evoke baroque representations of figure and composition. The theatrical apparatus as “vision machine” (Freedman, 1991, p. 50), thus, stages ways of looking, that respond to a particular consciousness.

The consciousness of Eros and Thanatos Strangely enough, it was a Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, who first connected Apollo and Dionysos with Eros and Thanatos so eloquently. In his book The Aesthetic ­Dimension Marcuse argued that “[the inexorable entanglement of joy and sorrow, celebration and despair, Eros and Thanatos cannot be dissolved into the problems of the class struggle” (16). Even a classless society, he added, “would not signal the end of art, the overcoming of tragedy, the reconciliation of the Dionysian and the Apollonian” (29).

With the Encore (2017) Terzopoulos continued his study on the stage machines which “trap” the performers into a topology endowed with dystopian qualities.

Two performers were enchanted by each other following a root (to a black niche at the back of the stage) which led to their union and mutual devouring. Such an encounter prescribed above all a process of communal interjection: at the beginning nobody knew that their desire to sadistically consume each other foreshadowed their own aphanisis and their transformation into a plural Body, fastened to the ­machine of Eros (after the symbolic Thanatos of the single male and female body).

In doing so, the Encore asked the “fateful question” to which extent the unifying ­powers of Eros might (re)signify the relation between I and not-I, me and the ­Other, not as the site of an antagonism but as an occasion for unification and self-negation.

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(Post)Humanism A type of neohumanism was generated in Europe due to several social crises and the people’s productive questioning of past ideologies and patterns of thought. To think in terms of a world picture, of a common framing of social circumstances means to “undermine claims of homogeneous and autonomous identity” (Chambers, 2001, p. 200). On the o­ ther hand, as Chambers (2001, p. 201) argues in­ Culture after Humanism: History, C ­ ulture, Subjectivity to “insist on a racial, ethnic or nationalist identity as something that is not connected or framed in the historical heterogeneity of a shared world is to deny the very forces that gave rise to such ­concepts (race, ethnicity), and which both ground and permit such an identity to speak”.

And in the frame of this post-humanism, Terzopoulos’ polyethnic and “intersectional” casts tend to assume “difference as the norm” of a common endeavor (Butterfield, 2012, p. 19).

A good example is the 2010 Prometheus at the Old Mill Factory in Elefsina.

The unchained Titan who spoke Turkish, following a line of descent from the back to the front of the stage, was constantly smearing his abdomen with black paint, unable to escape this self-punishment. Prometheus, the old mythical emblem of social rebellions (as analyzed in Hall, 2002, pp. 129-40) was thus transformed into a manifesto-machine h­ eralding the death of romantic revolutions and the ­inevitability of new social action. A ­ ccording to the director: “I want to incite people to rise. This can’t be done with a slow ritualistic performance […]. Even Prometheus’ own monologues are phrases that we use today in our everyday reality. Hence, there is already a basis for the development of a rebellion. (Paridis, 2010)” At the end of the performance the actors stood up in a long line facing the audience. They started loudly repeating Prometheus’ famous line “a day will come” (189) after r­ eciting the phrase ἔκδικα πάσχω. Before they finally fall on the ground, they were all trembling as if they were attacked by a power that wanted to take control of their bodies, shouting until the very end that “a day will come”. This was indeed an agita­ting image of shared suffering and hope, which caused a loud applause in every performance. The great humanist paradigm of Prometheus was actually used in order to broadcast a socially ­agitating message: ‘we are ALL abettors of crime and we will ALL fall, unless we rise’ (Sampatakakis, 2010, p. 41).

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Conclusion Patrice Pavis argues that for a director to “deconstruct tradition is not to destroy it: it is to extract its principles and confront them with today’s principles”. (2013, p. 161)Terzopoulos’ work embraces the productiveness of questioning canons and traditions, creating thereby new images of human essence.

Terzopoulos’ theatre offers the possibility of new structures, not only in the sense of a r­ enewed aesthetics, but mainly in the sense of new patterns of thought and new “structures of feeling” (Raymond Williams, 1966, p. 18).

My work has benefited by the books and articles of many colleagues, namely ­Marianne McDonald, Dimitris Tsatsoulis, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Penelope Hadji­ dimitriou, Frank Raddatz, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Kerem Karabogda to name some of the pioneers. And a second generation of “Terzopoulos scholars”: Avra ­Sidiropoulou, Kaiti Diamadakou, Kim Jae Kyoung and others.

But I owe a lot to Freddy Decreus, his kindheartedness and inspirational work with which I will conclude. And I quote: “In the eyes of Terzopoulos it takes courage to reconsider the absolute ­metaphors we still use today as well as the historical and mythological roots that are responsible for the way we think, feel, love and fight, and to integrate them into a new globalized and inter­cultural field, into the new ethnic, national and cultural borders, because interculturality determines more and more the new face of­ Europe, and therefore also of its production of art, religion and worldviews.” (2012, p. 191)

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References Barba, E. (1991). “Theatre Anthropology”. In E. Barba, N. Savarese (eds). A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. London and New York: ­Routledge, pp. 8–22.

Brooker, P. (1988). Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry, Politics. Croom Helm: London.

Butterfield, E. (2012). Sartre and Posthumanist Humanism, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Chambers, I. (2001). Culture after Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge.

Decreus, F. (2012). “Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Promethiade (2010), or the Revolutionary Power of Contemporary Theatre”. Classical Papers, 11, pp. 181–196.

Fischer-Lichte, E. (2014). Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” in a Globalizing World. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Freud, S. (1950). Remembering and Repeating: Collected Papers. Ed. and trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, London. _____ (2005 [1914]). Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Trans. A. A. Brill. Stilwell: ­Digirids.com Publishing.

Gillespie, G. (1990). “Prometheus in the Romantic Age”. In G. Hoffmeister (ed.). European Romanticism. Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 197–210.

Hall, E. (2002). “Tony Harrison’s Prometheus: A View from the Left”. Arion, 10, pp. 129–140.

Kyoung Kim, J. (2013). “Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Production of Heiner Müller’s Mauser: Metaphoric Political Theatre through Space, Body and Dialogue”. Skene, 1(3), pp. 373–87.

Moore, G. (2004). Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. CUP: Cambridge.

Müller, H. (1982). Rotwelsch, Berlin: Merve.

Paridis, C. (2010). ‘Αντι-Προμηθέας’ = ‘Anti-Prometheus’, Lifo, 19 June 2010, <http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/2123>, |accessed 23 October 2015|.

Pavis, P. (2013). Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today. Trans. J. Anderson.

Oxford and New York: Routledge.

Pitches, J. (2003). Vsevolod Meyerhold. New York and London: Routledge.

Ribeiro, J. M. (2007). Architectures on Stage. Lisbon: Almedina.

Sampatakakis, G. (2010). “Προμηθέας-Μανιφέστο” = “Prometheus-Manifesto”.

In Φεστιβάλ Αθηνών 2010, Athens Festival 2010. Athens: Greek Festival Ltd., p. 41.

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Silverman, K. (2000). World Spectators, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Tsatsoulis, D. (2006). “The Circle and the Square”. In F. M. Raddatz (ed.). Reise mit Dionysos: Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos. Journey with Dionysos: The Theatre of Thedoros Terzopoulos. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, pp. 42–54.

Schlemmer, O. (1961). “Man and Art Figure”. In W. Gropius (ed.). The Theater of the Bauhaus. Trans. by A. S. Wensinger. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP. Wesleyan University Press, pp. 17–44. Williams, R. (1966). Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto & Windus.

Photos page 174–185 Photo 1. The Trojan Women, Euripides, Ancient Theatre of Delphi, Erdogan Kavaz

(photo Johanna Weber) Photo 2. The Trojan Women, Euripides, Ancient Theatre of Delphi, Erdogan Kavaz, Savvas Stroumpos, Niovi Charalampous, Prokopis Agathokleous, Despoina Bebedeli (photo Johanna Weber) Photo 3. The Trojan Women, Euripides, Ancient Theatre of Delphi, Niovi Charalampous,

Prokopis Agathokleous, Despoina Bebedeli (photo Johanna Weber) Photo 4. The Trojan Women, Euripides, Ancient Theatre of Delphi, Erdogan Kavaz, Prokopis Agathokleous (photo Johanna Weber) Photo 5. The Trojan Women, Euripides, Ancient Theatre of Delphi, Sophia Hill (photo Johanna Weber) Photo 6. The Trojan Women, Euripides, Ancient Theatre of Delphi, chorus

(photo Johanna Weber)

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(Un)livable, (Un)grievable, (Un)mournable Bodies: Violence, Mourning and Politics in the Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos PENELOPE CHATZIDIMITRIOU Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GREECE

The importance of Dionysos for the Attis Theatre is well known: his death and ­rebirth. The dangerous explosion of energy that destroys the world, dismembers bodies and identities only to re-member them all, in the dual sense of reassembling the scattered pieces and looking back in remembrance. Dis-membering and Re-membering are vital in Attis theatre: sparagmos and mneme.

Still, today I will pay close attention not to Dionysos but to the Mothers of the Attis Theatre, embracing Olga Taxidou’s concept of the trope of the Mother or “Mother Machine”, and her assumption that “[the] fascination that tragedy has with mainly monstrous mothers, may be the precondition, the grounds of its ­theatricality” (44). Admittedly, there are many ways to see Terzopoulos’ theatre but today I will attempt to explore the concept of the Mother Machine as one of the means through which the ground for the unique theatricality of the Attis Theatre has been set. At the same time, I will pay tribute to major female performers who have worked with Terzopoulos, putting their bodies in the service of the archetypal journey of Dionysos: Sophia Michopoulou and Sophia Hill; Aneza Papadopoulou and Evrikleia Sofroniadou; Alla Demidova and Galatea Ranzi.

But who are these Mothers?

In Greek tragedy, mothers often kill their offspring, sleep with them, invite everyone even to feast on them. Yet, in the case of the Attis Theatre, everything starts with the childless Yerma; she opens the director’s way to tragedy:

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YERMA (Aneza Papadopoulou, Yerma, 1982) Terzopoulos often refers to Lorca’s Yerma, a work of the pre-Attis Theatre period, as the play that paved his way to the Dionysian exploration of the “organic time of human existence” (Papadopoulou) and mneme. Still, Yerma’s ecstasy is not the same as Agave’s; her Dionysian ecstasy is that of despair. Despair drives Yerma to kill her husband, and along with him, her hope for a child (MπακονικόλαΓεωργοπούλου 95). Yerma is the epitome of maternity cancelled and natality, in the sense of reproductive futurity, desperately celebrated.

AGAVE (Sophia Michopoulou, Bacchae, 1986) In the emblematic scene of The Bacchae, Agave becomes “The consummate mother, who generates both birth and death” (Taxidou, p. 46). It is through this c­ aesura, the cut between birth and death that the Attis Theatre aesthetics of c­ ruelty erupts.

Through the dark cavity of her stretched open mouth, theatricality is articulated and the staggering paralinguistics of mourning spurt out.

ATOSSA (Evrikleia Sophroniadou, Persians, 1990) Fear and terror are most prominent in The Persians. Primarily existential but also political, fear builds up within the akinetic bodies, turning the mouth once again into the bestial orifice through which explosive physical impulses gush out. ”The violent meaning of the mouth regains the upper hand” (Bataille 59–60), as the magnified, stretched-open mouth of Queen Atossa, Mother of Xerxes, ­asserts.

ANTIGONE (Galatea Ranzi, Antigone, 1994) For Judith Butler and Olga Taxidou, Antigone is not only a sister but “the anti-mother of Greek tragedy”, the one that turns “against reproductive futurity” and rejects becoming a mother (Taxidou, p. 46). Such a rejection creates a caesura, a cut between maternity and natality. A spectacle of Violence is composed, turning the stage into a deathscape and the performance into a burial ritual.

MEDEA (Alla Demidova, Medeamaterial, 1996) The study of natural phenomena has been decisive for Terzopoulos: the laws of the wave, lightning and earthquakes are not only forces of nature but forces of god, especially in their extreme manifestation (Terzopoulos, p. 66). Performed in the

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r­ eligious space of the Byzantine church of St. Irene in Istanbul, Demidova’s Medea plays with natural light at dusk, the blazes and shadows of the sunset; her speech exudes moisture and her body follows the swaying motion of an imaginary wave that ­su­ffuses the imaginary deck of the “Argo” (ibid, p. 66. In her aesthetics of ritualistic cruelty, female dignity is restored even at the expense of a sort of maternity and n­ atality that mourn their losses.

EUROPE (Sophia Michopoulou, Epigonoi, 2003) This Europe is not the young and beautiful princess of the myth; against the backdrop of the Iraq War, she is political and military, as old as the Old Continent which bears her name. She is “the Mother of nearly all 20th century wars; on her shoulders she carries the victims of all conflicts” (Stroumpos, in Χατζηδημητρίου, p. 270).

In her silent mourning and desperation, she “converses” with Heiner Müller’s Medea – the ultimate Müllerian Mother, and his Ophelia – the ultimate daughter/ lover. Both are agents of revenge and rebellion who emancipated themselves from history and the crystallized forms of Aristotelian and Shakespearean tragedy. A dismal view of the Old Continent is revealed as a dark continent that is politically and morally ­confused, militarily absurd, populated by once-upon-a-time heroes like Ajax, ­Philoctetes, Achilles and Aktaion, who may well suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

JOCASTA (Sophia Hill, Jocasta by Yiannis Kontrafouris, 2009) This is a postdramatic Jocasta after the Sophoclean tragedy of Oedipus the King.

Twice a wife, mother and wife of the same man, mother and grandmother of the same children, this epitome of maternity and natality [sic], blended with discourses of incest taboo, death and mourning, now stands centre stage breaking her prevailing silence in the original tragedy. Moving centre stage, Kontrafouris and Terzopoulos’ Jocasta enters “the centre of the dissolution of her story” (Σαμπατακάκης 65), of language and tragedy as such, disappearing into “the pit that she dug with her belly” (Κοντραφούρης 223, my translation).

The above exploration of the trope of the Mother Machine through seven ­instances offers us a different angle to view the unique mise-en-scène and theatricality of the Attis Theatre in the course of time. But it does more than this: in both its tragic and postdramatic manifestations, it reveals that “the political cannot be predicted solely on a hopeful ‘natality’ […]” (Fischer, p. 4), as the latter has been

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c­onceptualized by Hannah Arendt to celebrate ‘unpredictability’. For Arendt, ­unpredictability leads to action, freedom and plurality as the basic condition of human life. It also reveals that totalitarianism tries to exterminate what it sees as threatening – this element of unpredictability – by repressing and forbidding­ human action (Farrugia Flores 85). The exploration of the trope of the Mother ­Machine in the Attis Theatre reveals that the political must also acknowledge “the ‘mourning and negativity’ that encompass democratic life” (Fischer, p. 4).

Mourning, as we know, is central in the Attis Theatre, but in critical­ literature it has mainly been discussed in narratives of prehistoric stories that are apolitical narratives. Still, Erika Fischer-Lichte has proved that the ritual is not ­precultural, primitive, apolitical and asocial but cultural, political and social, and the fusions of ritual and theatre in the 20th century have resulted in political theatre.

As for mourning, Judith Butler famously points out that in 21st century politics of terror and terrorism “grief does not turn us to a solitary situation; it neither privatize us nor depoliticize us”. Quite the opposite, it “furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order” (ibid 22), as we can return to a sense of common human vulnerability that will foster a collective responsibility for the physical lives of the others. According to Butler, there is something to be gained from maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think of our international ties.

Although I am aware of the critical literature that expresses uncertainty about “the political relevance of mourning” (McIvor, p. 410), I am quoting Butler’s ethico-political intervention to argue that the work of Theodoros Terzopoulos connects with death, suffering, mourning and grief in the 21st century and thus “revise[s] the norms that prescribe both who can be mourned and how these others can be mourned” (ibid, p. 411). His theatre exposes human vulnerability and loss, Butler’s “precarious lives” and ours, in the hope that an ethical appreciation of these can lead to less violent politics.

It is fruitful to consider the above with regard to the production of The Trojan Women (Pafos 2017 and Delphi 2018) and the Mother Figure of Hecuba (Despoina Bebedeli). Obviously Hecuba is not a monstrous mother as Medea, Agave and ­Jocasta are. She is a mother and grandmother, a homo sacer who lives in monstrous times. The caesura that she lives in, the cut where she mourns from within is created by “the modalities of political, military, and economic power – the grand strategies of geopolitics” (Derek xv). When people make histories, they make geographies: their actions literally take place and places are taken in the most violent ways

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(ibid, IV). The Trojan Women, with its actors coming from Syria and Greece, as well as from the divided cities of Nicosia, Mostar and Jerusalem, can be seen as “a collective project of resistance” and a stepping stone “toward a more humane geography” in our colonial present (ibid xv). In that sense, The Trojan Women affirms Maternity and cries for Natality in the 21st century.

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Works Cited Bataille, George. “Mouth.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Ed. And trans. Allan Stoekl. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985: 59–60.

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004.

Derek, Gregory. The Colonial Present. Maiden, Oxford, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Farrugia Flores, Robert. “The Capacity to Begin: Arendt’s Concept of ‘Natality’.”

Threads 3 (2015): 80-87. University of Malta. Web. 30 May 2018.

Fischer, Tony. Introduction. Performing Antagonism. Theatre, Performance & ­Radical Democracy. Ed. Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 43–59.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political T ­ heatre.

London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Κοντραφούρης, Γιάννης. Ιοκάστη και Άλλα Κείμενα για το Θέατρο. Αθήνα: Άγρα, 2010. Μπακονικόλα-Γεωργοπούλου, Χαρά. Θέματα και Πρόσωπα του Σύγχρονου Δράματος. Αθήνα: Πατάκη,1998.

McIvor, David. “Bringing ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning.” Political Theory 40(4) 2012: 409–436. JSTOR. Web. 13 December 2017. Παπαδοπούλου, Ανέζα. Προσωπική συνέντευξη. 1 Φεβρουαρίου 2004. Σαμπατακάκης, Γιώργος. «Ολοσχερώς Πάσχειν. Το Μεταδραματικό Θέατρο του Γιάννη Κοντραφούρη.» Ιοκάστη και Άλλα Κείμενα για το Θέατρο. Του Γιάννη Κοντραφούρη. Αθήνα: Άγρα, 2010: 13–73.

Taxidou, Olga. “Tragedy: Maternity, Natality, Theatricality.” Performing Antagonism. Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy. Ed. Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 43–59.

Terzopoulos, Theodoros. Theodoros Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre. Athens: Agra, 2010. Χατζηδημητρίου, Πηνελόπη. Θεόδωρος Τερζόπουλος: Από το Προσωπικό Στο Παγκόσμιο. Θεσσαλονίκη: University Studio Press, 2010.

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Energy Theatricality and Creative Forms in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Performances MARIKA THOMADAKI Professor of Theory and Semiology of Theatre, University of Athens, GREECE

The semiotic cluster “energy theatricality” is a theoretical framework which is applied as a kind of detecting system for locating constants and variables in a certain performing event.

Following a dipole of receptive levels, Distinction Judgment Comparison (A level), and Perception Acceptance Reception (B level), we conclude that we need to reapproach issues directly related to the nature of theatre, the paradox and the symbolic joints that connect the logic of Logos with the eccentricity of the representation of the world. No doubt that theatre is the space of paradox, in fact, the logical paradox, which further proves the inability of the dialectic to confront the possibilities.

Theodoros Terzopoulos places the body of the actor in geometric constructions, where constants and variables dominate and relate to both the physicality and the objects that surround a theatrical Subject. Besides, the actor’s physicality is identified in its fascinating creative forms. In the performances of the Attis Theatre, the ideal forms of a story become creative because they produce systems of speech and/or movements in progress which reflect the inner expression of a ­nucleus of inscriptions of the phatic and aphasia.

The performances of Theodoros Terzopoulos raise various questions about the concept of theatricality integrated in a clear and distinct interpretative context, as much as theatre itself of course allows it. Each of Terzopoulos’ performances ­suggests a possible utopia controlled by a possible reality. However, the control of these possibilities does not ignore the necessary condition that allows for the

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t­ ranscendence and the development of creative forms, as defined by the imaginary through symbols. After all, energy theatricality resorts to stratagems thanks to which some concepts, produced by the sign as a signifier with infinite signifieds, are codified.

Starting from two basic qualities of the sign, diametrically opposed to each ­other at first sight, namely a) the absolute presence and b) the absolute vagueness, we are led to the search for a stable field of application of the theory of energy ­theatricality according to some standards that characterize some of Terzopoulos’ performances. From this point of view, we could define theatricality as a sub-quality that resembles the position that Aristotelian principles hold. Thus, the breaking of the mirror emerges as a fundamental concept, as an action of a primary system of inductive references. Moreover, the content of empathy is established on emotional ­systems that do not necessarily coincide with the reference to information. In contrast to empathy, they stimulate memory. Terzopoulos’ poetics analyzes the myth, both in its constitutional and exemplary axes, emphasizing the action. At the same time, it foregrounds the structural elements that orient mimesis towards a specific outline of preferential shifts of the idea, which is embodied to ultimately repel ­mimesis and install a new aesthetic construction.

After all, the percept appears as the dominant system of objects, which con­ tribute to the production of stimuli and stimulate energy. The object is categorized to give a maximum of sensibility that classifies it into a specific statute.

A) Object – obsession B) Object – ecstasy C) Self-defined object D) Object – result Every object for Theodoros Terzopoulos is an indication and a symbol, as for example in Heiner Müller’s Quartet. The self-defined object – sarcophagus functions in the space as a precursor that projects the invincibly precarious situation of a being that functions on stage as the initiator of a ritual process that results in death.

In the same way, Madame de Merteuil’s boots herald the lethal conflict in the context of a war that has already been declared. Here Terzopoulos creates two ­nuclei - centers through which two key questions are raised: Who is the winner, and who is the loser. Similarly, the card deck in the hands of Madame de Merteuil ­heralds the violent word of an oracle which reflects the impossible. The space

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s­ urrounding the object is framed by a square construction that functions bipolarly, depicting a yellowish sky and a bed as a reference to the earth. The general image of the construction, which is based on the square, is a reference to an Object-­ obsession, while the card deck is a reference to an Object-ecstasy. After all, destiny bodes to be ecstatic.

Furthermore, in Heiner Müller’s Medea Material, the space is structured as a pyramidal construction. The most prevailing element here is the lethal dress as a wedding gift to Jason’s future wife. According to Terzopoulos, the poisoned ­wedding dress is an object in motion, it creates ecstasy and accentuates Medea’s obsessions. The space of Medea is arranged in such a way as to create the impression of an icy, square, glass landscape.

In addition, in Euripides’ Hercules, the red flower is self-defined as a metonym for blood while in Müller’s Mauser, the automatic weapon is an Object-ecstasy and at the same time an Object-result at the level of Connotation.

The performance Mademoiselle Julie presents a space, framed by a metal ­structure which is supported by two vertical iron columns. Similarly, in Alarme, the space is framed by a geometric structure in the shape of a rectangle. At this point, we observe that the relationship between the one who sees and the one who is seen becomes decisive for the identification of the creative forms. The categorization of the actor’s body could be as follows: A) The body as a reference to the everyday human.

B) The body as a host of the dominant culture.

C) The body as spectrum.

D) The body as aesthetic structure.

E) The body as “manipulation” of a cultural belief.

F) The body as spectacle and action that is the body in a ritual.

In Terzopoulos’ performances we observe that the everyday body appears to be an unstable field of energy and is regularly set aside. On the contrary, the body as spectacle and action, and to a certain degree the body as aesthetic structure are ­exaggeratedly projected. Euripides’ Bacchae, for example, brings forth the actor’s body in a high-quality spectacle and action. Moreover, according to Terzopoulos’ poetics, in Antigone the bodies create numerous centers spread out over the stage, like islands that gradually evaporate. The actors of the chorus, panting and half-­

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naked, create two poles, those standing and those sitting, and give the impression of giant locusts that lurk in hostility. When Antigone meets Creon, the men of the chorus bow their heads, trying to avoid the disaster that has already begun. From the same point of view, Terzopoulos presents his creative forms through the bodies of the actors who wear a spectacular mask: In Quartet, Madame de Merteuil­ appears like a jellyfish lying on the ground. Also, in Heiner Müller’s Medea Material he presents a dynamic creative form of Medea. Spectacle and action go hand in hand. Terzopoulos’ Medea walks around covered in a sober geometric construction made of aluminum. Sitting in this icy box, Medea is exiled in cold and madness.

Terzopoulos’ direction emphasizes Medea’s journey into an inner space-time. Hercules, from the eponymous tragedy of Euripides, is an equally fascinating persona trapped in a closed box and laughing in a way that causes terror. Hercules tries to give meaning to his speech. His physicality creates circles that move, at first gently, to result to the degeneration of speech that follows the nightmare of madness. ­Theodoros Terzopoulos finally achieves to break the mirror using micro-sequences, which minimize the body of the dramatic personae.

It is worth noting that in the performance Mademoiselle Julie, Julie’s physicality betrays her defeat. Julie prefers to commit suicide drowned in the lace of her skirt.

In the performance Alarme the space also manifests itself as a dipole. The two queens, sedated, recover and get exhausted in an exchange of speech that reveals their vengeful rage and political alienation. The queens are trapped into their own existence. The body of the actresses initially expresses a spectral entity and, at the same time, it becomes the body as “manipulation” of a political and cultural credo.

Finally, in Amor, a performance for two actors, Theodoros Terzopoulos presents on stage two sides of the same coin, to emphasize the moral system of economy. The crisis of values grows as an idea that tends to abolish the ideology of the politically correct. The actor’s body incarnates the conceit of everyday life, an arrogant reality.

The actor incarnates the body of the existing culture: a creative spectrum and an aesthetic structure expressed by a vampire-style makeup. Likewise, the physicality expresses the manipulation of the cultural credo to result to the body as spectacle and action. Thus, the actor can create a dynamic integration.

In short, we would say that theatricality means theatre without the text, in a complex, conflicting relationship. From this point of view, the theatricality of the creative forms in ATTIS Theatre’s performances is enhanced by the dramatic ­expression of the idea, established on Aristotle’s four causes: the material, the for-

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mal, the efficient and the final cause. We consider the transition from one cause to another as a necessary condition for the synthesis of a stage integral. If “after being altered”, it does not rest, then it cannot perform the chaotic analogy of the continuously active presence of the sign. However, as a creative form of art and life theatre catalyzes and reconstructs its image.

Returning to the energy theatricality, we examine the presupposition of a­ theory through which theatre is approached as a field for reflections focusing on ­variables and constants. In a first approach to Terzopoulos’ performances at the Attis theatre, we observe that the theatrical environment is full of variables, starting from the energy structures. Indeed, the structural quantities of energy aim at the continuous production of stimuli, capable of creating dividing lines between space and time, sociological and anthropological constants as well as between the ­definitely present and the definitely absent sign. The actor’s body can be perceived as one of the most tolerant constants. However, the axis of interpretation of paralinguistic features is not a field of constants since the Performing Stage reflects one or more Social Stages. After all, the social categories that constitute criteria, shift, evolve and transform into potential and active alternative features in order to ­preserve the theatricality of the first creative form. Therefore, the image of Logos, for example, brings to light a new image, which reflects the renewed feature that derives from the general conceptualization and the special configuration of the ­philosophical aesthetics.

It should be noted that “meta”, as a component of the collective material, particularly refers to the space, the objects, the gestures, the grimaces, the gaze, the open mouth of the actor from which no sound comes out and so on. Both ancient tragedy and modern drama are approached by Terzopoulos through the immovable carriers of the archetypes, which arrange from inside the differences with the spacetime. In this way, the emergence of the socialized instinct and the mechanism of meaning production are enhanced.

Following the questions that Terzopoulos’ performances raise, we consider the actor’s body to be a universal constant. We point out that the hero might have existed or might not. It may belong to the imaginary structures of the memory, to the world of illusions. But there will always be an actor who will perform the unexplained. Indeed, the actor’s body becomes a capacitor of proportionally shaped ­matter. The muscles, the bones, the skeleton, the legs, the face, the hair, every part of the human body performs the first passion of matter that is transformed to­

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convey the idea of hubris, passion and suffering, the high emotions and the vile acts.

The actor returns to the zero point of the conception of the personae, which is a creative figure in Terzopoulos’ performances. In any case, the terrible gaze of ­Dionysos monitors the past, the present and the future. God never left and will ­always be among us, as long as theatre exists.

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The Attis Theatre and the Need for a New Language of Criticism (or the Director’s Sandals) ILIANA DIMADI Theatrologist-Dramaturg at the Onassis Cultural Centre, GREECE

I’d like to start by clarifying something, because my title is somewhat misleading.

I won’t be attempting to redefine the criticism of Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre.

I won’t be speaking about adequate and inadequate performance models and reception tools. But I will be talking about things that excite me when I think about the Attis theatre: about Dionysos the god, and the need to accept the ritual.

“Everything in the service of Bacchus”, as the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam puts it. The phrase could easily have been written about Theodoros Terzopoulos, who has declared on many occasions that “Dionysos is my god” and “my theatre is an offering to Dionysos”.

Theodoros Terzopoulos really doesn’t do theatre like anyone else. He actually doesn’t live like anyone else. He never gets drunk, he must have never smoked a cigarette and he almost never goes on holiday. The same in his theatre: he never talks about roles or characters or psychological causes of behavior. What he does talk about is rhythm, time, passion, the body, mourning and attraction. But, above all, he talks about Dionysos the god. Because his theatre reminds of a ritual.

Or might his theatre actually be a ritual above everything else?

Still, his arguments in support of these beliefs encourage you to think outside of the box, beyond the usual academic tools and the tried-and-tested methodologies.

And anyone that gets you doing that is, in my opinion, a most valuable asset. Maybe because my motto is a line by Rainer Maria Rilke, which says: “Whoever you may be: Step into the evening, step out of the room / where everything is known”.

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Meaning there are dozens of different starting points from which to approach ­Theodoros Terzopoulos’ work. You could, for instance, give weight to his personal experiences and references—Greece on the brink of Civil War and East Berlin in the Seventies, Bauhaus, Brecht, Einar Schleef and Heiner Müller. But you could just as well start with Heraclitus and from there arrive at Ludwig Wittgenstein, who holds that “We are generally ceremonial beings”, before immersing yourself in studies of mythology, ethnology and anthropology—from Carl Gustav Jung and Mircea Eliade to Van Gennep and Victor Turner. Or embrace the symbolic and imaginary of Jacques Lacan, the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard’s anathema of the postmodern, Roland Barthes’ death of the writer or, should you fancy so, latch onto German romantic idealism and make your way from there to Theodor W. Adorno. Because it’s almost as though TT works in accordance with the conditions Adorno laid down for an art-work: “It is its internal structure that produces knowledge, not its reception”. Its non-propositional language, “like hieroglyphics whose key has been lost”, gives it cognitive value which is intertwined with the content of its truth. But, ultimately, how many of these truths are there?

Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre never stops generating discourses. And, truth be told, what have all of us here been doing since yesterday but sharing discourses of this sort? Still, the following paradox holds: his work, which addresses dozens of discourses, honors and negates them at one and the same time. Because his theatre is dedicated to somewhere else. Like we said: to Bacchus.

But as you may already have realized, this is a non-academic lecture. My talk is perhaps a little idiosyncratic, but that may be the only way I can talk about TT. I’ve been ‘with’ Theodoros Terzopoulos for twenty years now, initially as a student of theatre studies, later as a post-graduate researcher and critic, but always as one of his people. So, I often catch myself linking his work with something I’ve read, seen or heard. His approach, which is actually an entire philosophy of life imprinted with dazzling clarity on his work, has had an enormous impact on mine. And I am not alone in that…

A few months ago, for instance, when Theodoros Terzopoulos came to the Onassis Foundation so we could coordinate our collaboration in Delphi, instead of speaking exclusively about technical matters, whenever the opportunity presented itself he would blow us away with his thoughts on what he calls “the great art idea”.

“Myths are our subconscious”, he was telling us. “I don’t do allusion”, he continued.

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“I lifted the lid off the subconscious a long time ago and let my instinct emancipate itself; I was never cerebral and I never deliberately complicate for the sake of it; everything I do stems from a particular mentality, there’s accumulated experience and knowledge there, and everything has passed onto the body...”

It’s as though Theodoros Terzopoulos has assimilated, consciously but ­intuitively, too, a whole series of models of reception, but guiding us backwards, as close to the primeval nature of theatre as he can get. Thus, he elevates theatre into something that precedes all discourses, taking it to the threshold of the things that formed the content of the Dionysian mysteries. Ancient Greek mythology leads us there: to the mysteries. It was not permitted to disclose the content of those mysteries. They remained unspoken. They were the most ineffable of the ineffable. The initiates swore to keep the content of their rituals secret. No one knows what they did or said.

Which may be why Theodoros Terzopoulos’ actors chew on their words, growl and howl like dogs, charge headlong at one another and break out into sublime arias only to end up tightly embracing like figures on a funerary stele: Hades and Persephone.

I would like now, if I may, to foist the following thought upon you: Theodoros Terzopoulos conveys something of the hidden world of these immaculate mysteries to us. He is fully aware that the available historical data is insufficient to confirm what actually happened during them. But he does demand transcendence of his ­actors, asking them to activate their imagination and shed light on this shadow world. Just as the Christian faithful prepare themselves twice over before Holy Communion, physically through fasting and spiritually through prayer, so Attis’ actors both train their minds and their bodies, as well as the hidden body.

Yet, Theodoros Terzopoulos doesn’t only demand transcendence from his ­actors – he demands it of the audience, too. Because one can only penetrate his ­on-stage universe on one condition: you must first embrace the ritual.

But can we really, by mental means alone, understand a ritual’s content?

Can we, for instance, understand Anastenaria, that ancient Greek fire walking ­tradition, without ever having placed our feet on the coals? And, just to be clear, I’m not hinting that we need to try out Theodoros Terzopoulos’ method if we really want to understand him. All we have to do is accept the ritual - and the initiation.

Generally speaking, there are three stages in a rite of passage: a) detachment, b) transition to a ‘new state’, and c) incorporation. These three stages mimic nature

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and Man’s progress through it: separation from our mother’s wombs at birth, ­initiation into society and exposure to the liminal experience of encountering ­culture; reincorporation into nature at death. Then back to the beginning in an ­endless cycle of death and rebirth...

The myth of Dionysos and of the Bacchae can (also) be read through this prism: Dionysos’ is nature, with all that may entail. Pentheus rejects nature. He separates himself from it. But he is still initiated into the Bacchic mysteries by Dionysos ­himself, and when he is torn limb from limb by the Bacchants, he is incorporated both into the rite and back into Nature.

It’s as though Theodoros Terzopoulos is asking his actors to become B ­ acchants: Dionysos worshippers who mediate – but also sacrifice – for the god. Sweeping the audience away, they initiate them into the mysteries of the Attis theatre’s acts of ­on-stage worship. So we can liken the viewer to Pentheus, who undergoes the ­liminal experience of the play (or not, if they are insufficiently carried away) and ­ultimately acquiesces (or doesn’t) to... the worship of Attis.

Anyone who writes about Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre is, to an extent, writing about themselves, however objective or scientific they may strive to remain. And still more significantly: we all reveal something. Which Marianne McDonald noted long ago: “Good theatre provokes, stimulates, alters. Theodoros Terzopoulos, master of the body’s mysteries, reveals to us mysteries about ourselves, dangerous mysteries”.

But the same is true of rituals. Ritual is an act of initiation; it requires you to do something - sing, dance, fire-walk, sacrifice - in order to fully conceive the World, God, the Other, the Self.

“I wonder how many pairs of sandals Dante wore out while he was working on the Divine Comedy”, asks Osip Mandelstam, with whom we started this lecture.

And we can ask the same thing about Theodoros Terzopoulos. For, he also has worn out many pairs of sandals travelling to the four corners of the earth in his search for the roots of theatre. And one might easily expect to find a line from Heraclitus inscribed into those sandals’ soles: Which one? The one with which Terzopoulos brings the book of his Method to a close: “The sun is the width of the human foot” – a phrase whose surrealist wisdom encapsulates the enigmatic allure of his theatre. Because we imagine that it tells us what every one of us has always wanted to hear.

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The Idea of the Tragic in Alarme / Amor / Encore ŐZLEM HEMIŞ Assistant Professor, Kadir Has Univeristy, Istanbul, TURKEY

In the limited time available to me, I would like to share with you my thoughts on the idea of the tragic in the plays Alarme, Amor and Encore by Theodore Terzopoulos, which were performed during the 30th anniversary of Attis. First of all, ­although I feel bound to state that I find George Steiner’s work to be of immense value, I cannot agree with his assertion that rationality has killed tragedy, thus r­ endering both tragedy and “the tragic” ineffectual.1 But after the epoch of tragedy in Ancient Greece, and especially in the context of the development of a monotheistic comprehension of the universe, I believe that tragedies - conveying the depth of tragedy in the place of its birth - can no more be written. Hence, I firmly believe that it is critical that the distinction between tragedy and the tragic play is meticulously maintained. On the other hand, as Terry Eagleton’s sarcastic work, Sweet Violence, subtly reminds us, experiencing the tragic aspects of human existence and transforming this experience into the language of art and literature seem to offer boundless opportunities.2 For instance, if we consider, as Erika Fischer-Lichte pointed out, the history of the theatre as the history of the construction of the individual,3 Heiner Müller’s plays, which reveal the deconstruction of the European individual, are intensely tragic texts. (In this context, reading the trilogy by Terzopoulos r­ egarding the similar Kieslowski trilogy, known as the European trilogy, I find it ironical to talk, here in Delphi, about Terzopoulos’s profound intuition about the deconstruction of the European Union.)

Although these three plays – which I would rather call the Attis Trilogy – make no reference to either the Ancient Greek tragedies, or the plays which refer to these tragedies, they nonetheless offer, as it were, a refined taste of the tragic, due to the producer’s long journey with “the tragic”. I would like to propose that “the tragic” in these plays has formed a contemporary tragic concept which aestheticises, as it

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historicises, its bond with the soil and worldly affairs, as well as its relationship with politics and economics. In the aesthetic of Terzopolous’ works, as he defines the ‘trilogy of conflict’, the tragic hero, the chorus and the traditional dialogues – the core of Greek tragedy - which are organised so as to convey the main idea of the play are diminished, thus emphasising the essence of life, and the conflict, having existed in the roots of the tragedy, is a proposition towards the reproduction of itself which is rendered on stage by the performance of the players. I choose to define Terzopolous’ tragedy staging as ‘ritualistic retelling’ in that for me, he transformed performativity in this trilogy, Aristotelian energeia and the various states of the ­conflict, manifesting themselves as dispute, struggle, irreconcilability or disagreement – into the performativity which reveals violence, extermination and cruelty.

As he does so, I believe the impact which is played out on the audience can accurately be described as a kind of wonder born out of the audience finding themselves face to face with the broad picture of the state of humanity.

The first play in the trilogy is Alarme, created by Theodore Terzopolous from the correspondence between Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scotland, and Elizabeth I, the Queen of England; on one hand, the play takes us to the source of the animal world in the language of Shakespeare; on the other hand the metaphors revealed on the stage multiply in the players’ bodies and in the interaction among them. As the narrator ‘man’ (Tasos Dimas) keeps on cursing at the women, lowering his head into a prone position, downstage, he reminds us of either King Lear or the ‘elephants and grass’ adage.

If we consider the power which these two women have over the island country, Mary Stuart (Aglaia Pappa) and Elizabeth I (Sophia Hill) resemble ancient dragons in which more than one animal dwells – two quarreling hydra heads. They are, variously, like beasts that have seized hold of their prey and are playing with it, and sometimes they act together in perfect harmony, fusing ‘I’ and ‘You’, but later breaking apart again. Threatening and retreating, attacking and counter-attacking, they invoke each other’s life force, their Eros. The conflict which arises from their intense and willed desire for competition and recognition produces a consuming and homoerotic atmosphere which eats at their souls. As soon as one of them, ­triumphant in jouissance, absorbs the immediate attack of the other, the dreadful, destructive power of the feminine self is revealed as that which they are programmed to create. In Alarme, which has the largest number of references to a specific historical era in the trilogy, the two 16th century Queens’ power play and struggle for

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recognition is particularly meta-historicised as a metaphor for the eclipse of reason which seems to have arisen to haunt us today, in a world which is going through the experience of redefining the intoxication of power born out of unfeeling political passion which effaces true national identity.

Amor, staged by Terzopolous, and adapted from Thanasis Alevras’ text, presents an absurdity of a no-go, or impossible conversation, so to speak, between a woman (Aglaia Pappa) positioned almost like Winnie, the character in Beckett’s Happy Days, and a man (Antonis Myriagkos), who talks non-stop in figures. This conversation of the absurd, of the impossible, is a lesson in the economy of desire, delivered almost as a slap in the face. As the woman passionately cries “Credit me!”, she merely means “Love me!”. The man’s responses are nothing more than figures. He utters only the terms and figures of the financial market. The mask of passion on the ­woman’s face, and the neurotic numerical effusion from the man create two different forms of ‘isolation’. The text occasionally offers us a duet in which figures and words such as take, buy, sell, give, profit, deliver, produce, stock, success ring in our ears. The man, constantly uttering nothing but figures, keeps his fingers clicking as if typing on a keyboard, and he ‘touches’ himself, but without being r­ eally able to touch himself, just as it is not possible for him to have a meaningful conversation with the woman. Yet he continues to utter his figures and numbers, returning eventually to his original position. Prefering to use this dramatic ­language, Terzopolous reveals not only the devastating effect of the profound crisis, extending from the ­financial sector to impact daily life, in our consumption-driven society, but also shows how it rips the threads which join us, one by one, unstitching ­relationships.

The tragic in Amor reveals itself in the incompatibility between the signifier and the signified in the language which is used. The tension in the bodies as they make their utterances which never hit the target during the ‘dialogue’ b­ etween the two players – this forms the tragic phase.

The first thing that comes to one’s mind when approaching Encore is Lacan’s renowned seminars on Feminine Sexuality from 1972–73, and I would like to ­mention Lacan briefly here.4 I consider that he is indeed a significant key to ‘reading’ the trilogy, but a detailed discourse is beyond the scope of this talk. It will, hopefully, form the topic of a future article. Thomas Tsalapatis’ poetry, and ‘Can She Excuse My Wrongs’ from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas are the basis for Encore. At a meeting of paths, reminiscent of Oedipus’ inauspicious crossroads, a woman ­(Sophia Hill) and a man (Antonis Myriagkos) come face to face, and knives in hand,

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they enter into a fatal dance. The infinity of the vicious circle underlined in the ­‘finale’ reveals their desire to experience this deadly game of love over and over again. Symbolising the entire literature of love, from flirtation to seduction to ­abandonment, through the striking images which are deployed, and using great economy in both utterance and action, though with a degree of repetition, we are confronted with the awareness of how we have been charmed by a pattern of ­relationship which has assumed the proportions almost of a tableau of addiction, simply because we are not able to imagine any other pattern.

I have already mentioned that the tragic in the trilogy reflects on the perfor­ mativity, and the effect of this is to create a sense of wonder. As Aristotle ponders on pleasure in the 10th book of the Nicomachean Ethics, he reaches a state of wonder through the connection between the two concepts.5 And in his Metaphysics, he states that wonder and admiration, born out of theoria as a divine action above all human concerns, are activities which lead the human being to encounter life and vitality, that is to say, energeia (1072b:20-30).6 This is an infinite source of pleasure.

It is possible to be overcome with the thought that Aristotle, who has defined this dynamic operation of the divine as the source of life and vitality, suspends this vitality as he is given to pondering, in his Poetics (Poietika), a narration style in which the end is immediately apparent from the beginning. However, Martin Heidegger p­ roposes that such a thought is due to our failure to fully comprehend the “Greek understanding of existence” and the “Greek way of experiencing ­dynamism”. It is Heidegger’s assertion that Greeks comprehend dynamism through tranquillity.7 “[354] (Metaphysics Θ, 1048b 23) The movement of seeing and inspecting what is around one is properly the highest state of movedness only in the repose of (simple) seeing, gathered into itself. Such seeing is the τελος, the end where the movement of seeing first gathers itself up and essentially is movedness.”8 Theatricality can be explained by entelekhia, which is an act of seeing – ­embodying telos, for it is yet an incomplete design. The designer of the work has already completed it in his own mind, before staging it – as if he had already seen it on stage. As exemplified by Aristotle, “through entelekhia the tragedy ­reveals ­ eidegger, itself, its i­ ntegrity, in its completeness (teleias)”.9 However, according to H this ­completeness is not a precise finale - “on the contrary, it is the beginning of the ­dynamism which has caught the kinesis and which keeps it” yet at some point it will be named as “to-bring-itself-to-an-end” or “to-possess-itself-at-the-end”.10

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This definition brings us to the intuition of the staging. As soon as the staging possesses itself at the end it opens the gate of historicising, while starting narrating a narrative/history - illuminating the experience for the observer.

According to Heidegger’s suggestion thinking in Greek, energeia, which bears the meanings of “coming to the existing in vision” “to remain in the work”, and ­energeia ateles, which signifies incompleteness, having not yet come to its end, ­correspond to being on the path in itself.11 The audience can experience the equivalent of this in the performance arts – more so in performance or in performative staging.

The sense of wonder derives from the ecstasy which is experienced as a result of the vibrancy which exists in the process of transforming thought into action, and the potential, which is contained in it. And Aristotle’s energeia amazes the audience as it produces not exactly a katharsis, but works with the process, reaching telos in a linear form. Along with the findings during the process, the sense of wonder – ­revealing the layers of meaning and the taste – creates a sense of pleasure in the heart, not merely in the eye and its collaborative mind. During the process of the production of wonder, there exists bewilderment due to its sublimeness and to the effect and status born out of the unity of conflicts in which the truth itself is ­embedded. It is the realisation that existence, thought and status differ from each other, are even explicitly contradictory to each other, and that this signifies the ­human condition, which evokes wonder in the observer.12 As a result of its complex design and the triple helix of entelekheia – energeia – thauma (wonder), the Attis Trilogy serves today to prepare the ground for the ­return of Dionysos, while revealing to us the tragic in the state of humankind through the wonder created by the actors in their performance.

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1

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, Faber and Faber, London, 1995.

2

Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2003.

3 Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre, Trans. Jo Riley, Routledge, London, 2004.

4 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, Trans. Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton, 1999.

5 Aristoteles, Nikomakhos’a Etik, (Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics) Transl. into Turkish, ­Saffet Babür, BilgeSu Publishing., Ankara, 2009, pp. 194-210.

6 Aristoteles, Lambda: Metafizik Kitap 12, (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 12) Transl. into ­Turkish, Kaan Ökten and Gurur Sev, Notos Books, Istanbul, 2012, p. 143 and p. 145.

7

Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of φύσις, Aristotle, Physics B 1” The page numbers in brackets are of the German edition. For the edition in English see “On the E ­ ssence and Concept of φύσις”, Pathmarks, CUP, Cambridge, 2009, p 216.

8

Heidegger, ibid., Germ. p. 353, Eng. p. 215.

9

Ibid, p. 216.

˘ (Greek Philosophical Terms) 10 Peters, “Entelekheia”, Antik Yunan Felsefesi Terimleri Sözlügü, p. 104. William McNeill, The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ethos, p. 170.

11 Heidegger, ibid, p. 217 and p. 218. ˙ 12 Özlem Hemis,¸ “Temsil Biçimleri Üzerinden Bir Zihniyet Incelemesi” (A Study of Mentality Through the Forms of Representation, PhD dissertation, forthcoming published) Univer­ sity of I­ stanbul, The Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul, 2012.­

Photos page 208–209

Theodoros Terzopoulos at the Ancient Theatre of Delphi, Photo by Johanna Weber 207

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Towards a Poetics of Communality: Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Staging of Tragedy in the 21st Century AVRA SIDIROPOULOU Assistant Professor, M.A. in Theatre Studies, Open University of Cyprus, CYPRUS

Over the years, Theodoros Terzopoulos’ intercultural work has proved a lot more than just a wistful, utopian proposition; as the international reception of his productions testifies, the emphasis on corporeality as a medium for generating universal meaning has led to an artistic idiom both vital and flexible enough to survive across national borders. Terzopoulos encourages global communication, while simultaneously inculcating the culture-specific elements of the tragic plays with a distinctly universal scope.1 Suspicious of the monomaniac euro-centric ‘regulation by culture’, a ‘repression of individual, instinctive spontaneity and an expression of human ­creativity’ (Pavis 1991, p. 11), he explores the visceral element that exists in any act of creation: a product generated through the synthesis of different cultures and/or an exploration of the essentialist supra-cultural cell, a constitutional element of all ­humans. Denouncing tragedy’s long-held role as a repository of the ideals of ­Enlightenment, his theatre is nonetheless ruled by a humanist perspective, part of the trust that people carry within them the same emotional matter – a conviction that allows him to move comfortably from one culture to the next, incorporating languages and traditions, and having them stand in dialogue with each other.

The conspicuous shift of focus in Terzopoulos’ treatment of tragedy over the years is worth noting: while identifying a process of maturation might perhaps ­suggest an attitude of condescension, evidently there is an inner movement from the existential (and thus, personal) to the political (and thus, communal) dimension. This turn is obvious in the director’s work on Aeschylus’ Persians and

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­ rometheus Bound. The small cast/intimate space/private mood elements of earlier P directorial readings have in the more recent productions of the plays given rise to pluri-vocal, politically conscious productions of a much more global scope.

This opening up is also manifest in the very fact that some of the later works also feature culturally mixed casts, having actors speak in their native language (as was the case with the 2006 Greek-Turkish Persians or the 2010 Prometheus Bound, in which the actors communicate in Greek, German and Turkish). Terzopoulos’ ­travels seem to have rendered him progressively sensitive to how language can be more of an empowering, rather than limiting, mechanism for encouraging universal perspectives, all the while illuminating anew potent aspects of tragedy. The reality of having different idioms co-exist on stage could be a sign that notwithstanding its inherent ‘locality’, language can still address the desire to connect and transcend.

Equally pronounced is the anxiety to simultaneously preserve one’s own cultural identity and still contribute its unique features to a more generous quest towards understanding our primal and essential humanity.

Revisiting the Persians three times (1990, 2003, 2006), Terzopoulos is ambitious to unearth and fortify the communal and universal core of the play, bringing up the process of both deconstructing and reconstructing the material that has resulted from the abrupt explosion of the tragedy’s centre,2 from a kind of blast that causes a series of extreme actions, manifest in the performer’s external and inner expression. Set in the aftermath of the Persian army’s defeat by the Greeks in the battle of Salamis (480 BC), the tragedy relates the native responses to King Xerxes’ excessive pride (hubris), but the point-of-view is surprisingly sympathetic towards the fallen Persians.3 With his 2006 take – co-produced by the International Istanbul Festival and the Epidaurus Festival – Terzopoulos unlocks a broader political statement on the fate of the humankind, rendering both performers and spectators witnesses to a condition of irreparable liminality. While Aeschylus’ play merges the lamentations of the Persian Chorus with the pained experiences of the ancient Greek spectators, who had incurred similar losses in the war, Terzopoulos formalizes the tragedy’s­ anti-war statement further, by uniting two conflicting nations’ (Greece’s and ­Turkey’s) sensibilities on stage. The production features a mixed cast of seven Greek and seven Turkish actors, who jointly, and in their native tongue, narrate the defeat of the Persian army, simultaneously foreshadowing the Persian Empire’s ­decline. Queen Atossa is performed by a Greek, Darius by a Turk, whereas the part

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of Xerxes is shared by one Greek and one Turkish actor. Terzopoulos now departs from Aeschylus’ tragic tale of hubris; he also downplays the somber tone, investigating, instead, common manifestations of mourning in both Greek and Turkish cultures. Against the sparse, monumental space of the Aghia Irini in Istanbul, first, and later, in the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, a number of men of different national origins, dressed in modern costume, stand next to each other along a horizontal line that splinters into chaotic configurations, once the reality of loss takes over. East meets West, as distinctly Eastern music fuses with Byzantine melodies that make the performance resonate with suggestive religious overtones. Once again, here too, as in the previous version of the tragedy, the visual layering with photographs of war victims is telling: portraits of Greek, Cypriot, Turkish and Kurdish casualties p­ arade on stage in black-and-white, haunting ­reminders of how commonly fatal wars are. In addition, the director conjures up another strategy of contemporizing the play, having the actors display pieces of paper that feature names of the dead Persian soldiers, thus highlighting the ­political dimensions of a remote historic fact. The trans-national scope and strong anti-war sentiment can certainly vouch for ­Terzopoulos’ use of joined lamentation as a cross-cultural bridge, albeit imaginary.

The shift in emphasis from the formal rigidity of the previous versions of the play to the ubiquity of grief no doubt suggests a changed approach, an evolution in political awareness. The aesthetics of formalism is predictably still there, but it is also transfused with moments of collective suffering. This is particularly poignant when the large bilingual cast speaks of the human plight which clearly transcends the specifics of time and space. To this end, the meeting of cultures is also conspicuous in the desperate embrace of the Greek and Turkish actors, who also share a variety of similar gestures. Typically, Terzopoulos’ stage is turbulent, vibrating both visually and aurally with bodies that shake and roar, disturbing any tentative symmetry in explosive movement. Transformation is a key feature of the abstract mise-en-scène, and the painterly perspective predominates – the exacting composition of the stage sharpening directorial semiosis. At the same time, the violence of the battlefield is conjured up physically: on the floor, the Chorus members fight and shake, all the while becoming more and more physically involved with each other.

They toss their red ‘bloody’ kerchiefs on the floor fiercely, throw coins to one ­another and set up a scene of anarchy, until they slowly emerge cleansed, their ­soldiers’ boots in hand. In the end, the Chorus is nothing but a series of red dots,

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blurring into history. Reflecting an encounter as well as a confrontation between two conflict-torn nations, this version of Persians brilliantly encapsulates ­Terzopoulos’ conception of a notably global approach: When we meet the other, the stranger, and we look at him in the eyes, in that terrifying moment, there are two options for us: either we reach eros in its ontological meaning, or war, in its literal meaning. Perhaps, in the end, the deeply political can be identified with the deeply erotic. ( Dimadi 2006) The humanistic perspective is addressed even more forcefully in Terzopoulos’ work on Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, staged in 1995, 2008 and 2010. An archetype of rebellion and of faith in human progress, the universal figure of Prometheus has been a fascinating subject for several auteur revisions of the exemplary myth of ­heroism. Terzopoulos uses a classical character ‘at the centre of a myth that easily transcends cultural boundaries’, someone who is ‘at the dawn of several Enlightenments with all their philosophical, ethical and political problems’ (Decreus 2012: 182). Positing axiomatic questions as to the value and viability of the Prometheus paradigm in today’s ostensibly dehumanized world, Terzopoulos’ claim on the ­necessity of heroism displays a deep anxiety for the personal and existential to become political. Going past the distinctly ontological focus of the first Prometheus version, he gradually deconstructs the tragedy’s heroic stature, offering a fresh ­interpretation of Prometheus as an anti-hero who bears little relation to the universally idealized conception of the Titan’s tortured son. Prometheus’ fall now­ becomes a multilayered icon, charged with echoes of the Western civilization’s ­decline and the collapse of all faith in the values and promulgations of the Enlightenment. By having his modern Prometheus display characteristically non-tragic responses towards the imperious torture to which he is subjected, Terzopoulos ­actually tries to reconsider ‘the absolute metaphors we still use today’ (Decreus 2012: 191). For him, as Decreus argues, ‘tragedy is not a soteriological construction (unlike the three western book-religions), it is man-made, diverse in its historical periodization, and today questioned in its post-tragic characteristics’ (Decreus 2012: 193).

After the solemn 1995 version of Prometheus Bound in Tuscany, Terzopoulos was commissioned to stage the tragedy in China (at the Central Drama Academy of Beijing, 2008), in a production, which, blending elements of the local culture and manipulating the aesthetic mandates of social realism, became an overtly political statement against totalitarianism. Terzopoulos re-staged Prometheus Bound in 2010,

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as part of the Promethiade project, which also travelled to Istanbul, Turkey, and Essen, Germany.4 A tragedy of a “dehumanized man”, who exists at the threshold of ridicule, this version of Prometheus Bound is an aggressive, almost anarchistic ­portrayal of contemporary social, political and ideological turbulence, and, certainly, a far cry from the first handling of the Prometheus myth. The old oil mill factory in the industrial area of Elefsina, near Athens, now defunct, becomes a haunting landscape of reflection on current socio-ideological anxieties. Against the amber ­colors of the surrounding mill, lit in warm hues, the drama of Prometheus is being played as a piercing political parable. Here language once again reinforces the g­ lobal scope of Terzopoulos’ reading: Greek, German and Turkish mix at all times, ­repeated in key phrases, splitting fiercely or fusing harmoniously. Significantly, ­nationality – foregrounded linguistically – is rendered inconsequential. Linguistic dissonance ultimately stimulates feelings of empathy, corroborating a valid mechanism of establishing a truly global perspective of reception. According to the director, the 2010 production was far from a predictable portrayal of the perennially ­idealized liberator of humanity, but more of a self-derisive mirroring of the extremes of self-sarcasm and disparagement that an individual can reach in the attempt to reclaim one’s own. In Brechtian manner, the very victims introduce to the public their victimizers, who come ‘from within’ (Terzopoulos in Paridis 2010).

Current-day references are interpolated in different moments of the performance.

Emotionally loaded phrases drawn from Greece’s long history of strife and dissent altogether universalize the scope of the play. Spoken in unison, lines such as ‘the army is coming’, ‘take him away!’, ‘no, I will not sign’, are only some of the hypnotic mottos that add to the generally impassioned effect. The prophetic undertones of ‘there will come a day’ [«θα έρθει μια μέρα», ‘bir gün gelecek’, ‘der Tag wird kommen’], taken up in three different languages, are chilling statements of hope and courage, which are, however, instantly annihilated by the negative ‘it will not come’ [«δεν θα έρθει»]. After a choral recounting of characteristic modern predicaments (‘everything burns –forests, factories, books, universities, children’), bearing a number of haunting associations, the triple-facet Prometheus, performed by a Greek, a Turk and a German, delivers an unequivocal political message: ‘after I am dead, the world will change’ [«όταν θα έχω πεθάνει, ο κόσμος θα αλλάξει»].

Repetition builds obsession, as languages, bodies and ethnic histories clash and then mesh, until, in the end, the intentionally cacophonous ‘klausigelos’, a p­ rolonged

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sequence where laughter and crying interchange, is cut short by the unnerving ­siren, which takes us straight back to the beginning, as the cycle of coercion and defiance repeats itself ad infinitum. Exploiting the affective dimensions of intercultural collaboration, the performance is an obsessive – if loving, utopian and necessary – depiction of cultural and, most notably, of political solidarity. Aeschylus’ heightened poetry yields a commanding weapon against oppression, as Prometheus’ predicament unfolds its ecumenical dimensions. The germane vitality of the 2010 version of Prometheus Bound is a by no means a facile reconciliation between the tragic plays’ stature and the final cry-revolt against the utter disenchantment of our un-heroic, indeed, ‘post-tragic’ era.5 In our discussion of Terzopoulos’ increasing politicization, leaving out even the briefest of mentions to his recent production of Euripides’ Trojan Women would be a serious omission. One of the seminal events of the European Capital of Culture – Paphos 2017 program, the performance brought the 21st century refugee crisis in ­startling focus, while also retaining the timeless perspective that is so central in the director’s work. Indeed, the sustained human history of conflict and displacement, as Euripides’ 4th century tragedy suggests, has been ongoing, and the need for ­reconciliation and peace, profoundly common across East and West. True to highlighting the “drama of division and the deeply rooted human need for reconciliation,” performers from a number of divided cities, such as Nicosia, Mostar and Jerusalem, but also from Greece and Syria, become the collective voice of human suffering across temporal and geographical borders.

Central to this drama is the presence of the Turkish-Cypriot choreophaeus, the human face of the need to connect, despite representing the enemy “other.” Gradually, the Chorus members would each pick a photograph of a missing soldier from the ground, calling out his name, to which the word “missing” was uttered with deadly finality in each participating language (Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Croatian and Bosnian). The linguistic collage synthesized a voice of protest against violence and the absurdity of war. Needless to say, in divided Cyprus, just emerging out of yet another cycle of failed negotiations on the reunification of the country, the word “kayip” (Turkish for “missing person” /«αγνοούμενος») indeed rang particularly poignant.

The gradual shift from the existential to the political has expanded the breadth of Terzopoulos’ work to fierce expressions of the essential us. In many respects, the stark formalism of his early productions is cracked open in the later ones, becoming

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more aggressive and yet, curiously, also more humane. As McDonald points out, while Modernists were able to ‘make collages out of the fragments of the past’ (1992: 6), today’s artists can only point to how fragmentary everything is. Terzopoulos is perhaps unique in staging this damaged, disjointed, post-tragic universe, all the while anxious to expose through a deconstructed form his own religious search for a centre, for meaning, for a sense of human connection. The plunge into the depths of communal conflict, lament and (non)heroism is his own way of bringing time and space together into the heart of meaningful art.

1

While criticism of over-eager intercultural perspectives in theatre practice has been fierce, in Terzopoulos’ work, ‘the invocation of global humanism is not complicit with an overwhelming hegemonic order’ (Stone Peters 1995: 202).

2

The director actually defines avant-garde art as ‘an explosion of the root of the classical’ (qtd in Kyriakou 2012).

3

A fact that can be attributed to Aeschylus’ own involvement as a soldier in the battle of Salamis.

4 The Promethiade project featured German theatre company Rimini Protokoll’s Prometheus in Athens and Turkish auteur Sahika Tekand’s Anti-Prometheus (forgotten in ten steps).

5

In fact, Terzopoulos sees sarcasm and laughter as the only possible remains of human decency, after all dramatic or tragic dimensions have been (un)resolved:

We are in a post-tragic space. This means we constantly make mistakes. We are a machine full of errors. Of the promises of progress, nothing has been left. This is a post-tragic vision. It’s not like it used to be in the myth where the God says: You are my marionette and I’m blinding you to make you commit a mistake’ . . . Therefore, he says, (t)his is the absolute end, this darkness must be shown by art [. . .]. We must accept the evil and make people aware of it ­instead of speaking on behalf of a utopia. (Qtd in Raddatz 2010: 96; 98)

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Bibliography Decreus, Freddy. 2015. ‘Bodies back from Exile’. Gramma Journal of Theory and Criticism Vol. 22.

Dimadi, Iliana. 2006. [«Είδαμε τους Πέρσες στην Κωνσταντινούπολη» [‘We saw the Persians in Istanbul], 27 June 2006. Athinorama. <http://www.athinorama. gr/theatre/article .aspx?id=2784> [accessed 11 August 2014] McDonald, M. 1992. Ancient Sun, Modern Light. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pavis, Patrice. 1991. Theatre at the Cross-roads of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Raddatz, F. M., ed. 2011. Promethiade. Athens, Istanbul, Essen 2010. Essen: Klartext.

Sidiropoulou, Avra. 2017. “Contemporary Greek Approaches to Tragedy: Terzopoulos’ Revisions of Aeschylus.” In Rodosthenous, George, editor. Contemporary ­Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Global Directorial Perspectives. Methuen Bloomsbury.

Stone Peters, Julie. 1995. ‘Intercultural Performance, Theatre Anthropology, and the Imperialist Critique: Identities, Inheritances, and Neo-Orthodoxies.’ Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance. Ed. J. Ellen ­Gainor. London and New York: Routledge: 199-213.

Terzopoulos, Theodoros. 2012. Interviewed by Maria Kyriaki, «Αφιέρωμα Τερζόπουλος-Εμμονή και Μνήμη» [‘Terzopoulos: Obsession and Memory’], 20 Dec. 2012. Episkinis.gr <http://www.episkinis.gr/2009-05-31-09-20-01/2009-0604-11-06-13/964-2012-12-20-15-58-21> [accessed 14 December 2014].

---. 2010. Interviewed by Christos Paridis, «Αντι-Προμηθέας» [‘Anti-Prometheus’, 19 May 2010. lifo <http://www.lifo.gr/mag/features/2123> [accessed 4 September 2014].

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The Three Productions of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound Directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos KATERINA ARVANITI Ass. Professor, Department of Theatre Studies, University of Patras, GREECE

Through his systematic Method Theodoros Terzopoulos approached the universal myth of the disobedient, undisciplined and impassioned Prometheus, who disrespected and resisted against Zeus’ tyrannical will in order to be beneficial to human beings. Terzopoulos has approached Prometheus’ myth many times and in different versions, starting from Heiner Müller’s The Liberation of Prometheus in Berlin 1991. Prometheus, as the other Dionysos, becomes the symbol of resistance to any authority. He also becomes the ultimate embodiment of universality and interculturalism of Terzopoulos’ Method, as the director incorporates in his productions actions and traditions of the Greek world using rituals, practices and ceremonies from the East, thus creating a new mythology based on corporeality and rituals.

The actor’s “Energy body”,1 through painful exercises of his bio-dynamic method, acquires a “ritualistic dimension”,2 which transforms it into a Dionysian body.

At the same time, Dionysos, the dominant god of Terzopoulos’ theatre, embodies the intercultural nature of his method. Significantly, the book in which the director analyzes his Method is entitled The Return of Dionysos, while his own theatre venue based in Athens is called ‘Attis’, after the Winter Dionysos, who arrives from ­Phrygia.3 In an interview with Frank M. Raddatz Terzopoulos made the following statement: “Dionysos came from India. We find the same god as Osiris in Egypt, Adonis in Syria, Attis in Phrygia, while in Thrace he is named Dionysos again. He is always on the move. Each of these cultures considers him as a traveler. That is the history

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of his metamorphosis. This phenomenon does not mean that one culture imitates the other. Rather it testifies a profound dialogue with the energy of the Other, the foreign culture.”4 Thus, Theodoros Terzopoulos’ intercultural theatrical experience goes through utilization and integration of the foreigner, the “Other”.

Within the above context of universality, achieved through the ultra-cultural tools of Terzopoulos’ Method which goes beyond the limits of certain cultures and looks for the theatre’s mythic origins in the performer’s language and movement,5 my article will focus on three different stagings of Prometheus Bound directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos. More precisely, I shall attempt to reveal Terzopoulos’ ­intercultural approach to Aeschylus’ play, which is realized through his two ­“ultra-cultural” means:6 a) the embodiment of rhythm and word, and b) the use of props used as symbolic objects. The above “ultra-cultural” means are absolutely recognizable since the very first staging of the play back in 1995-1996, in which the ontological and existential dimension dominates over all the evils of the unyielding Prometheus. They are also recognizable in the second Chinese version of 20072008 which had a strong political interpretation, and finally in the third trilingual staging of the play in 2010.

Theodoros Terzopoulos first presented Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound in 1995– 1996 with his theatre company Attis (Tuscany, Delphi, Attis Theatre in Athens and on international tour). This was a static stage approach which clearly ­pronounced the embodied threnody over the woes the dynastic power imposes on human beings. Prometheus (Tasos Dimas) and Io (Sophia Hill) are the two indi­ viduals – symbols of the destructive force of Zeus and thus, they both held distinct roles in contrast to all other dramatic characters played by two actors only. Actress Sophia Michopoulou impersonated the Chorus of the Oceanids. Prometheus’ body, although static, is in a biodynamic movement and at the same time contrasts with the eternal movement of the ecstatic Io. In this particular staging Terzopoulos makes the best of elements inherent in religious ceremonies which focus on the deep-seated human and at the same time the universal pain of the loss.7 Through controlling their breath, wheezing and extending the syllables, the performers ­embody the rhythm and pronounce the “pain-word”. Thus, when Prometheus ­announces the real motives of Io’s future suffering, the conceptual content of his words bears no significance. It is rather the way the words are reflected in ­Prometheus’ vibrating body that makes sense. Nevertheless, Io’s words are simul-

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taneously uttered with difficulty, in the way of meaningless syllables. In addition, the oriental, mournful music accompanies the recurring “ai ai” of her lamentation over her future wanderings, while, at the same time, the sound of horsefly alludes to her perpetual moving. Hence, through the embodiment of words of tension and of ecstasy, Terzopoulos’ stage language is transformed into a universal language.

At the same time, the acting area and the arrangement of the performers (actors and actresses) on it, contributes to the universality of Terzopoulos’ approach. The director abolishes the realistic, massive architectural constructions representing the mountain of Caucasus that have long dominated over the performances of Aeschylus’ play. The captive Prometheus is depicted being tied with red ribbons originating from the ground and continuing upwards. Thus, the audience gets the impression of a Titan hovering between heaven and earth, between gods and ­humans. The ritual of Prometheus enchainment takes place when the representatives of God’s power are striking the ground with their military rods, without ­touching Prometheus or looking at him. Moreover, at the peak of Io’s scene, two cloth stripes are pulled backwards from the front area of the stage, creating a white cruciform cross which is intersected vertically by the “hovering” Prometheus.8 The shape of the cross is one of the oldest symbols.9 It is the third out of four essential symbols (the other three are: the center, the circle and the square) and the one which connects all the others. According to the Dictionary of Symbols, the cross is the universal symbol referring to wholeness.10 However, the universality of the ­language of symbols is not completed with the cruciform cross and its clear-cut ­allusions. The transparent sphere, as a symbol of wholeness and universality,11 ­appears emblematically in Io’s hands at the back of the stage, that is, the area from which the rectilinear arrangement of the personalized roles of Io, Prometheus and Sophia Michopoulou’s one-woman Chorus unfolds. Interestingly, the same sphere appears in the hands of Europe in the staging of Epigones (Descendants) in 2003.

Europe as a dramatic role symbolizes all political upheavals and overthrows as well as war conflicts. Moreover, when Io narrates Zeus’ love for her, she puts on her head a garland, which she later throws away as soon as Prometheus reveals the continuation of her endless persecution until her ultimate redemption. At the same time, the white covered heads of the two actors who held the roles of Zeus and Io respectively and of Sophia Michopoulou (Chorus) picture the misery and the loneliness of the wandering. In the discussion of visual symbols, we should also include the three sculptured square boards which possibly depict the recorded fate of Io. The ritual

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use of items, made by insignificant and unworthy material, evokes the activation of memory which holds an important role within the universal character of ­Terzopoulos’ theatre of corporeality.

In 2007–2008 Theodoros Terzopoulos staged Prometheus Bound again with ­Chinese actors at Beijing’s Central Academy Theatre. The new production of the play has a profound political context. Meanwhile, the staging involves all the ­characteristics of Terzopoulos’ Method. As Dimitris Tsatsoulis argues, the M ­ ethod projects itself “as an ultra-cultural factor composed by grains of different cultural environments (…)”.12 The political negotiation of the play’s content is apparent in the fragmented role of Prometheus,13 shared among ten different actors, who are holding red boards with three-digit numbers, from 230 to 239. The plural form here refers to the number of the political prisoners of Uighurs persecuted by the official regime. The Chorus of the Oceanids consists of an equal number of women dressed in Maoist uniforms, who act as companions and comrades of the prisoners. The two groups of the oppressed are arranged inside the white circle of the stage, a space demarcation of cultural diversity. That space differs from the s­ ocial one, in that it signifies the protective threshold for the safety of the actors and actresses inside.

A second threatening Chorus, whose entrance preceded that of the Oceanids, is sitting on a bench outside the circle. This Chorus of nine actors and two actresses is composed of the white-collar representatives of the powers that be. Power (Kratos) and Hephaestus belong to this Chorus. Thus, the dramatic c­ haracters that embody threat and violate the circle’s sanctuary derive from this second, “Other” Chorus.

Chinese actors and actresses managed to meet the demands of Terzopoulos’ Method concerning corporeality, thus confirming the Method’s universal, inter­ cultural character. Corporeality is accomplished: a) by the rhythmical movement of the naked upper part of the bodies of male actors who shared the role of Prometheus; b) by the interrupted cries of the same actors who hold their mouth wide open in an expression of pain and anguish; and c) by the hugging of the ten male actors impersonating Prometheus with the ten female actresses consisting the Chorus of the Oceanids; and d) by the vibration of the bodies of the performers lying stretched on the ground of the stage towards the end of the performance. At the same time, the laugh and the cry of Prometheus intensifies the atmosphere of agony and threat.

In addition, Io’s long hair and the ecstatically pulsing of her body in the sound of a horsefly are reminiscent of Sophia Hill’s Io of 1995-6. In the context of the director’s intercultural approach, the performance’s music is determined by Odysseas

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Elytis’s lyrics from Axion Esti: “Where should I look for my joy, the four-leafed tear”. The same lyrics are repeated at three different points of the performance by the ten Prometheuses, while the ten women who constitute the Chorus of the ­Oceanids sing an Uighur oriental lament, probably of Turkish origin (which should be explained according to the Uighurs’ descent). Finally, the sound of a machine gun heard just before Io’s entrance reinforces the military atmosphere of perse­ cution, thus turning the particular, concrete political message into a global one.

The same sound (i.e. machine gun) is going to be further deployed by the director in the trilingual Prometheus Bound of 2010.

In the production of 2007-2008 Theodoros Terzopoulos used symbols from the Chinese cultural tradition, albeit investing them with universal features. Thus, the Oceanids enter the circle of the scene. They carried square glasses depicting a black circle in the middle, a symbol of death in Chinese culture. Meanwhile, the way they bring the square glasses close to their faces recalls Agave’s mirror scene in the ­production of Bacchae of 1986 and her consequent muteness. Moreover, Prome­ theus’ mock nailing on Caucasus is enacted through the use of the same square glasses. At the same time, the impressive entrance of Via (Strength) pushing a lily-covered coffin in which the dead body of Kratos (Power) lies, clearly alludes to the dead but always mighty state. Furthermore, the flashlight in the hands of Kratos (Power) reminds the audience of political interrogation and torturing scenes. In addition, in his effort to bring the revolutionary convicts to their senses, Okeanos (Oceanus) rips Prometheus’ book which contains his benefactions to mankind. This representation can be read as a symbolic action of inflicted censorship. Finally, the ultimate punishment of Prometheus is portrayed through the cheerful lady companion of Hermes who by use of red paint stains the ten actors playing the role of Prometheus between their eyebrows.

The director’s third approach to Prometheus Bound took place in 2010 as a co-production among Athens Festival, “Istanbul Cultural Capital of Europe 2010” and “Essen Cultural Capital of Europe 2010”. In this trilingual, intercultural ­production Terzopoulos used Eleni Varopoulou’s Modern Greek translation, Sampahattin Eyüboglu’s Turkish translation, and Heiner Müller’s German­ ­ version of the play. For the stage design of the production he collaborated with the internationally acclaimed artist Jannis Kounellis, who created an imposing scenery at Elaiourgeio in Eleusis (the site in which the Greek performances took place).

The suspending large stones, geometrically fastened from the walls of a building,

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represented a prison. In addition, the circle of the stage in front of the building gave the impression of a prisoners’ yard time area. This recent approach to Aeschylus’ play by Terzopoulos bears a strong political meaning and refers to the rebellion of the universal man against all forms of power/authority. Within the circle boundaries, under the stone installation, the archetypal female figure (Sophia Michopoulou) held a dominant position as she was immobilized in space and time, saddened by the pain of loss she should experience infinitely. The twelve men of the tri-national Chorus of the Oceanids dressed in black, dusty costumes (due to the soil ground of the stage), are portrayed as “corpses, human-made fabrics washed out by Oceanus”.14 However, in the particular staging of Aeschylus’ play, apart from the German Hermes (Götz Argus) who inspects and tames violently the men of the Chorus of Oceanids, the perpetrators, the representatives of the powers that be, derive from this Chorus, thus giving the impression that “the victims introduce their own ­perpetrators”.15 The Turkish Prometheus (Yetkin Dikinciler) resists to the ­violence of power, but the symbolism of the black hole on the center of his belly, reminiscent of the hole on the square glasses which the Chorus of the Oceanids carried in the Chinese production, bodes suffering. According to the director, in the trilingual, intercultural production Prometheus has “all the characteristics of an anti-­ Prometheus”.16 Furthermore, the repeated sound of sirens and guns contributed greatly to the creation of the political atmosphere of the “dehumanized man”,17 who is hunted and totally defeated. In addition, the inserted scene delivered by Sophia Michopoulou after the scene with Oceanus, brings memories of war and civil strife: “Bombs are dropping bombs, the sirens, the sirens. Run, run in order to hide yourselves back in the shelter. The army, the army is coming, the army is coming.

Help, help the child […] Sign and you may leave. Whoever wants to sign, do it now and they will be saved. Quicky, quickly, traitors, traitors […]”.

However, the production is basically built upon the phrase “there will be a day”, constantly repeated by Prometheus and the Chorus in all three languages. But the promising message of the phrase is almost nullified by the agonizing “when?” which also repeatedly returns in all three languages and the disheartening, for the human race, response of the centenarian, archetypal woman (Sophia Michopoulou): “When I die, the world will change”.

Nevertheless, the director’s political approach in this trilingual production is mostly reflected on the performers’ bodies. Terzopoulos is not at all interested in a

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mental, intellectual theatre but in a physical theatre which projects rhythm, gesture and ecstasy. The embodiment of rhythmicality allows the multilingualism of the production. Significantly, Terzopoulos believes that the dialogue is based on the rhythm.18 According to the director, there is no need for someone to be familiar with the language in order to understand the lyrics which are nonetheless reinforced by “the description produced by the hands and the head”.19 Thus, the deep pain of ­defeat and destruction is reflected in the vibrating bodies of the male members of the Chorus, whether they are in a standing position or they stumble and fall in the ground to the sound of the gun. The aggression and the outrage of the spectacle are evident in the sarcasm expressed in the recurrent laughs of men, especially in the scene before Io’s entrance. At this point a Chorus member, being in a state of trance, abandons the rectilinear arrangement and goes away from the circle only to collapse backstage. The timeless Io enacted by Sophia Hill experiences the bodily vertigo of never- ending persecution. Corporality dominates over the trilingual production of Prometheus Bound. At the same time the visual symbols are limited to two stage props. On the one hand, there is the knife of the resistance against the imposed ­authority raised by a member of the Chorus. On the other, there is the container with liquid mud which is used by Prometheus to grease his belly during Io’s scene, a possible indication of the impasse experienced by the defeated.

In summary, Theodoros Terzopoulos approached Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound in three different productions with actors and actresses of different social and ­cultural backgrounds. The director’s intercultural approach became possible through the use of the myth and the biodynamic movement of the actors and actresses. Terzopoulos’ ultra-cultural Method highlighted the community of ­ ­emotions and reactions of all human beings to common problems that concern the “Homo Universalis”.

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1

Theodoros Terzopoulos (2015), The Return of Dionysos, Athens, 15.

2

Freddy Decreus (2016), The Ritual Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, transl.: Yiannis Sideris, Athens: Agra 271.

3

Theodoros Terzopoulos (2000), History, Methodology and Comments, Athens: Agra, 73-74.

4

Theodoros Terzopoulos (2006), “The Metaphysics of the Body”, Theodoros Terzopoulos in conversation with Frank M. Raddatz in Frank M. Raddatz (Ed.), Reise mit Dionysos: Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos/ Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 136-171, 169.

5

Patrice Pavis (1996), “Introduction: Towards a Theory of Interculturalism in Theatre? The Possibilities and Limitations of Intercultural Theatre” in: Patrice Pavis (ed.), The Intercultural Performance Reader, New York: Routlegde, 1-21.

6

“Ultra-culturalism” which characterizes Terzopoulos’s approach to tragedy was firstly used as a term by Dimitris Tsatsoulis. Dimitris Tsatsoulis (2017) Western Hegemonic “Example” and Intercultural Theatre (Dytiko Hegemoniko “paradeigma” kai diapolitismiko Theatro), Athens: Papazisis, 329-334.

7

See Katerina Arvaniti (2005), “The Wailing Body. The Lament for the Community and the Personal Lament” (“To Threnoun Soma: o Threnos gia tin Koinoteta kai o Prosopikos Threnos”) in: Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd International Meeting of Ancient Greek Drama, Sikyon: September 2005 and August 2006, First Meeting: Skotos emon Phaos – 2005, Athens: Katagramma, 99-120.

8

Dimitris Tsatsoulis (2006), “The Circle and the Square” in Frank M. Raddatz (Ed.), Reise mit Dionysos: Das Theater des Theodoros Terzopoulos/ Journey with Dionysos. The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, Berlin: Theater der Zeit 42-53, 48. For the function of circle and square in the performance see Giorgos Sampatakakis (2008), The geometry of Chaos (“Geometrontas to Chaos”), Athens: Metaichmio, 110-113.

9

“There is evidence for the cross as a symbol from the remotest ages in Egypt, China and Crete, where a cross dating from the fifteenth century B.C. has been discovered”: Jean Chevalier Alain Gheerbrandt (1994), Dictionary of Symbols (translated from French: John Buchanan-Brown), London: Penguin, 248.

10 Ibid.

11 According to Dimitris Tsatsoulis (2006) [(Dimitris Tsatsoulis, “The Circle and the Square” ibid.

46-47)], “sphere is one of the favorite symbols of Terzopoulos […] as it appears to be connected directly with the androgynous nature of Dionysos” which is made of “a mixture of all opposites [...] and it is at the same time man and woman, near the supernatural and natural […] it unites everything and at the same time eliminates the differences and the boundaries of identities”.

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12 See, Dimitris Tsatsoulis (2017), Western Hegemonic “Example” and Intercultural Theatre, ibid. 331.

13 See, Avra Sidiropoulou (2017), “Greek contemporary approaches to tragedy: Terzopoulos’ revisions of Aeschylus” in George Rodosthenous (Ed.) Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy. Auteurship and Directorial Visions, London: Bloomsbury, 53-72, 64.

14 Theodoros Terzopoulos, “Anti-Prometheus”, interview with Christos Parides, Lifo, 19.5.2010.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Theodoros Terzopoulos (2015), The Return of Dionysos, Athens, 57.

19 Theodoros Terzopoulos (2000), History, Methodology and Comments, Athens: Agra, 61.

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The Reception of Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Works in Turkey DIKMEN GÜRÜN Professor at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, TURKEY

Turkey and Greece are two countries lining up the two coasts of the Aegean Sea. For centuries we made war, we made love and we listened to or even witnessed the miseries of families forced to emigrate from one coast to the other. Waters have been calm, waters have been rough; just like today. However, despite all the political ­turmoil, people in both countries feel for each other. Within years, an intercultural dialogue made itself apparent along the line where the West ends and the East ­begins.

In 2004, when we, as International Istanbul Theatre Festival, presented our Honorary Award to Theodoros Terzopoulos, the acclaimed director of the theatre scene told in his acceptance speech that his roots went back to Trabzon, a city in the Black Sea Region of Turkey, and that his family never broke away from the traditions of those lands, nourishing him with the elements of both cultures. It might well be the reason why, from time to time, we sense the bitter Black Sea breeze in his plays.

Back in 1990, ATTIS Theatre and Theodoros Terzopoulos visited the Istanbul Theatre Festival for the first time, with Euripides’ Bacchae. It ran for two nights, both to full houses, at the Main Stage of Atatürk Culture Center. Such an attention was due to Terzopoulos’s striking use of body language on the bare stage. The ­artists were reflecting, with their bodies, his radical approach to the inherent energy of the text.

Three years later, when I was appointed the director of the Istanbul Theater Festival in 1993, one of my first steps was to contact Theodoros Terzopoulos. Both young artists and drama students had a lot to learn from him and his theatre.

The first encounter was with Heiner Müller’s Quartet, where Terzopoulos’ ­approach to the text reflected sophistication and a sense of cruelty. At the end of

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both performances the audience was stunned. Especially the young public was ­eager to meet with the director. Through those meetings I realized that it was not only Terzopoulos who had captured the audience, but the audience also invoked his interest. Such a communication is even more vigorous today.

In 1995, Attis Theatre came to Istanbul with Prometheus Bound, based on Aescylus’ tragedy. Again, Terzopoulos created a strong sense of rhythm and energy on stage through the use of body language. In his minimalistic approach, as he pointed out, Terzopoulos placed Prometheus at the axis as the prosecutor and the judge, thus touching different social codes in the system… It was the time of e­lections and­ political turmoil in Turkey and Prometheus had to say much in this respect.

The same year, Istanbul Theater Festival started to organize workshops with Theodoros Terzopoulos for drama students and particularly young artists. In years those workshops attracted so many young people that the director had to open up auditions. These workshops extended to Athens and many of our young artists had the opportunity to work with him and the Attis team. Some young Turkish a­ ctors even had the opportunity to take part in Attis productions and thus travel to Delphi, Epidaurus, Toga, Shizuoka and other cities.

1996 also left its mark on our audience. Euripides, one of the great tragedians of ancient Greek theatre. Heiner Müller, one of the leading intellectuals and playwrights of contemporary theatre. Alla Demidova, one of the divas of the theatre world, and finally the St. Irene Church of the Byzantium era. They all were the components of Terzopoulos’ Medea version bearing the rich colors of the Eastern and Western cultures. The performance left a lasting impact on the audience.

In 1999, Istanbul Theatre Festival took another step forward and started joint productions with international groups and festivals. The first co-production ­proposal was made to Theodoros Terzopoulos. Our relations became even tighter and diversified with the Heracles Trilogy. It was a co-production of Attis Theatre, Istanbul Theatre Festival and Theatre Olympics Delphi.

Heracles Trilogy was composed of three plays, based on the texts of Heiner Müller, Euripides and Sophocles, questioning the past, present and future. In this trilogy consisting of Heracles, Descent and Descent of Heracles Terzopoulos, once again, delivered his political message filled with sharp criticism of our day. They were performed by Greek and Turkish actors.

After its successful premiere in Istanbul, the Heracles Trilogy was invited to ­Shizuoka for the 2nd International Theater Olympics and the following year, to the

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European Culture Center of Delphi, for the “Meeting of Ancient Greek Drama”.

In March 2001 Turkey was hit by a long-awaited economic crisis and the sponsors withdrew. The minimal government support became almost nonexistent. Inevitably the 2001 edition of the Istanbul Theater Festival was cancelled, and decision was made to organize it biannually.

In the years 2002 and 2004, we lent support to Sahika Tekand and her theatre company Studio Oyuncuları. Where is Oidipus? and Oidipus in Exile were the co-­ productions of Studio Oyuncuları, Istanbul Theatre Festival and European Culture Center of Delphi. Striking adaptations of these two Sophocles tragedies by Sahika Tekand made their way to other international festivals after Delphi. Here I would like to once more emphasize the support of Theodoros Terzopoulos for giving a hand both to me as the Director of the Istanbul Theatre Festival and to Sahika Tekand.

Two years later, in 2006, the Theater Olympics Committee proposed to cooperate with Istanbul for its 4th edition. Until then, Theatre Olympics were held in Delphi, Shizuoka and Moscow. Istanbul, together with the 15th Istanbul ­Theater Festival hosted the 4th Theatre Olympics under the theme of “Breaking the Walls”.

The opening performance of the Theatre Olympics was Persians of Aeschylus directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos and it was presented by a cast of actors from Greece and Turkey, once again in the enchanting atmosphere of the St. Irene Church. Terzopoulos’ interpretation was, as usual, minimalistic. The artists lamented against the destructive power of war. One could sense it not only through words or sounds but also in the rhythmic trembling of the bodies sending a strange sense of energy to the audience. Terzopoulos’ comments on Persians are interesting: “This performance is a ritual. The suffering of the body is employed to express universal despair. It tries to evoke catharsis to all those who have suffered, and is a ceremony of death, both our own and that of our beloved ones. We learn through passion to participate in this ritual. This co-creation by Greeks and Turks opens up a special dimension, which refers to modern and future disasters.”1 In 2008, Prof. Kerem Karaboga, Chair of Istanbul University Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy Department, wrote his PhD dissertation on Crossing the Boundaries with Tragedy: Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Theatre. Later it was published and received positive reviews. It is also translated into Greek. Kerem Karaboga is also an actor of Attis.

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In 2016, Terzopoulos’ book The Return of Dionysos was translated from Greek to Turkish and published in Istanbul. I had the honor of writing a preface for the Turkish version.

In 2010, Istanbul was elected by the EU as one of the three European Capitals of Culture. Certainly it was a pretentious attempt to console Turkey who has been waiting for years to become an EU member. Furthermore, relations with Mr. Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party (AKP) were much better than they are today. To cut a long story short, many projects were realized. Naturally, we as Istanbul Theatre Festival gave our assistance to some projects. Promethiade was one of them. A ­ thens, Istanbul and Essen (Ruhr 2010) were the partners of the project. ­Prometheus Bound directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos with a new concept did its premiere in Istanbul with a big cast of Greek, Turkish, German actors.

In an interview with Frank Raddatz, editor of Promethiade2 book, Terzopoulos was touching the core of his intercultural theatre concept in Prometheus Bound: “The simultaneous presence of three languages of three different theatre schools on stage, results in freedom of a very different kind. This freedom opens up the political dimensions.” Further down, he continues: “[…] these are three antagonistic languages that do not share a common harmony. […] The basic material for intercultural theatre is energy. Body language. The homogenization of language is reached by energy.[…] The body is global. This is the starting point where intercultural dialogue must begin. At this point zero. But we must be aware that we don’t know anything. We must not know everything but we must wait and see.

Surrender.”

Terzopoulos realized this project with Jannis Kounellis, the doyen of contem­ porary art. Kounellis’ striking installation of 50.000 pairs (fifty thousand) eyeglasses covering the stage of historical Rumeli Fortress on Bosphorus was bewildering ­beyond words.

I must also note that in May 2018 a young group of Turkish artists organized the International Pergamon Theater Festival in the antique city of Pergamon on the Aegean Sea. Theodoros Terzopoulos and Attis Theatre were invited. I hope to have played a part in his accepting the invitation. They staged Ajax, the Maddness at the 3500-seat Asclepion Amphitheater which attracted young audiences from ­surrounding cities as well as Istanbul. His workshop “The Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos” drew much attention. I hope that in the coming years Terzopoulos will continue to support the Pergamon Festival and its young team.

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Finally, I would like to note that I just tried to reflect the pleasant and nurturing route I took with Theodoros Terzopoulos, through Istanbul Theatre Festival, between the years 1993 and 2012. Young artists, young groups as well as the g­ eneral public learned a lot from his methodology, from his theatre and they will continue to do so...

In 2012, I entrusted my position as the Director of Istanbul Theatre Festival to Dr. Leman Yılmaz. In 2017 with Ancore and this year with Amor Terzopoulos was already the guest of the festival. Yes, in the mutual waters of the Aegean sea we will keep on sharing.

1 15th Uluslararası Istanbul Tiyatro Festivali/ 4. Uluslararası Tiyatro Olimpiyatları. Istanbul Kültür Sanat Vakfı. Mayıs 2006, p.37 2 Promethiade. Edited by Frank M Raddatz. Klartext Verlagsgesellschaft, Essen 2011, pp 97–98

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Theatre Olympics and Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Artistic Vision1 JAE KYOUNG KIM Assistant Professor, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, KOREA

I would like to start with this question: is a theatre festival different from a group of individual artists’ productions? Hosting a theatre festival requires more than scheduling an array of individual performances. An overall aesthetic direction is ­essential to evaluate the festival’s success and anticipate its future direction. For this reason, a festival with no artistic concept is little more than a random collection of performances. To present its own aesthetic direction, each festival needs not only a skilled executive director to manage festival business but also a creative artistic director to guide the festival’s artistic vision. The artistic director’s blueprint for the festival presents the theme and determines which productions will be featured.

The ideal theatre festival is an integrated organism that combines a main program of individual performances and complementary secondary events, including ­workshops, symposiums, outdoor events, and exhibitions. Through careful programming, the ideal festival promotes intercultural and multidirectional communication among the artists and provides a carnivalesque experience for the attendees.

Accordingly, it is necessary to evaluate the success of a theatre festival based on its overall cultural impact on the community rather than its size, location, lineup of artists, or commercial success.

Among the numerous existing theatre festivals, the International Theatre Olympics was co-founded by eight international artists in 1994.2 It is an exemplary example of a festival that successfully established a distinct artistic vision. As an independent, nonprofit cultural organization the Theatre Olympics has been held in various foreign cities, including Delphi, Greece (1995); Shizuoka, Japan (1999); Moscow, Russia (2001); Istanbul, Turkey (2006); Seoul, South Korea (2010); ­Beijing, China (2014); Wroclaw, Poland (2016); and New Delhi, India (2018).

Most recently, the festival was co-hosted by Toga, Japan, and St. Petersburg, R ­ ussia

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(2019). Each festival, based on a different theme and strategy, has presented d­ istinct characteristics that encompass the national identity, theatrical heritage, and cultural interests of the host country. Over the last 25 years, there have been many ­surprises, interesting changes, and challenging moments of growth and retreat. ­Behind all of this meaningful history is Theodoros Terzopoulos, the festival’s first artistic d­ irector, who originally suggested the festival’s concept to its co-founders.

Terzopoulos orchestrated the first Theatre Olympics in Delphi, which was held ­August 22–27, 1995. It was a symbolic start in terms of its intensive programming and it represented an original aesthetic philosophy beyond compare. Unfortunately, I was not able to participate in the first Theatre Olympics in 1995. Due to its significance in festival history, I would like to explore that year’s program by examining related documents and records and conducting interviews with Terzopoulos.

Terzopoulos began to envision the Theatre Olympics when he was the artistic director of the first two International Meeting[s] on Ancient Drama at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi (ECCD) in 1985 and 1986. Describing the first Meeting as “a call from Dionysos” (Terzopoulos 2006: 148), Terzopoulos was amazed by how pleasant it was to meet theatre artists from around the world. He especially enjoyed the open dialogue with those who shared their interest in Greek classics and witnessed many other artists’ interpretations of those works. When all of the attendees gathered at the ancient stadium in the archeological site to watch the performances, they shared a transformative experience and forged strong emotional bonds. Terzopoulos’ own company that was founded in 1986, Attis Theatre, ­premiered The Bacchae at the second Meeting on Ancient Drama. Due to Terzopoulos’ work with the ECCD, he was able to invite his future Theatre Olympics partners (including Müller, Suzuki, and Wilson) to subsequent Meeting[s] on ­Ancient D ­ rama, where they speculated about the possibility of future intercultural collaborations. As Terzopoulos expanded his artistic boundaries as an artistic ­director and organizer, he ultimately came up with the idea to create an internatio­nal version of the festival.

Terzopoulos was eager to create an international theatre festival that would lead global theatre artists into open dialogue beyond their different languages, ­cultures, and ideologies. To reach this goal, his first order of business was to search for foreign artists willing to join his artistic adventure. Terzopoulos talked about his idea with his old friend and mentor Heiner Müller, who was very supportive.

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He then contacted Suzuki Tadashi. After securing Suzuki’s active partnership, ­Terzopoulos approached several foreign artists to invite them to participate. He eventually succeeded in organizing the International Committee for the festival in 1994. At the first official meeting of the Committee in Delphi in June 1994, the eight co-founders, with Terzopoulos as chairman, announced the official charter and agreed on Delphi as the first host city. Thus, Delphi became the birthplace of the Theatre Olympics.

As reflected in Terzopoulos’ early time in Delphi, the first Theatre Olympics was inspired by the significance of Delphi as the performance site and the enduring virtue of Greek tragedy. Terzopoulos designed the festival’s program with the theme of “Tragedy,” which had emerged as a common interest among foreign­ artists of different cultures, histories, and languages. Because of his collaboration with the ECCD, the first Theatre Olympics and the eighth Meeting on Ancient Drama were held together. The tragedy theme allowed Terzopoulos to visualize an ideal program for each festival’s artistic identity. He pursued a specific goal: restoring the essence of ancient Greek theatre to the contemporary world.

The first Theatre Olympics presented a small but intense program of seven productions from six countries (five of which were staged by the co-founders of the Theatre Olympics).3 In 1994, at their first meeting, the co-founders agreed to ­explore Greek tragedies and mount a brand-new production. What made the first festival so memorable was its showcase of a series of Greek tragedies specially ­produced for the festival. As a result, the co-founding artists, who believed that Greek tragedy belongs to the world, reinterpreted ancient Greek dramas using ­contemporary interpretations and their own cultural sensibilities. Through this ­experience, Terzopoulos and the participating artists embraced their diverse­ visions and were able to build a strong bond despite their differences.

Terzopoulos premiered an early version of Prometheus Bound which simplified and reinterpreted Aeschylus’s text through the bodies of the performers. At first glance, Prometheus (played by Tasos Dimas) looked helplessly exposed to Zeus, and his suffering was emphasized by his immovable position. However, on a deeper level, this geometric position symbolized the tight bonds of sympathy within mankind. Although Prometheus submitted to his tragic punishment, his love for ­humanity opened a new era to mankind, and his sacrifice vouched for the value of human beings. Prometheus’ stillness displayed his dauntless will. Although he was physically restricted, his self-determination was unconfined. In the last scene,

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­ rometheus finally moved forward, lining up with the rest of the characters, and P laid face down. All of the other characters, filled with despair, also laid face down and trembled with fear as if they had fallen into an unfathomable hole. Based on the original text, this scene represents the moment when Prometheus is plunged into the abyss by Zeus’ thunderbolt. However, paradoxically, the last synchronized ­gesture, sharing a single hero’s agony with others, revealed a sacred connection that resulted from deep mutual sympathy. By ending Prometheus Bound with group ­sympathy, Terzopoulos achieved a sense of communitas.

Communitas, as described by Victor Turner, is the way rituals create the­ feeling of being equal together. According to Turner, communitas is “a state of unmediated and egalitarian association between individuals who are temporarily freed of the hierarchical secular roles and status which they bear in everyday life” (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 4). Following Victor Turner’s search along the spectrum of ­communitas, Edith Turner explains it as “a group’s pleasure in sharing common experiences with one’s fellows” (Turner 2012: 2). I believe that this communitas was a central concept in Terzopoulos’ production, and vital to the festive spirit he wanted the Theatre Olympics to encourage.

The concept of communitas, with different forms and names, has been passed along in Delphi’s festival history. Despite their different time periods and styles (starting from the ancient Pythian Games, to the Delphic Festival, to the Meeting on Ancient Drama), every event fostered intercultural communication with the aid of the Olympic spirit and the Delphic Idea. With archeological sites, especially the Stadium, as their cultural centers, these events created an ideal atmosphere for ­cultural dialogue and artistic exchange. The Pythian Games embodied an extensive philosophy that was grounded in Olympism. In comparison with other Panhellenic Games, the Pythian Games, which featured a rare combination of music, poetry, and theatre competitions with athletic contests, exemplified the spirit of cultural Olympism.4 Meanwhile, the Delphic Festival, organized by poet Angelos S­ ikelianos and his wife Eva Palmer-Sikelianos in 1927 and 1930, brought the communal essence of the Pythian Games back to the modern world by recreating theatre performances, music, and sports events under “The Delphic Idea.”5 Finally the Meeting on Ancient Drama inherited Delphi’s cultural legacy and motivated Terzopoulos to expand his journey to the world stage through the Theatre Olympics. In conclusion, the Delphic heritage that can be traced back to the Pythian Games continues to encourage people in Delphi to embrace otherness and celebrate being together.

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This spirit continues to thrive in the contemporary world, beyond the borders of Greece, through the Theatre Olympics.

The Theatre Olympics was designed to be organized by different artistic directors in different countries. For this reason, programming comparable to the first Theatre Olympics is not found in the subsequent festivals. In spite of its one-time program, the first Theatre Olympics proved that a close collaboration between foreign artists (who respect the host country’s cultural legacy) and festival organizers (who envision their program through the eyes of the local people’s cultural background) is essential to create the synergetic effect desired. Following the first Theatre ­Olympics, Terzopoulos continued to demonstrate his dedication by his consistent participation in the years that followed. As the chairman of the International ­Committee, he continues to fulfill his mission of encouraging each artistic director of the successive Theatre Olympics to secure the spirit of communitas, so people at each festival can communicate, collaborate, and interculturalize beyond their ­differences. Through his lifelong achievement as a director and festival organizer, Terzopoulos has raised the status of an international theatre festival to a global ­opportunity to experience the spirit of togetherness, which is desperately needed in today’s world.

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1

The origin of this article comes from my book International Theatre Olympics: The Artistic and Intercultural Power of Olympism (2016). After the article was presented at the European ­Cultural Centre of Delphi in July 2018, proper corrections and updates were made to reflect Terzopoulos’ recent work for this publication.

2 The co-founding members in alphabetic order are Núria Espert (Spain), Antunes Filho ­(Brazil), Tony Harrison (United Kingdom), Yuri Lyubimov (Russia), Heiner Müller ­(Germany), Suzuki Tadashi (Japan), Theodoros Terzopoulos (Greece), and Robert Wilson (United States).

3

The cofounders presented the following shows: Prometheus Bound (by Aeschylus), directed

by Terzopoulos; Electra (by Hugo von Hofmannsthal) by Suzuki; Persephone (inspired by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) by Wilson; The Labours of Herakles (inspired by Greek myth)

by Harrison; and Birds (by Aristophanes) by Lyubimov.

4

The Panhellenic Games refers to the following four major sports festivals in ancient Greece: the Olympic Games, the Pythian Games, the Nemean Games, and the Isthmian Games.

5

Sikelianos explained the driving force of the Delphic Festival as “the Delphic Idea.” For the detailed explanation, see Kim 2016: 26-29.

Work Cited Eade, John, and Michael J. Sallnow, ed. 1991. Introduction to Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, pp. 1-29. New York: Routledge.

Kim, Jae Kyoung. 2016. International Theatre Olympics: the Artistic and Intercultural Power of Olympism. Singapore: Palgrave.

Terzopoulos, Theodoros. 1995. Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Talk. Reviving Greek Tragedy.

Tokyo: NHK, August. Documentary.

Terzopoulos, Theodoros. 2006. The Metaphysics of the Body. In Journey with ­Dionysos: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, ed. Frank M. Raddatz, 136–173.

Berlin: Theater der Zeit.

Turner, Edith. 2012. Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. New York: Palgrave.

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Programm Thursday 5 July Conference Venue 15:30 – 18:00 Film screening 18:00 Registration K. Karamanlis Amphitheatre 18:30 – 19:00 Official opening Hélène Ahrweiler President, European Cultural Centre of Delphi Paul Kalligas Director, European Cultural Centre of Delphi Afroditi Panagiotakou Director of Culture, Onassis Foundation Opening Session Chair: Paul Kalligas 19:00 – 20:00 Vassilis Papavassiliou Theodoros – a legacy with no borders Anatoly Vasiliev Eleni Varopoulou Theatre as a translation. Heiner Muller and Aeschylus by Theodoros Terzopoulos Freddy Decreus A theatre of energy, a theatre of consciousness Daniel Wetzel 20:00 – 20:20 Photographic installation The Dismemberment of Dionysos Johanna Weber – Alexandros Kokkinos

20:20 – 20:30 Sound installation Enopae Panayiotis Velianitis Exhibition Hall 20:30 Opening of the photographic installation The Dismemberment of Dionysos Outdoor Spaces 21:00 Opening of the sound installation Enopae 21:30 Dinner —

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Friday 6 July Frynihos Theatre Multi-Purpose Hall 10:00 – 14:30 The return of Dionysos The method of Theodoros Terzopoulos 10:00 – 12:00 Part I: Demonstration Theodoros Terzopoulos & Savvas Stroumpos Participating: Mikhail Sokolov, Przemyslaw Blaszczak, Juan Esteban Echeverri Arango, Justin Jain, Paolo Musio, Li Yadi, Long Long, Rustem Begenov, Kerem Karaboga, Yiling Tsai, Niovi Charalampous, Evelyn Assouad 12:00 – 12:20 Coffee break Part II: Speeches Moderator: Aglaia Pappa 12:20 – 14:00 Kerem Karaboga The acting method of Terzopoulos as a means to confrontation with our age of ”total decay“ Justin Jain The universal body: exploring the methodology in the United States Rustem Begenov Method of Theodoros Terzopoulos: my experience as an actor and assistant director Li Yadi An extraordinary journey of Attis 240

Paolo Musio Here, elsewhere, on the border – where I am when I am on stage with Attis Long Long A journey to unknown – my reflection on the return of Dionysos Interventions: Mikhail Sokolov, Przemyslaw Blaszczak, Juan Esteban Echeverri Arango, Yiling Tsai, Niovi Charalampous 14:00 – 14:30 Discussion 14:30 Lunch 16:00 – 18:00 Film screening Ancient Theatre of Delphi 19:00 Euripides’ The Trojan Women Directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos 22:00 Dinner —

Saturday 7 July K. Karamanlis Amphitheatre Second Session Chair: Konstantinos Arvanitakis 09:30 – 10:45 Eugenio Barba No beauty without rules, no new beauty without breaking rules George Sampatakakis Eros and Thanatos: the aesthetics of entrancement in the theatre of Terzopoulos Jaroslaw Fret Wrestling with memory Iliana Dimadi Attis Theatre and the need for – another – critical language Frank Raddatz Theodoros Terzopoulos’ theatre of verticality 10:45 – 11:30 Discussion 11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break Third Session Chair: Freddy Decreus 12:00 – 13:00 Hans-Thies Lehmann Ritual and reflection. Theodoros Terzopoulos and contemporary tragic theatre Penelope Chatzidimitriou (Un)livable, (un)grievable, (un)mournable bodies: violence, mourning and politics in the theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos Avra Sidiropoulou Towards a poetics of communality: Theodoros Terzopoulos’ staging of tragedy in the 21st century

Marika Thomadaki Energetic theatricality and creative forms in Theodoros Terzopoulos’ performances 13:00 – 13:45 Discussion 13:45 Lunch 16:00 – 18:00 Film screening 17:30 – 18:00 Coffee Fourth Session Chair: Eleni Varopoulou 18:00 – 19:00 Gonia Jarema The voiceless voice in the work of Theodoros Terzopoulos Dimitris Tsatsoulis Glossolalia: from the “langage universel” of Artaud to the “nuclear rhythm of the word” of Terzopoulos Özlem Hemis¸ The idea of the Tragic in Alarme-Amor- Encore Panayiotis Velianitis The memory of sound 19:00 – 19:30 Discussion 20:30 Dinner 22:00 Film screening Ancient Theatre of Delphi 19:00 The Trojan Women

by Euripides Directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos LIVE STREAMING: www.sgt.gr —

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Sunday 8 July K. Karamanlis Amphitheatre Fifth Session Chair: Kerem Karaboga 09:30 – 10:45 Despoina Bebedeli The eye of Dionysos Konstantinos Arvanitakis Primal phantasies and the unrepresentable in the work of Terzopoulos Maria Marangou When Malevich meets Dionysos Kalliope Lemos A synthesis of antitheses 10:45 – 11:30 Discussion 11:30 – 12:00 Coffee break Sixth Session Chair: Dimitris Tsatsoulis 12:00 – 13:15 Tassos Dimas he Time of Grief Katerina Arvaniti Prometheus Bound directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos Aglaia Pappa Alarme-Amor: the evolution of an actor working with Theodoros Terzopoulos Santanu Bose Encore: three Indian readings 13:15 – 14:00 Discussion 14:00 Lunch 16:00 – 18:00 Film screening 17:30 – 18:00 Coffee

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Seventh Session Chair: Gonia Jarema 18:00 – 19:30 Dikmen Gurun Reception of Theodoros Terzopoulos’ works in Turkey Blanka Zizka Theodoros Terzopoulos at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia Kim Jae Kyoung Theatre Olympics and Terzopoulos’ artistic vision 19:30 – 20:15 Discussion 20:15 – 20:45 Theodoros Terzopoulos End of the Symposium 21:00 Dinner Conference Venue 22:00 Musical performance The wanderer and his shadow Dimitris Tiliakos baritone Yiannis Tsanakaliotis piano

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Acknowledgements Special thanks for their contribution and valuable support to the European Cultural Centre of Delphi, the Onassis Foundation, the Ephorate of Antiquites of Phokis, the Organisation Pafos 2017 European Capital of Culture, Theater der Zeit, Hélène Ahrweiler, Afroditi Panagiotakou, Athanasia Psalti, Paul Kalligas, Maro Nicolopoulou, Maria Vogiatzi, Johanna Weber, Andreas Simopoulos, Georgia Doetzer, Loukia, Charalampos Terzopoulos, Harald Müller, Thomas Irmer, Gudrun Hommers, Titos Kolotas, Anatoly Vasiliev, Eugenio Barba, Julia Varley, Freddy Decreus, Frank Raddatz, Dikmen Gürün, Vasilis Papavassiliou, Eleni ­Varopoulou, Daniel Wetzel, Jaroslaw Fret, Blanka Zizka, Maria Marangou, Kalliope Lemos, Konstantinos Arvanitakis, Gonia Jarema, Dimitris Tsatsoulis, Savas Patsalidis, George Sampatakakis, Penelope Chatzidimitriou, Despoina Bebedeli, Tasos Dimas, Savvas Stroumpos, Panayiotis Velianitis Iliana Dimadi, Kim Jae Kyoung, Sophia Hill, Aglaia Pappa, Kostas Bethanis, Dimitris Tiliakos, Marika Thomadaki, Avra Sidiropoulou, Niovi Charalambous, Özlem Hemis,¸ Katerina Arvaniti, Paolo Musio, Kerem Karaboga, Yiling Tsai, Lin Chien-Lang, Justin Jain, Li Yadi, Przemyslaw Blaszczak, Mikhail Sokolov, Rustem Begenov, Juan Esteban Eheverri Arango, ­Erdogan Kavaz, Prokopis Agathokleous, Evelina Arapidi, Ajla Hamzic, Hadar ­Barabash, Sara Ipsa, Evelyn Assouad, Andreas Fylaktou, Alexandros Kokkinos, Yiannis Tsanakaliotis, Pericles Spatoulas, Athena Gotsi, Magda Korpi, Vasiliki Segouni, Aris Gouvalis, Nikos Koutsokeras, Elisavet Pantazi, Vicky Gerontopoulou, Nikos Apostolopoulos, Aris Dorizas, Katerina Tzigotzidou, Giorgos Zamboulakis, and the students of Athens Conservatoire Drama School.

Photos page 244–247 Photo 1. The Trojan Women – the applause, Ancient Theatre of Delphi

(photo Andreas Simopoulos) Photo 2. The Trojan Women – the applause, Ancient Theatre of Delphi (photo Johanna Weber) 248

Previously published by Theater der Zeit

The Return of Dionysus Theodoros Terzopoulos With a Preface by Erika Fischer-Lichte Paperback, 118 pp ISBN 978-3-95749-306-4

Dionysus in Exile: The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos With a Preface by Erika Fischer-Lichte Paperback, 182 pp ISBN 978-3-95749-224-1

This book collects the contributions to the international conference on the theater of Greek director Theodoros Terzopoulos, held in ­Delphi, Greece, in 2018. Terzopoulos, who developed an internationally acclaimed contemporary form of ancient theater with his own method, has made a deep impact with his work on both theater theory and practice as well as on the research of its foundations in different cultures.

Contributors include Hélène Ahrweiler | Afroditi Panagiotakou Erika Fischer-Lichte | Etel Adnan | Anatoly Vasiliev | Eugenio Barba Freddy Decreus | Frank Raddatz | Dikmen Gürün | Vasilis Papavasileiou Eleni Varopoulou | Daniel Wetzel | Jaroslaw Fret | Blanka Zizka Maria Marangou | Kalliope Lemos | Konstantinos Arvanitakis | Gonia Jarema | Dimitris Tsatsoulis | Savas Patsalidis | George Sampatakakis Penelope Chatzidimitriou | Despoina Bebedeli | Tasos Dimas | Savvas Stroumpos | Avra Sidiropoulou | Johanna Weber | Panagiotis Velianitis Ileiana Dimadi | Kim Jae Kyoung | Sophia Hill | Aglaia Pappa | Dimitris Tiliakos | Marika Thomadaki | Niovi Charalambous | Özlem Hemiș ˘ Katerina Arvaniti | Paolo Musio | Kerem Karaboga | Yiling Tsai | Lin Chien-Lang | Justin Jain | Li Yadi | Przemyslaw Blaszczak | Mikhail Sokolov | Rustem Begenov | Juan Esteban Echeverri Arango

ISBN 978-3-95749-400-9

www.theaterderzeit.de