Electra Ellinikioti meets Christos’ “Horizon Line” Vakalopoulou and tells us about the work he created.
The prematurely lost writer, director and radio producer Christos Vakalopoulos almost thirty years after his death remains a point of reference not only for his friends and companions, but also for much younger people who share his thoughts and concerns. .
Electra Ellinikioti, one of the most special and pure theatrical voices of her generation, she was fascinated ed oh and years from the “Line of the Horizon”, its swan song. Not only did he create “Kamiro” in Kypseli, a new space to present the theatrical version of the book there, but he also sparked a series of events inviting artists to talk to “Line” through an exhibition, a short film, discussions,
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PHOTO: SOFIA MANOLI
Now that the show finally meets its audience, Electra Ellinikioti talks to us about the project, revealing her passion for Vakalopoulos and her fascinating, original and brilliant thinking.
So many years after the death of a man who lived very little and did so many different things, his memory, both to the people who lived him and to those they did not manage to live it, it remains very much alive. What do you attribute it to?
In that she was very honest in what she was involved in. This made his relationship strong, which is why his friends still remember him or work on his work and try to bring it to light.
) People who did not know him can find him at work. Maybe it also played a role that he was struggling between life and death due to his health issues and he had no time left for wrong spending.
) ● It’s been talking about this book .
You are the first person I mentioned in an interview. Five years ago.
● Five years later we not only have the show, but also a very exciting course. How did all this happen?
) Honestly it was a time I needed, an experienced time, because it is a text with many layers. I studied it again and again in the contexts, in the seasons. It may be the first time in my life that I do not have anxiety before the start of a show. Not because I’m sure about the result, but because I do not care about the result. I have enjoyed the process so much, I have discovered so many things in the cancellations even…
I wondered how you do theater afterwards. And I said since you don’t know how to do theater, make a theater – which is not exactly theater. Maybe we should write outside: “Here one day there would be a theater”. In my opinion, it can no longer be a theater in 2021, we do not need other theaters.
) ● Since we do not need other theaters, what do we need?
To re-appropriate the public space. I am also influenced by Vakalopoulos, because for the last two years I have read the slightest article that talks to “Grammi”. I had read Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”, but inevitably the “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle”. Everything is now so assimilated into the concept of the spectacular, that if we are talking about theater, we must talk about a theater that happens in unbearably real terms, that sends you back into your life, on the street. I do not understand why the classics go up in a classic way – you know, “right”.
The performances, the versions, the narratives are over. You need something bolder, where you will share space and time with the viewer. Not aesthetically or in what the poet wants to say – he does not want to say anything! We have to take the concept of viewing out of the theater and include the concept of coexistence, of community: I come to see a version of life that I have not yet been able to contemplate. It must be sharp, with a lot of humor.
Yes, this is what Debord says in “Comments”: when the spectacular has infiltrated the roles of politician, journalist, doctor, lawyer, then what role and what incarnation of the narrative should the theater bring? He should finish it rather – out of love.
● In the last two years the theater has been almost criminalized. How do we manage this?
The question is whether he is trying to prove that he does not need to be criminalized. For me the charm would be to allow oneself to be illegal, annoying, reprehensible. We have done it properly hygienically, we have all the measures. Let us be like this in our principles, in how we treat people.
In the rest we have to be dangerous. May they forbid us! For me, there is nothing more tasteful than the fact that the theaters were closed and the churches were not closed. You need another form of faith. The theater will survive – and the germs will survive.
The point is to prove that what is required is not to survive, it is to live. Vakalopoulos once had a very heated discussion with Petros Tatsopoulos, passionate about how Athens has become. At one point Vakalopoulos asks: “Petros, are you still in love with Athens?” – “I am always in love with Athens”. And Vakalopoulos says calmly: “Well, then we must fall in love with misery”.
I agree with him: we can not behave as winners. This is a great neurotic distortion that we have anyway as a nation: that we succeed. We may or may not succeed, remaining in something purely mortal. Theater may be the best version of the failure of the universe – to go and see fundamental failures, disasters, to go to something illegal, painfully illegal.
) ● I know that you have companions and time relationships, which are transformed, but not lost.
Now they are at their best. When “Kamiros” started with the exhibition edited by Dimitra Liakoura, when I saw “Grammi” happening on the walls without me, I can not describe how I felt. It started with the shaking of the baguette by me, but I had no involvement in the exhibition, in the concerts and in the movies. This is already a victory, a great transformation in our relationship. I wonder how it will be next time.
I really do not know how we will work after the “Line”. What is happening between us is so strong that we do not expect what will happen to the public – although it will be a huge gift to happen.
But something has already been won, a very substantial relationship has been carved, maybe because we went through this text for a very long time and the fermentation was more substantial. I never doubted I wanted to work with the same people. But the “Line” made it clear, he said yes, go ahead, he has more.
A framework is created in which I and the regular, but also the new partners, feel safe to try. I do not know if it can be done otherwise. When you try to tell a deeply personal story, you can not do it with people close to you.
) ● Which do you consider what are the characteristics of your theater? Do they have to do with your studies?
I do not know what to answer. The studies had to do with form, not content. The rest is a series of fermentations that are mostly of my life. Recently, when we were making the program for “Kamiro”, we were discussing our identity and Iro-Sofia Smyrnioudi tells me: “But there is no question: you have been dealing with the female gaze for years”. I did not have the clarity to see it. I move quite kinesthetically, with instinct, and I always chose the texts with it. But yes, in recent years this has been the case.
So if I have a look, it’s how they can to make things a little more tender. And violence still comes with a tenderness, because the world is too violent. And ugliness still comes through forgiveness.
“Line of the Horizon” PHOTO: MARILI ZARKOU
● However, you are concerned with Greek drama, Greekness.
Yes, it is clear. George Kritharas said in the rehearsal that every artist is a man who has identified the impossible and has decided to spend his whole life trying to make it possible. It still bothers me.
I see it in our lives: the horror we have been experiencing in recent years on a political and social level is an absolute consequence of the wrong impression we have of Greekness since the establishment of the modern Greek state. We try other versions of Greek, which include defeat, the borderline, a more abysmal view of life: life will not win, all it can do is try to fail nicely – and that is deeply Greek. Vakalopoulos says: we do what we want to end with the schism, not to be both West and East, to belong to the West.
All these are narratives of the effort for a pure identity , but Greek is not a pure identity, it never was. We are identically mixed and we do that this does not happen. That is where the problem begins, the borders, the war, the fascist attitudes. It is great to be Greek, but not in the way of the great Greeks, of the excellent, not crusading Greek.
Vakalopoulos is the last mosaic of a mosaic that goes from Solomos to Papadiamantis , passes by Theotokas and reaches until today. In “Grammi” he captured the issue of Greekness in an indisputable way. A Greekness that is and is not, a line of the horizon – what a great game with words!
) It can be the share: the horizon. Are you defined as a Greek? What is the line you are on? What makes a child of Albanian descent less Greek than me? Or a person with disabilities? What makes a religion more or less Greek than me?
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I will answer you succinctly with a phrase by Vakalopoulos: Someday you will find a way to advertise shit. I have put it in the show. It even has Bella Tarr’s “Harmony of Werkmeister”. I’ve done it with a light bulb, George, and I’ve had an amazing time.
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Journalist, director and translator
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) “The Horizon Line”
) by Christos Vakalopoulos, conceived – dramaturgy – directed by Electra Ellinikioti, will is played in the area “Kamiros” (Ithaca 32, Kypseli). Set design – costume design: Dimitra Liakoura. Lighting: Ismini Starida. Music: Grigoris Eleftheriou. Video – photography director: Marili Zarkou. Scientific collaborator: Dimitra Dermitzaki. Assistant director: Iro-Sofia Smyrnioudi.
Cast: Stella Vogiatzaki, George Kritharas, Maria Mamouri, Anna-Maria Papaioannou, Iro-Sofia Smyrnioudi .
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