Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2017

In this article, I trace institutional transitions that have framed, produced and hosted theatre in Athens during the last four decades. In doing so, I seek to devise a methodology that examines the city’s changing theatrical landscapes against the backdrop of Metapolitefsi’s trajectories of transition and the post-2010 in-crisis permutations. Subsequently, I pursue a twofold argument: first, I observe the ways in which state subsidies forged theatrical economies that contributed to the shaping of Athens’ geographies; and by focusing on the example of the Onassis Cultural Centre, I propose that a key marker of change is a move towards an ethic of hospitality, concurrent with the systematization of the economies of debt in Greek society.

No Man’s Land was a peripatetic performance produced in Athens by the Onassis Cultural Center (2014) and previously presented in several European cities. According to its director Dries Verhoeven, the piece sought to explore ‘what is a multicultural environment today’ by staging one-to-one encounters, where (ostensibly local) spectators were guided by performers (migrants, refugees or asylum seekers) through the city while listening to a story of forced displacement and exile. Drawing on a corpus of semi-structured interviews with the Athens-based performers, this article examines the performers’ own conceptions and experiences of this institutional attempt to ‘host’ the laments of Others, as ‘both a performance and a political act’ (Anon. 2014b). Participants’ narratives are studied in connection to the representational strategies of the performance, in an attempt to unpack interrelations between these theatrical walks and everyday experiences of discrimination in the Athenian urban fabric. In doing so, the article reveals a larger field of tensions and antinomies between representations and presences, vocalizations and silences, languages of the Other and mother tongues, art and ‘life’.

The article explores some ways in which Greek theatre production during the last 30 years has engaged with gender politics. Most theatre historians and critics agree that the impact of second-wave feminism was rather insubstantial in the context of Greek theatre, and despite the presence of women in fields such as acting, playwriting, set and costume design and directing, there is no trace of a collective effort to develop a tradition of feminist playwriting and theatre practice. Discussing selected works by women playwrights in the light of the reception of feminist thought in Greece from the early years of Metapolitefsi until today, my intention is to trace the different trends of feminist dramaturgies and their genealogies. The first trend refers to plays that expose and discuss issues related with the everyday experience of women and that, in their majority, adopt a realist aesthetic; the second includes women-centred works that adopt a more experimental dramatic style and use intertextuality in order to turn to history, myth or popular legends; and the third refers to the form of the monologue as a distinctive genre carrying a strong feminist dimension.

In May 2011, the National Theatre of Greece launched its autumn 2011 to spring 2013 programme season under the title ‘Ti ine i patrida mas?’ (‘What is our motherland?’) which featured works by Greek and non-Greek artists that focused on three areas: Greeks’ perceptions of themselves, non-Greeks’ views of the country and its people, and what Greece might signify today. This two-year long season can offer insight into the National’s role amidst growing socio-political and financial crises as well as a shifting theatre and performing arts landscape. This article explores whether the ‘What is our motherland?’ season marks a change in the politics, aesthetics and practices of the National Theatre in order to offer some ways of approaching the interplay between crisis, culture and nation-building in contemporary Greece. I will argue that the National’s ostensible change of attitude, inaugurated by this season, in fact constitutes a fulfilment of its institutional role, ‘a natural affiliation between theatre and public politics on a national scale’ (Kruger 1992: 6). But what deserves further critical attention is the issue of temporality as manifested in individual works during the season. In the examples considered here, I offer some ways of reading current experiences of temporality, a time ‘out of joint’ that seems to mark the tone of Greek politics and public life since 2010.

This article reflects upon a personal experience deriving from the juxtaposition of the Attis Theatre workshop that took place in Athens, in July 2015, and its socio-political context, namely the events surrounding the country’s vote on the new deal with its creditors and the mass migration from countries of west and central Asia to Greece. Focusing on the journeys between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, the ­article specifically explores different temporalities, how they emerged, how they corresponded with each other, how they clashed. Viewing the strategy developed by the workshop and its wider impact as a metaphor for an ethical stance trespassing the limits of its aesthetic context, I outline the possibility of theatre as a timespace that changes everything.

This essay represents a personal and polemical perspective that considers recent cultural and political events in order to reaffirm some of the key principles of cultural studies as a discipline. Particular attention is given to the so-called Cavafy controversy in Greece, and the essay outlines a cultural studies position in relation to it.

Crisis Aesthetics: Documenta 14 (Athens, 8 April–16 July, and Kassel, 10 June–17 September)

The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven (eds) (2015)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 324+xi pp.,

ISBN: 9780748697953, h/bk, £75.00

Koupia Kai Ftera: O Mythos Tis Odysseias Sti Logotehnia Kai Ston Kinimatografo Tou Modernismou (Wings and Oars: The Myth of the Odyssey in Modernist Literature and Film), Maria Oikonomou (2016)

Athens: Nefeli, 351 pp., ISBN: 9789605041564, p/bk, €21.50