PERFORMATIVE
READINGS
FOR THE PUBLIC
PRESENCE
OF EXCLUDED
SOCIAL GROUPS A PROJECT WITH
4 SEPARATE PERFORMANCES
Medea. Photo by Vaso Michalopoulou & Lucia Liberi Oreopoulou
Medea. Photo by Vaso Michalopoulou & Lucia Liberi Oreopoulou
Medea. Photo by Nikos Mavrakis
Medea. Photo by Vaso Michalopoulou & Lucia Liberi Oreopoulou
Ajax. Photo by Melanie Varnavidou
The Persians. Photo by Eva Νikiforou
The Bacchae.

PERFORMATIVE READINGS FOR THE PUBLIC PRESENCE OF EXCLUDED SOCIAL GROUPS 

This event is part of a project that is being implemented and concerns the public presence of excluded social groups (prisoners, recipients of mental health services, refugees, Roma, LGBTQ+, etc.), as examples of all types of exclusion in everyday life, within the context of our post-modernist world. The aim of such a public presence is neither to teach, nor to heal, nor to create a new hegemony, but it aims at the mutual understanding of the general Other. To this end, a Poetic process is proposed; a general field of artwork production, where heterogeneous institutions (“exclusion”, “regularity”), can be found in a common non-assimilative field. A field that accepts the differences as non-hierarchical, but equivalent, based only on the functional layout of the roles of the poetic text. This field is determined by a minimum presentation (performative reading), the high and universal art of the theatrical text (ancient or newer), which takes place in a space which is also of high and universal art (archaeological sites and modern public spaces). This kind of poetic process, in terms of ethics and aesthetics, may, albeit temporarily, achieve a sign of coexistence between the heterogeneous social groups. As a work of art, first, and ultimately as an intellectual and empirical bridge of communication. This type of initiative, establishes the different identity of each project, even temporarily. It can set up a new “species” of works of art, as events of truth; minimal and vulnerable. Such a poetic process, implies mutual but autonomous transformation, exchange or mere symbiosis.
Credits
Concept, texts and performative proceedings: Filippos Oraiopoulos Production: TooFarEast Productions,  Nikos Mavrakis The Informal Studio of NeoPoetics is composed by: Alexis Dallas, Meropi Zavlari, Vasiliki Roditi, Sophia Dona, Stathoula Palivou, Filippos Oraiopoulos. Any member can initiate the production of urban performative events. None of its members are sponsored by any sources for these performative readings.

MEDEA – FONISSA

Medea in Drag, the first drag show ever presented on an archaeological site in Greece

The tragedy of Medea is not just a conflict between “brutality” and “civilisation”. It is a battle, an act of resistance between the social and cultural performative configuration processes of the whole spectrum of gender in the context of the exercise of authority. From a contemporary point of view, it is a conflict between the extended multiplicity of genders that Medea contains in her archetypal version and the forms of power from which the existence of pluralism is excluded.
Credits
Concept, texts and performative proceedings: The Informal Studio of NeoPoetics, Alexis Dalas, Sofia Dona, Vasiliki Roditi, Stathoula Palivou  Directed by: Themis Theocharoglou Production: TooFarEast Productions   Drag Queens performing in the project: Holly Grace, Gorgina, Socrates, Mitsi Lou, Lala Kolopi

PERSAE

The Persians of Aeschylus is a universal text, an apology for the evils of war, in a place of great symbolic and universal significance: the Archaeological site of Delos. An island with multiple meanings in its timeless course, sacred and free for its multicultural habitation in antiquity, today in a state of absolute non-habitation, but in the center of the Aegean, an archipelago bridge οf the current refugee crisis.
Credits
Concept, texts and performative proceedings: Filippos Oraiopoulos Dramaturgy, Director: Korina Vasiliadou Actor: Haris Pechlivanidis Readers: Eleni Michali, Falak Sher, Bilal Ahmel, Ali Qasim Production: TooFarEast Productions,  Nikos Mavrakis 

BACCHAE

If we accept that Apollo’s tradition inherited the West with the dominance of logocentrism (the absolutism of truth of speech and rationality) and by extension the eurocentrism, Dionysus, originated from the East, brought the truth of “non-rationality” of emotion and sense. It could be said that Bacchae constitutes the beginning of a genealogy, in the context of the literary tradition of Greek antiquity, as a resistance to the logocentrism and the kind of authority that implies its univocal power. Roma community, with its attitude toward life, albeit marginalised, claims its own different existence.
Credits
Concept, texts and performative proceedings: Filippos Oreopoulos  Director: Korina Vasiliadou Participants: Annoula Magka, Fenia Eliou, Marianna Batia, Petros Papazisis, Filippos Oreopoulos  Guest appearance: Eirini Kyriakou Production: TooFarEast Productions, Nikos Mavrakis  

AJAX

One of the notions that are suggested in the text of Ajax is the presence of “madness”, as an element of community’s salvation (Achaeans) and concurrently, its absence as an element of self-distraction (Ajax). Moreover, the place itself of the Aristotle’s Lyceum could be considered not just as a place of teaching the relation of speech and non-speech (in Greek the word logos has a double meaning of speech and rationality), but also a place of teaching “madness” as a performative process of artworks production [poetry implies either a happy gift of nature or a strain of madness, Aristotle, Poetics, (1455a-1455b)]
Credits
Concept, texts and performative proceedings: Filippos Oreopoulos Dramaturgy, Director: Korina Vasiliadou Performer : Klea Samanta Readers: Recipients of mental health services of Kentro Imeras and The Boarding House IASIS Ngo, Antonis Bertos, Akis Dimopoulos Production: TooFarEast Productions,  Nikos Mavrakis