Fevgada, emeis kai oi Ellhnes

What is the culture of the crisis? Today is culture produced or is it just recycled scraps of culture? Are we foreigners in our own country? Which are the responsibilities of the past and the possibilities for the future in a present like this?

“Bijoux de kant” offers the scenery of the production “Culture: a cosmic tragedy” to the “Theros” Theatre Company and the production “Fevgada, Emeis kai oi Ellhnes”, a work in progress which was first presented in May 2013.

Based on the second collection of poems by George Prevedourakis, “Kleftiko”, and on texts and articles by Dimitris Dimitriades, the production explores a lack of culture as a possible root cause of the crisis and presents Greece as a country which constantly “walks away” from itself and from its people. How Greek can we be when Greece itself is not Greece anymore but a “flyaway”?

^{*Electra Ellinikioti
Born in Athens in 1987, she studied acting at the Theodosiadis Drama School and graduated with distinction. She learned the Viewpoints technique and the Tadeshi Suzuki method with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company in New York. She has followed seminars by Nikita Milivojevic, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Atsushi Takenouchi and others. She has directed the following productions: “Peftei h nichta sthn Athina” (2012, Vrissaki), “To Hmeroma ths Stringlas” (2012-2013-Epi Kolono), “To Kleftiko, Emeis kai oi Ellhnes” (2013, Bob Theatre Festival, Bios Basement) and Sarah Kane’s “Laxtaro” (2013, Neos Cosmos Theatre, lower level).}

Note from the director:
The title was born from the combination of ‘Fevgada’ with the heroic anti-Greek poem “To Kleftiko”, by George Prevedourakis, and the article “The Greeks and us’ by Dimitris Dimitriades.

The picture is now crystal clear. The provocative article by Dimitriades, to negate all that we are, to deny an identity which impinges us and keeps us stuck in the mud, is applied, 13 years later, by Prevedourakis via the ultimately dangerous form of self-sacrifice. Prevedourakis “checks-out” and offers himself to revolution, a revolution which he knows, however, is rebellious. Not being able to live within the “slavery” which the era and the country has forced upon his generation, he runs away to seek asylum in the mountains of spiritual loneliness. From there, with a few kindred “klephtes and armatoloi” (Giannis, Eleni, Nikos, Thomas) begins a war for freedom where they are not only  massacred themselves by their “conquerors” but  convicted to fighting as outcasts, marginalized by the “lords of the nation”. They were however reconciled with this solitary life of loneliness  which is characteristic to all those who do not settle but continue to rise up spiritually.

Prevedourakis the “klephtis” sends his own “Kleftiko” into exile, on the “flight” of revolution, with a small amount of nostalgia for the “spiritual” homeland he was to say goodbye to along with most of his generation, which would have to be left behind, bereft and broken. The most perilous thing about Prevedourakis’ “heroic exodus” was the way in which he must kill his spiritual fathers, his own beliefs and himself. He addresses self-sacrifice as a necessity, becoming the example he is trying to set. He is no longer Greek, he is a klephtis. He cannot be Greek since Greece – his Greece – is enslaved. If he remained Greek, he would also be a slave. In such a way he founded his own Greece, “Fevgada”, which, as the name suggests, also leaves him, also betrays him and from which he too is constantly distanced. He is in self-exile in order to be redefined.

13 years later, with “Kleftiko”, Prevedourakis completes Dimitriades’ phenomenally impractical theoretical eschatological exhortation: Prevedourakis is no longer Greek and Greece does not belong to him. He arms himself and rises up against that which defines itself by self-appointment and without effort, as Greece today. It was he who swam in the contaminated “Greek seas”, he who gazed upon the “giant posters”, he who listened to the “speechless raving on the television”.  He then vomited. After that he wrote “Kleftiko”.

We noticed that the theatre company “Theros”, with the production “Fevgada, Emeis ki oi Ellhnes”, comes to grips with the issue of culture and its crisis in the same way that “bijoux de kant” did with the production “Culture: a cosmic tragedy”. At this time culture is ailing, degenerating, mixing significance with rubbish. This realization prompted “bijoux de kant” to offer its sets to the “Theros” theatre company hoping that the latter will be able to use this material in a different way. In the event that this proves to be a disaster, we hope it will be a huge disaster.