To keep in mind or just forget? Blitz respond to our questions and take us to a journey through their Galaxy

By Achilleas Kourias

We have been used to see theatre through their subversive eyes and we are not surprised to hear similarly subversive, though always interesting responses. Blitz members talked to mcf.gr for their new production, the performance entitled Galaxy that is being presented at Michael Cacoyannis Foundation until May 29th. They take a chance to remember faces, ideas, movements or things of the past that might have been forgotten but, certainly shaped what we live in today They claim that they attempt a conscious attack against theatre and its norms, while we can only add that every single triumph of them takes place in favor of the artistic outcome that we all have the opportunity to enjoy.

How Blitz members define their own Galaxy? Could someone find correspondence to his or her own Galaxy or you probably share the opinion that the orbits of our individual Galaxies are finally asymptotical?

Galaxy is a performance with persons, objects, movements, ideas, expressions, theories that have been faded, passed away. However, the fact that we are born in history, that the world exists before us, make us find its references and events. Some of the things we experience concern just us or they reflect just our own taste and aesthetics, some others, however, concern entire humanity. We are a blend of public ideologies and private desires. Each ones path is lonely; however we all walk in the same lane.

If then we would ask every single member of the team to state a person, a thing, a notion or even a word, maybe the first that everyone comes up with, but at the same time the most important, in order to compose the mosaic of your Galaxy, what would that be and why?

Hot Monogamy!

The journey back to the dawn of human history seems to have similarities with a dive to the human unconscious itself. What really Blitz discovered during this deep dive?

When somebody looks onto their lives of all those people who are mentioned in the performance, when reconsiders theories and notions that have faded or have been outreached, then understands with what materials reality is built. We have been lead to the point we are nowadays thanks to the things that have proceeded, we live in their meaning. Everyones life is a blend made out of ugliness and beauty, dreams and disappointment, out of knowledge and ignorance, we all know how this journey ends. Death is what offers meaning to our lives as well as to the moments we live, hence it is always important someone to surpass disappointment and try for his or her personal happiness, which certainly has nothing to do with money or possessions but only with the shared contact, with what the notion itself describes, the emotionally loaded and alienated from the use, word of love. Unfortunately or fortunately this is the only antidote that human has against death.

What feelings are created to the production members on one hand and on the other hand to the audience of the performance when facing moments or personalities throughout history that nowadays have been suspended to the sphere of oblivion? Maybe nostalgia, anger or even relief?

The performers feelings since they are enacted do not always identify with the ones of the audience although almost every play seeks of communion. The emotional burden of the performance is influential and has various and often controversial directions due to the fact that we do not let a feeling to dominate on our performance. There are moments of nostalgia, funny moments, moments of compassion. We tend to combine tragic with comic because we do not want performance to have just one dominant feeling, just like it happens in life.

Hearing Blitz team, most of us perceive a method of collective experimentation on theatrical act as well as subversive approach of its norms. As far as this performance is concerned, it seems to happen both. Could you disclose for us the process of conception, creation as well as function of Galaxy as theatrical happening?

We have worked on the performances procedure during a rehearsal we had for Faust in National Theatre, we liked the outcome, but the time limitation we had and the consequence of the plays proceedings didnt allow us to integrate it in the plays dramaturgy. We reverted to this idea when we participated in Low Budget Festival and realized that, what was going on was really relevant to us aesthetically as well as conceptually, following keeping on working it we undertook further processing for the concept as well as the performances rhythm. We liked the simplicity of the concept and the fact that as far as the performance goes on a new meaning constantly emerges. We consciously attack theatre in order to expand its language, its form and simultaneously our involvement into this, while at the same time our artistic freedom which is unquestionable. In every performance we try to expand the potentialities of our language, thats why no performance of ours is similar to the previous one. From Katerini rooms to the stage of Guns!Guns!Guns!, then to the pedestrian of Cinemascope and now to the simplicity of Galaxy. Every play for us is an adventure that pertains form, plays content, how we see reality all around us, and how our lives are these days. This is how it is.

We invite us to perceive your performance as a society of actors and spectators- that owes to remember in order to understand Do reality, personal and collective, being built with materials coming from the fields of memory or on the contrary oblivion is what shapes things? What is finally demanded from everyone in order to understand? Remember or forget?

Memory is a fundamental brain function that helps you survive. Without it no imagination, rational thought or emotion can exist, without it our lifes events would be ephemeral appearances of persons and things which would have no unity. However, someone has to be taught how to forget as well. You always have to keep in mind that you are alive, a moving controversy, you have to forget your wounds and the disappointment you have been given by the people around you. If you want to fall in love again you have to forget that there is love justice it never existed!

See more details for the performance GALAXY with a click here