This Duo of Eclectic Stage Works, Born in Greece, Gears Up for European Tango
The choreographer of Athens’ Olympic opening ceremony draws dark inspiration from director Ridley Scott while Euripides Laskarides harnesses the energy of an ancient gem.
Even the most ravenous of culture vultures sometimes find things like modern dance to be akin to cod liver oil: something less to be enjoyed than endured in the vague hope that it might provide a dose of intellectual nourishment. In that respect Dimitris Papaioannou’s somewhat nightmarish show “Ink” gives some food for thought.
Mr. Papaioannou is best-known internationally as the choreographer of Greece’s Olympic opening ceremony in 2004. The tallish sexagenarian is also the artist in residence at the gleaming Megaron Athens Concert Hall, which is where I saw the show before it headed to its upcoming final run at Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville.
The show is a particularly tortuous form of performance art. The fabled French venue’s description sums it up as “two men, two bodies, two ages, an octopus, and a newborn baby.” Add to that a garden hose. Set somewhere “between the apocalypse and eroticism is the struggle between the old and the new, between nature and culture.”
Whether from one of the dreariest mise en scènes this correspondent has ever seen Mr. Papaioannou truly succeeds in having “daringly devised a torrential metaphor for existence” is hard to say. The humorless spectacle opens with a naked man wriggling in a sort of transparent bubble not so much across the stage as underneath it, with the black-clad Mr. Papaioannou alternately attempting to lasso his quarry for reasons unspecified and hose him down. One doesn’t necessarily want to be in the front row for this.
What ensues is a sort of bleak procession of ideas about possession, lust, and your basic existential despair — “like last year with my ex-girlfriend” my theater companion snickered afterward.
Dark stuff. The creator of this dispiriting “play for two” says he was inspired by director Ridley Scott’s seminal space horror film “Alien,” but “Ink” doesn’t exactly feel derivative. The spartan use of music and dearth of color does create a sense of impending doom but instead of a space ship infested by half-mechanized monsters it is just two fellows seemingly incapable of managing even the most basic human communication.
A less lugubrious and in places bewitching work is “Lapis Lazuli.” It also had its genesis at Athens. This unclassifiable work premiered on the main stage of the Onassis Foundation, where I saw the final show before the production took off for other stops around the Continent. Its young director, Euripedes Laskarides, has been called a creator of “anarchic physical theater” and that description fits the bill — this is theater of the absurd with strobe lights, fake gunshots, and a luminous denouement that channels the spirit of Dionysus with the hyperkinetic dazzle of a Lady Gaga video.
There is dialogue, and it is in English, but for most part none of it is indiscernible. Mr. Laskarides has said that he likes to “avoid using speech, mainly to allow meaning to roam free. Therefore, a certain kind of indecipherable speech often infiltrates the work, together with other elements such as light, objects, music, the movement of bodies, objects, lights, and even sounds.”
For brevity’s sake I will not attempt to decode the middle section of the show, which involves a Brothers Grimm-effect wolf-man (with a soupçon of eyeshadow) chasing a distressed damsel around the stage, until the seemingly wicked beast purloins the lady’s lime green nightgown and is pursued in turn.
Before veering too far in the direction of uncontained chaos or mere farce, she breaks out into a moody tango with a male dancer that comes out of left field and is more sublime for it. Both partners don masks with faintly feline features as if to presage the mystery of a following scene in which a hunk of glowing lapis lazuli stone, or what appears to be one — is it actually a headdress? — figures prominently.
Experimental theater is less given to giving audiences a rousing grand finale than Broadway productions, underpinned as they are by plot rather than pure expression. Here, though, there is a big finish: Through some deft staging the scene pivots from nightmare/dark to “Lion King”/exuberant.
A giant glowing seahorse descends and our former wolf man re-emerges as a magisterial Madonna-type figure, sporting a kind of technicolor dreamcoat as he repeats, mantra-like, “It’s a difficult, difficult life…but it’s a beautiful, beautiful show.”
That encapsulates where much of Europe is right now, and who knows in what direction it is careening — or is it easier not to look? In the meantime , bring on the glowing seahorses.