The unique theatrical world of Mario Banushi
Waiting for Goodbye Lindita
(Eleni Papadaki Stage - Rex Theatre, Athens - 20 April 2024, 18:00)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Waiting for MAMI
(Onassis Stegi, Athens - 16 March 2025, 14:00)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Following the end of the pandemic period, in 2022, he garnered significant attention with his inaugural work, entitled Ragada (Stretch Marks). This was followed by Goodbye Lindita, staged in 2023 upon an invitation from the National Theatre of Greece, which played to sold-out crowds in Athens for a period of three years, while also touring the world. Invited to the Amsterdam Brandhaarden Festival in February 2024, the Madrid Festival de Otoño, Dresden and Munich in the fall, and the prestigious Adelaide Festival in Australia in February 2025, Goodbye Lindita returned from the BITEF Festival in Belgrade with awards. While Goodbye Lindita will be featured at both Wiener Festwochen and Berliner Festspiele – Performing Exiles next June, Banushi’s final instalment of his trilogy on mourning, Taverna Miresia – Mario Bella Anastasia (Restaurant of Kindness), which he has commissioned from the Athens-Epidavros Festival again in 2023, is scheduled for further performances in 2024, with a tour from Montreal to Antwerp in May and to London in June. Banushi’s recent piece, MAMI (MOTHER), which had its world premiere in Athens in February-March of this year, this time as a production by another prestigious institution in Greece, Onassis Stegi, and which also played to a sold-out crowd, raises the bar even higher: It has been invited to the Avignon Festival in July and will tour to the Barcelona-Grec Festival right after. As can be seen from this dizzying international touring schedule, Banushi has become one of the most sought-after young names in the performing arts world in recent times.
In April 2024, thanks to a combination of curiosity and luck, I had the chance to see Goodbye Lindita in Athens. I was deeply impressed by the piece where I encountered Banushi's world for the first time. So, I pushed myself and my means not to miss one of MAMI's Athens performances this year. When the 80-minute piece finished, I was blown away and didn't want to leave; I was just amazed.
In a recent interview, Banushi stated that MAMI is an addition to what he had previously thought of as a trilogy of mourning, so that these first four works can be considered as a quartet. Actually, Goodbye Lindita and MAMI have a lot in common. Firstly, both of them have a vague, dreamlike atmosphere that I would describe as 'gloomy' where real and imaginary elements are are intertwined. It is natural that the atmosphere of Goodbye Lindita is gloomy and sad because it tells the story of a family who have lost their daughter, and how they deal with this loss and mourn her in their own way In MAMI, on the contrary, there is birth. MAMI is the story of a midwife. But the emotions that pass from the stage to the audience, at least to me, are loneliness, fragility and melancholy.
Another common point of the two pieces is that they are wordless. After doing some research, I found out that Taverna Miresia is also wordless.. Banushi prefers to construct his narratives not with words, but with images, because since his childhood he has been fascinated by the stories that a picture or a drawing can tell without using words. Now he only creates pictures on stage to reveal the emotions he wants to tell and to convey them to his audience.
Light plays a dominant role in Banushi's simple and poetic images. In addition to creating the atmosphere, light is also an element that Banushi skilfully uses to realise the play of images, which he often uses both as a narrative and as a transitional technique between scenes.
Other important elements of Banushi's narrative of moving paintings are gestures and - not mimes, but especially - gazes. In his pieces, which move slowly in terms of speed, it is possible for the viewer to construct the narrative in his mind by simply following the gaze, which is given time to digest, and to interpret the relationships and situations between the people on the stage. In terms of gestures being the main element in creating meaning, MAMI, rather than Goodbye Lindita, winks at dance theatre with its more predominant use of the body and movements. It is not for nothing that Dimitris Papaioannou is mentioned when MAMI is mentioned in the Greek press. Of course, one of its key figures is Angeliki Stellatou, co-founder of the legendary Edafos troupe together with Papaioannou.
Another difference between the visual worlds of Goodbye Lindita and MAMI is that the former has folkloric tones, while the latter has reduced these references. Perhaps one should look at Taverna Miresia to bridge the gap between the two... In the folkloric world of Goodbye Lindita, inspired by Balkan mourning and funeral ceremonies, one can find traces of Sergei Parajanov's use of Georgian and Armenian folklore. Banushi stated in an interview that he had not known Parajanov before conceiving this piece.
A third similarity between the two pieces is that at some point Banushi appears on stage from the audience and takes part in the action on stage. When I see his name in the cast of Taverna Miresia, I realise that this is one of the integral features of Banushi's world. Since all of his work is related to or inspired by his own experiences and family, his choice to appear on stage for a short time at some point in the show and become involved in the story is very natural and not at all strange, but also interesting because I have never seen such a choice of mise-en-scene before. Banushi's sudden appearance on stage from the audience positions the show in an intermediate space between reality and representation, here and there, then and now; the transformation of an audience member into a performer, in a way intervening on stage, gives the work a meta character. But Banushi's way of doing this is not emphasised and underlined; it is calm, unhurried and in its natural flow...
Banushi was inspired by his mother in Ragada, by the sudden death of his stepmother in Goodbye Lindita, by his father, rather by the absence of his father in his home life in Albania, where he lived until he was six, in Taverna Miresia, and by his mother's profession as a midwife in MAMI. But there is not only one woman/mother in MAMI; there is an old woman in a white nightdress, a young pregnant woman, a young girl on a bicycle, a young woman. There is also a young man looking after the old woman, caring for her, cuddling her, putting her to bed, cleaning her nappy. The young man may be the woman's grandson or a nurse. But in another scene, the young man who first flirts with the young woman and then marries her is the same person.
It is conceivable that the women are all different ages/states of the same person. Thus, we are confronted with a non-linear narrative with undefined characters and, as I mentioned before, it is also without words. As such, each spectator can read/see their own story, a story whose structure they can construct themselves in this puzzle. Furthermore, Banushi has left the scenography open to association in order to make this possible. The stage area in twilight is generally empty; there is only a one-room flat-roofed house with a window and a door (a house with the most basic features of children's drawings, the only thing missing is a roof with a smoking chimney) and a tall lamppost. I couldn't see the ground from where I was sitting, but I think it was covered with earth. It was like a place on the edge of a city, on the border where the city has turned into the countryside, or the desolate and eerie set of one of David Lynch's surreal films.
While Goodbye Lindita takes place in the living room of a house and Taverna Miresia in the bathroom, i.e. Banushi's previous pieces focused on interior spaces, the use of exterior/empty space in MAMI proves that Banushi can also skilfully control the empty and unrestricted space of the stage. Like the dreamy atmospheres of Pina Bausch’s pieces, which she cultivates in spaces and objects that the audience recognises and knows from their everyday lives, he constructs a surreal, supernatural narrative in everyday settings, inspired by his personal past, but easily recognisable in collective memory.
Applauding Goodbye Lindita
(Eleni Papadaki Stage-Rex Theatre, Athens - 20 April 2024)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Applauding MAMI
(Onassis Stegi, Athens - 16 March 2025)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
Mario Banushi's language, characterised by great sensitivity and a maturity inversely proportional to his age of 27, is very unique and original, even if it recalls Parajanov, Papaioannou, Romeo Castellucci, Pina Bausch or Lynch. Although his world, in which smells, textures, colours and corporeality are important components, and in which a deep symbolism plays an important role, as well as many of the things mentioned above, based on his personal past, experiences and environment, it appeals sensually to our collective subconscious, to the everyday and the commonplace, and thus finds its counterpart in the audience. Otherwise, neither the audience in Athens nor festival directors around the world would have shown such interest in his work. So much so that, although it was not included in the programme of this year's Venice Theatre Biennale, its newly appointed director, the famous actor Willem Dafoe, visited Athens last March just to attend MAMI. It is not necessary to be a clairvoyant to say that interest in Banushi will increase even more after the performances of MAMI at this year's Avignon Festival, introduced by its artistic director Tiago Rodrigues with these words: "I believe that his work will be one of the greatest discoveries of this Festival”. Thus, Mario Banushi's name will be heard more and more on the stages of the world in the coming years...
Applauding MAMI
(Onassis Stegi, Athens - 16 March 2025, 14:00)
© Mehmet Kerem Özel
[The Turkish version of this article was published in Tiyatro Tiyatro Dergisi.]
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