tabula rasa for unlimited imagination: the great tamer by dimitris papaioannou

photo: mehmet kerem özel 

when we enter the auditorium, this scene welcomes us: a pitch-black landscape of low heights; in front, a man in a pitch-black suit but with bare feet is lying. there is a pair of pitch-black boots just in front of him. while we are taking our seats, he first opens his eyes and then puts his arms under his head as if gazing at the sky.
while the lights of the auditorium are fading, he gets up and puts the boots on; he walks to upper stage right near a one-legged round stool. first he takes the boots off, then his clothes; he is left totally naked. while gazing at us, he walks to center stage, turns one of the black panels over and lies on the cream-colored side of it.
a little while later, a man in a black suit approaches him from upper stage right with a white sheet in his hand. he covers him entirely with it with two sharp, decisive arm movements.
a little while after he retreats, a second man in black suit enters lower stage right. he approaches the man lying on the panel, lifts a panel from the ground and lets it fall towards the reclining man. the wind from the panel falling with its own weight blows the sheet off of the reclining man on the other side and once again leaves him totally naked. while the second man exits the stage, the first one enters to cover the body again. this vicious circle continues for a while…

the pitch-black landscape of dimitris papaioannou's last piece "the great tamer" could be the slope of a volcano or the black sand beach of santorini island, the planet of the little prince or somewhere on the moon. when the piece continues, we realize that this rectangular area is not a referential place cut out of those assumed above. this area is a whole by itself. it is a ‘place’ on its own, since the players could fall off of it and some objects are dropped or placed in front of it. this place is a ‘nowhere.’

this nowhere is used as a tabula rasa throughout the piece for the sake of the human who could be free solely by becoming independent of his roots. however, on the other hand, it is actually impossible to free oneself from one’s roots. to become free is not possible by refusing and cutting off roots, it is only possible by accepting and converting them, by changing and widening one’s habitual point of view, by imagining. maybe that is why in the onward scene the young man who puts on the boots could not move first because they have roots planted in the ground which prevent him. he cannot proceed unless he pulls and rescues the boots from the ground by doing a handstand. in a further scene, he survived with the rooted boots on his feet only by flying through the air.

the subterranean nowhere shelters infinite goodness; it is fertile, deeply rooted. this nowhere conceives many things: the first human, the first seed, the first offspring, the first harvest, the first fountain and many surprises.
whenever this nowhere is excavated the man gets out, the woman gets out, limbs independent of the bodies get out. all of them are alive; they are longing to be completed, to be one, to be a whole. they are trying to unite, to hold on to life. this nowhere inevitably shelters skeletons in its bosom; the dead, death and the past; rituals and feasts.
in this nowhere there are not only mythological creatures, but also astronauts; there are gods who resemble humans, there are fragile folks, there are figures lost and found in the shadows, and there are tracksuited mortals passing time in a puddle of water.

papaioannou reuses materials, situations, techniques from his previous works in order to convert them into new meanings.
. the single panel from 2013 dated “primal matter” is multiplied in “the great tamer" not only for creating illusion by playing with front-back and upper-below coordinates, but also for using its sound, rubbing it against the ground. in one scene that rubbing of the panels against the ground imitates the sound of the ocean waves hitting a coast. at an arid ‘nowhere’ where water could only survive in a well-like hole, this ocean created by the sound seems like a fata morgana.
. the thin plaster from 2014 dated “still life,” which was covered layer by layer in thick spongy panel and which crumbles every time the panel gets hit, becomes a shell restoring and protecting the broken bones of the human body. the man who one scene before fell into the void at the back of the ‘nowhere’ returns with his whole body encased; another man frees him from the plaster suit by breaking it with his own body.
. the ground from under which in only one scene of 2015 dated “origins” the male dancers sprang by spilling earthly dust, is transformed into a permeable surface throughout the whole “the great tamer.” papaioannou turns the underground into a second space which is competing with the one above. he multiplies the meanings of the ground by letting things and beings get or be pulled out of it, be buried or crammed into it.

"the great tamer" seems to tell us the story of the human who tries to find oneself by ways of reaching for the beyond, by reaching forth through one’s imagination.
"the great tamer" seems to tell us that the place where the human arrives to discover the black, wide emptiness called space at the end of travelling great distances is one’s own imagination, one’s own mind, one’s own intelligence.
when the astronauts arrive at this pitch black nowhere, maybe that is why the objects, the figures and the creatures jumping out of paintings of goya's, cranach's, rembrandt's, el greco's and dutch renaissance masters appear in front of them; maybe that is why situations quoting the films of chaplin, kubrick and others meet them; maybe that is why fields of wheat, gods of fertility and mythological creatures come across them.
humans create and design the world around them in their own imagination; and the furthest distance s/he could cover is limited to one’s phantasy.

"the great tamer" is a breathtaking journey between birth and death, between life and death; the striving of the human to keep the hidden essence in one’s body alive and awake; by knowing and waiting for death, by standing against death, but when it comes to that also by submitting to death. 

dimitris papaioannou paints us a world which may be imagined and tamed by the man who stared at the sky, lying on nowhere, in the first scene of the piece. that man, who may be papaioannou’s alter-ego , like an alchemist, alters the materials at his disposal, namely objects, bodies and space, by injecting a more or less but by all means certain dose of irony into all scenes; without neglecting to draw attention to that the man is falling, time is passing but the memory does not vanish.