a piece with a strange charm : elenit by euripides laskaridis

before the end of 2019, i met a new name in performing arts: euripides laskaridis. besides following the artists i know and love, i enjoy discovering new artists i haven’t known before. however, only a few of the shows, which i watched with hope and anticipation by artists whom i did not know before, affects me. i watched works of many artists that i had not known before at the festivals i attended in 2019 but i did not come across a name that appealed to my heart and aroused the desire to follow until my last trip to athens. 

when i went to athens to watch the last performances of dimitris papaioannou's the great tamer at the end of november 2019, one of my evenings was free and there was the world premiere of elenit, the new piece by euripides laskaridis, one of the former performers of papaioannou. i can say that on my trip to athens i witnessed the death of one work and the birth of another as inspired by papaioannou's description of these last performances of the great tamer, as "a funeral" in my interview with him. when i watch the two one after another, it was impossible not to notice the correlation between the thin yellow metal paper that the performer tries to keep in the air by blowing upwards in the last scene of the great tamer, which exhales its last breath; and the thin white corrugated metal paper that rips through the darkness and silence by means of flashing lights and harsh sudden noises in the first scene of elenit of which it starts to take its first breath. the great tamer is the distilled maturity work of a 55-year-old master who has been producing since the age of 18, whilst elenit is a young artist's dynamic and reckless work with a strange charm despite its burrs. 

in elenit; the princess of las meninas meets tyrannosaurus rex of jurassic park, dorothy of the wizard of oz meets officers of kafka's the trial, burlesque meets club culture, kafkaesque meets grotesque in a greek landscape marked by the nike of samotrace and a huge wind turbine full of garbage beneath where corrugated boards, which are widely used as a roof cover and wall material in the poorly-built environments, sometimes as a thin shiny metal floating in the air like a small and thin paper, sometimes as large pieces to set up spaces, sometimes as in the form of transparent yellow plastic turns into ancient greek columns.

laskaridis himself portrays the main figure who has aristocratic associations and looks like inspired by a mixture of the princess in velazquez's painting las meninas, the venus of botticelli, marie antoinette and madonna. it is a disproportionate and ugly, almost freaky, grotesque creature with a prosthetic nose, a height that is much taller than a normal person, and a voluminous body. however, it is awfully funny and cute with its gestures, expressions, looks, stance, and movements. although it speaks gibberish (a language made of meaningless words), our ears catch some english and greek words here and there. 

in the first scene; we are teleported to a planet in space, possibly to the earth, with the small corrugated metal board that is instantly and sharply illuminated by lightning bolts in total darkness. the creature i described above is the first thing we come across. in the following moments appears a family, which is obedient and dark and with no identity, wearing identical head masks, resembling kafka’s public officers, and then emerges a dinosaur. the creature and the dinosaur enter a contest with their ugly voices. the scene is suddenly interrupted and club music starts to play. there are performers in dark clothes, similar to kôken’s of arianne mnouchkine, changing scenes and doing illusions, but these have long rat tails. a dj plays live music on the upper elevation at the back of the stage. then suddenly he cuts the music, jumps on his skateboard, and enters the forestage. the girl, who resembles dorothy of the wizard of oz and the snow white of walt disney, faints whenever she sees the big plastic bale and immediately falls on it with her upper body. once in a while, the kafkaesque family holds hands and dances in a circle similar to a pagan or folk dance. the halo made of stars, which surrounds above virgin mary’s head as we are used to seeing in most of her depictions, now surrounds the creature with halos of two different sizes, but made of light bulbs instead.

it looks like a meaningless, topsy-turvy and chaotic mass when the scenes are lined up like this one after the other, but surprisingly it is not like that at all: i neither got lost nor bored while watching it, and despite the intense use of effects, lighting and music, for some reason none of them felt too much. laskaridis has managed, with a strange skill, to produce gold like an alchemist from all kinds of materials he threw into his cauldron. 

laskaridis studied theater (acting in athens, directing in new york), was a performer in some of papaioannou's works (in 2 and nowhere). he worked with robert wilson and spent three months in 2016 with lemi ponifasio thanks to the scholarship of pina bausch foundation. he started to stage his own works by establishing his company osmosis in 2009.

elenit, which premiered on the 28th november 2019 at onassis stegi, is the last piece of a trilogy. the previous episodes are the solo piece relic (2015) and the duo piece titans (2017). i hope i can catch these two pieces of his somewhere on the planet earth when the pandemic is over and theatres are open again since i enjoyed elenit a lot.