Serenity in Chaos - Transverse Orientation by Dimitris Papaioannou

For this article, that consists of sort of a play within itself, Dimitris Papaioannou selected and sent to the authors six images, previously not shared with the press, particularly for this article, from Transverse Orientation that the authors have watched together two nights in a row, on the evenings of October 10-11, in Plovdiv, within the scope of One Dance Week 2021. The authors then selected five images each and wrote down their recollections and impressions independently of each other. Just as Papaioannou does, for all his works, inviting a trusted friend for final rehearsals to give a title to the work, the authors invited choreographer/dancer Gizem Bilgen to give a title to this article.

(Left aligned bold text by Mehmet Kerem Özel. Right aligned normal text by Ayşe Draz)

Black orb-headed creatures that make vaguely mechanical noises; they're cute, they're happy. They are easily distracted, they can easily get involved in a game, but they can easily lose themselves in the loop of that game. They open Transverse Orientation; a light, carefree, enjoyable start. 

In a scene far ahead, we will cheer again as we watch naked people playing like innocent children; and their cheerful screams and the joy they get from the game they are playing will make us happy and laugh. We will laugh and be happy, but even in the game played and enjoyed there is something strange, wrong, difficult, contradictory: trying to go backwards on large stone-like cubes by staying in balance. Trying to stay in balance, that momentary balance, that moment... A way of cheering that takes the risk of falling and failure… 

Transverse Orientation consists of 105 minutes of simple and pure psychic states such as happiness, grief, joy, love, hope, despair, tranquility, distress, enthusiasm, delight, majesty, astonishment, violence, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in succession, sometimes focusing on a single situation or on a single point and sometimes dispersing it on stage in multiple ways. It is a collage show, a carnival-like parade, a fairground.

An empty horizontal wall on which is a flickering fluorescent lamp, scratching the ears with its buzz. Soon enter the stage creatures with their black outfits, huge shoes and tiny ball-shaped heads. We might be in a spy movie or in the office of aliens, or perhaps in the world of figures who, like a group of clumsy clowns with their movement quality, remind one of the fantasy world of modernism that was triggered by the two world wars and their brutality, recently resurrected with the advent of the pandemic, or in the re-enactment of an unknown but newly discovered painting by Magritte. Not any music coming from the outside, but the sounds of the objects and the bodies in space (that of the shoes, the flickering fluorescent lamp …) determine the atmosphere. We are in an uncanny world since everything is so familiar yet so foreign. Maybe this is the beginning of a nightmare, maybe that of a fun adventure...

 

What a nightmare is this; causing beads of sweat, fluttering, squirming? Is it that of a diver who wants to be a merboy but couldn't? Or that of the young man whose balls were plucked off? Maybe it is a collective nightmare in which humanity tries to gain control of a potency, a power, or a danger that has the potential to get out of hand at any moment. Or maybe it is the nightmare of the lonely and helpless human being who has fallen into her/his own trap, trapped in her/his own snare, where the object s/he knows the most, her/his bed, has turned into the trap... It is certain that there is a struggling humanity on the stage. There is a difficulty in everything that is constantly tried to be done. Everything, every effort is constantly interrupted, repeated over and over again; stumbled upon difficulties, tried again, stumbled again; what has been structured so far is immediately destroyed. There is more confusion than order, there is more chaos more than cosmos, there is failure and destruction without success or creation. There is struggle, not giving up, but it always ends in defeat. 

There is a door; human beings and figures come out of that door, human beings and figures disappear from that door. Countless stones also come out of that door. That door is like a hole, a mouth, an anus, that vomits stones, poops stones. 

Is it possible to interpret a show that was created and started to be presented during the pandemic independently of this period that we are still going through and cannot get rid of? I don't think so… It is as if the spirit of the epidemic period permeated Transverse Orientation.

We are in the universe of a dark circus. Half-animal half-human creatures; body parts that are dismembered and reassembled in unusual ways; genitals made out of ladders; black suits in contrast to the nudity; some acrobatic tricks; illusions created by different materials; at times the body's capabilities and at others its deformation which catch the eye; various focal points simultaneously present on the stage; sometimes one focus overshadowing the others in order to facilitate transitions, sometimes all of them gaining momentum at once; entrances and exits; walls and doors; hoops and ladders; a circus of bodies, materials, forms, lights and shadows, colors and contrasts...

For me, Dimitris Papaioannou is a “special” master of blindfolds. He is special because his is different from the usual blindfolding styles. He doesn't blindfold me while he's doing his tricks, he doesn't hide the way his tricks are done. The interesting thing is that he can still deceive me; the fact that he can doubly amaze me by making me watch the illusion itself on the one hand and how it is made on the other. Papaioannou is always playing with my perception; leaves me in a dilemma. Every moment my perception shifts once to the created illusion, once to those who create it. One moment I lose myself in the imagination, the next I return to reality.

Another part of Papaioannou's mastery is that he creates the aesthetics of this simultaneous duality, the synchronicity of imagination and reality, on the stage. The matador wrestling with the bull has not a sword but a light in his hand, he is a performer, that bull is a puppet; they both belong to the stage, a space of imagination but also a space of reality. The tongue that licks the neck of a naked man, that sometimes drinks from a bucket, is not the tongue of a bull, but the hand of a performer. That bull has not four legs, it is sometimes eight-, sometimes multi-legged. And although my eyes are witnessing that that bull can barely be restrained by four or five men, it is never being forgotten to my mind that it is actually a puppet.

A bull from Dimitris Papaioannou's universe of images that is pregnant with rich associations and in constant transformation ... an animal that must be killed or tamed by humans in order to co-exist with them, but whose 'potency' is imitated by 'men'... a symbol of sexual power... two different species that when they make love instead of war, would give birth to or transform into the Minotaur with a bull’s head and a human body... a stage temporality unraveling slowly but surely, in fact transforming instantly though at times might even be challenging the audiences’ patience with its apparent stasis, allowing the audience to watch and enjoy each image; accommodating occasional humorous moments, ...and a structure revealing how the imagery on the stage is constructed by the performers and the designers, constantly reminding us of the mind that has imagined and designed the whole by bringing all the pieces together...

That cross-line created by light divides the background-wall at every moment of the show. The fluorescent lamp, which is mounted on the right of that wall, does not light properly; it gets stuck, it sizzles, after a while it completely falls off and hangs loose. 

A ladder leans against the wall to reach the fluorescent. Thanks to the lighting design, the staircase itself and its shadow are intermingled, blending with each other. Not only that staircase, but all the illuminated figures, dark silhouettes and their shadows that are moving, standing and flowing on the stage, intermingle, overlapping and accumulating layer by layer. Sometimes a huge round white spotlight is cast on some figures, sometimes the spotlight moved by another figure travels the stage, animating the shadows, blurring their boundaries. It is difficult to realize the situation of the figures on the stage in terms of their ratios to their surroundings and to each other. Sometimes a piece of material laid on the floor reflects, multiplies, and breaks up the light. There are constant contradictions on stage throughout the show. The concepts of time and place are always blurred. As a spectator it is impossible to find the direction, the way, to orientate oneself; disappearing is immanent to the work.

What if the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam was not an apple, but a sea urchin that covers – and indeed alludes to – Eve's genitals… aphrodisiac eggs inside a prickly outer shell… what if the chemical formula of air was H₂O... that would compel us to change the nature of our movements... what if the scuba-diver instead of encountering a mermaid under water, would transform himself into a merboy... a queer object of desire that has kept up with the zeitgeist... what if a performer’s hand would become the bull’s tongue licking the water… the 'splashing' of the water becoming the new sound design... what if Botticelli's Venus would come out naked from the water and lay down on a bull… creating a contrast between the whiteness of her naked body and the black skin of the bull...

Long, lengthy, time-stretching, mind-blowing plans that focus on a single situation; those that harbor calm within them but also storms. A naked woman walking slowly from one side to the stage with the help of two canes, standing in its front-middle, watching us and disappearing through the door that is reached by two steps at the back. The other woman who appeared from the same door at the same moment as she disappeared, sitting on those steps and waiting for her bucket to fill with water. The same woman standing in the back-middle of the stage, pouring water from her bucket, softening the ground under her feet, and slowly sinking herself into the water. Reflections of the light hitting the wrinkled floor which is slowly turning into water, multiplying on the wall behind. And then the total destruction of that ground. 

It is a peaceful landscape that emerges from under the ground when the water subsides and the surroundings calm down. That ground which was turned upside down by the tsunami that reached the land long after the earthquake that took place in a much earlier scene. Perhaps it is the earth itself that exists out of the water where Gaia is slowly burying herself under her own weight. A calm, peaceful twilight. 

There has just been an upheaval, but now things calmed down. The old turned into the new, the straight into the curve, the ground into the water. The danger has passed, the transformation is complete.

Following a long and at times silent process, in which familiar body parts on the stage come together in different ways and transform into new mythological creatures as they fill the stage with the beauty and the ugliness of the body, its perfection and defectiveness, its eroticism and uncanny-ness, after a scene in which water seeping into the stage in various ways gradually consumes the body, the stage floor gives ground to water, and by transforming into rocks and islands reveals a painting, and the only ‘body’ remaining on the landscape, perhaps the alter ego of Dimitris Papaioannu, crosses the sea with his broom in hand, climbs the rocks, and through the door of this painting opening to the horizon, exits this dream the atmosphere of which is at times reminiscent of a nightmare, and in which desires appear to the ‘eye’, leaving behind a landscape painting most probably of a few Greek islands, large and small, which the spectators can only stare at, at the end of this journey...

[The Turkish version of this article was published as a hardcopy in Art unlimited (January/February 2022 issue) and can be downloaded from here]