In the opening scene of The Great Tamer, directed and choreographed by Dimitris Papaioannou, a performer drapes a naked, recumbent male body with a gauze sheet. A second performer then raises one of the door-sized tiles with which the stage is covered and lets it fall, so that the resultant draught blows the sheet off. This sequence is repeated numerous times. It’s a statement of the work’s theme: that the human story is a process of covering and uncovering. That while history conceals, it does not erase. The skin of time is permeable, and the past waits restlessly underfoot, waiting to be rediscovered. The musical score, a fractured version of Johann Strauss II’s Blue Danube waltz adapted by Stephanos Droussiotis, underlines this idea. Returning at intervals, at once sad and insistent, it strives for melodic resolution without ever quite achieving it.
Papaioannou is a veteran of Greece’s theatrical avant garde. He ran Edafos Dance Theatre for 17 years until its demise in 2002, winning international acclaim for Medea (1993), Human Thirst (1999) and other productions, and earlier this year created a full-evening work for Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, the first choreographer to do so since Bausch’s death in 2009. Papaioannou also conceived and directed the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games. Much of his work references Greek mythology.
In The Great Tamer we are always conscious of the underworld that lies beneath the shifting tiles (set designs are by Tina Tzoka). When these are lifted, we see body parts. Arms, legs, naked male and female torsos. These twitch, half-alive, and are assembled into reanimated beings that blunder, shaky and unseeing, through the landscape of the present. Are these assemblies of parts merely objects or do they retain vestiges of humanity? A dry collection of bones, unearthed from beneath one of the tiles, suggests the latter, as does a brief but sinister tableau recreating Rembrandt’s 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, which degenerates into savagery.
Fragmentary re-enactments of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice send a more equivocal message. Orpheus, after failing to bring his beloved Eurydice back from the underworld, prayed for death so that he might join her for ever, and was dismembered by wild beasts. Are they Orpheus’s limbs that Papaioannou’s dancers are constantly uncovering? Is his dismemberment symbolic of our own mental fragmentation when trying to reconcile past and present? In The Great Tamer’s most striking scene, hundreds of golden arrows fly across the stage and stick into the interleaving tiles. The tiles act as shields, beneath which men shift and heave like the Spartans facing the Persian archers at Thermopylae. When all the arrows have been discharged, the stage shimmers like a field of wheat. A tunic-clad female figure, perhaps Persephone, queen of Hades and the personification of the harvest, looks silently on.
The Great Tamer lasts 100 minutes without an interval, and its zombie pace will not be for all. But those with a taste for existential melancholy will thrill to the aeonic sweep of Papaioannou’s vision. On Tuesday’s opening night, a capacity audience greeted the 10 performers with a standing ovation.
