Greek Chorus in 09

The question of the chorus has been of special importance to twentieth-century theater. Plays like Toller's Mass and Man, O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Kazantzakis' Capodistria, Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, and Heiner Müller's Mauser attempt to assemble people in a public setting of common interests and concerns. The quest for a viable chorus explores the possibility of a modern socio-political community. How can such a community be constituted and governed? How can it claim legitimacy? How can it define its space and its membership? If we assume that the ancient chorus represented the citizens of the polis, whom might a modern chorus represent? Recently Greek theater has offered some interesting experiments.

Among the several offerings of the Athens Festival in the Summer of 2008, two stood out in terms of both media coverage and audience response, the opening and the closing one. The opening show, X skinis: Afta pou kapsan to sanidi (On Stage: Burning Down the House), produced by composer Stamatis Kraounakis, was a review of twentieth-century Greek music for the stage. Its program moved mostly chronologically through famous songs from epitheorisi/variety show, operetta, ancient comedy and modern Greek and non-Greek plays. People of all generations packed the Odeon of Herodes Atticus to hear and sing along all-time favorites. The show that closed the Festival was a stage adaptation of Dimitris Dimitriadis's novella Pethaino san chora (I am Dying as a Country) (1978), produced by director Michael Marmarinos. In it, a foreign occupation has crushed a country's culture and thrown it into a state of advancing anarchy, sterility, and self-destruction. People packed "Peiraios 260," a furniture factory turned theater in an industrial part of Athens, to see a devastating commentary on twentieth-century Greek history.

The contrast between the celebration of the first show and the lament of the second could not be starker, in terms not only of content but also of dramatic style. For example, Kraounakis brought out the legendary 1960s singer Zozo Sapountzaki to recreate her old hit "Panayia mou, ena paidi" ("My God, what a guy"),¹ while Marmarinos brought out the legendary 1960s singer Beba Blanche to declare "I despise this country" against a tape of her old hit "To karavi" ("The boat").² Both singers stood outside history to declare, the first, its suspension (the '60s never ended) and the other, its destruction (everything ended with the '60s).

The two producers started with similar assumptions. In an interview he gave to the official newspaper of the Athens Festival on 19 June 2008, just days before the premiere, Kraounakis was asked about the future of creative artistic work in Greece. His response sounded like a quote from I am Dying as a Country: "I do not believe in Greece. At all. I do not believe it has any future. Everything is done so that they can cut the arms and legs of those of us who still manage to do what we feel or what we believe is our job." And later in the same interview, when asked about the current phase of Athens, Kraounakis called it "post-decadent, as in 'post-modern.'" Thus the two producers had remarkably similar general views of Greece. The radical difference lay in their treatment of these desperate views.

Kraounakis took over a Hellenistic amphitheater to present a three-hour extravaganza, giving 5000 people the transcendent opportunity to sing together and feel again unified and homogeneous. All divisions seemed overcome as operetta co-existed with Lorca and camp with Pirandello, the Weimar Republic with the Greek 1967 junta and the Balkan Wars with Irish anti-colonialism. With Greek quality popular music exhausted for years, and the CD practically dead, Kraounakis seemed to celebrate the era of the 78 and 45 records.

Marmarinos took over a big, empty industrial space and used very few scattered props. Divisions in Greek life were foregrounded—sexual, ethnic, linguistic, social and others. Nameless people walked in line or wandered around, unable to communicate with one another. A sense of desolation prevailed everywhere. At the...