Still Life Production by D.Papaioannou
Source: Belgrade Dance Festival
A great scientist, Nikola Tesla, is ever so constant a source of inspiration for many people, artists too. But how to depict Tesla through the art? It’s easy if it is seen in a proper way, it is very easy. For those who like Nikola Tesla on the dance floor, one of my favorite Tesla meet dace performance would be the appearance of Greek artist Dimitris Papaioannou, with his high budget stage dance performance production Still Life (2015) where Dimitris seems to draw the stage with the bodies and create visual choreographic work, as an illustration, very simply and with minimal resources. A short but impressive scene, as an illustration, shows dancers undressing in pairs, forming an enchanting rising sea of bodies on the stage. “I paint the best I can on stage because the live performance remains unrepeatable and unique for me. My troupe in this dance performance has three dancers and three actors. Dancers in addition to the actors, make a special aspect of the play because they do physical theater. Just as silent films have a connection with comics, so these same films have a connection with contemporary dance. They are organized, stylized, and very strict movements, which function as a framework. Critics have noticed that here in my piece, there is a connection with comics that, in a transmitted sense is “dancing.” Mention is made of the great silent film comedians Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin who were great dancers in their films, and that’s the exact link. It’s like a life transformation of big birds happening in a piece in front of our eyes; the rules of dance composition that exist in every choreography. ”
Dimitris works with a lot of people on stage, which is not easy. These are images of desolation and illusions, shown in a seemingly random composition of human bodies, arranged all over space in a Sisyphus attempt to search for the meaning of life. In Still Life, there are men who look like Tesla, who are doing something, rolling, playing with white platforms. And the first viewers’ association is the myth of Sisyphus. In the myth of Sisyphus, we have a man who deceived death, and as punishment, the gods gave him immortality in the endless hard and meaningless work of turning the rocks over the top of the mountain and in a circle backward. On this topic, the writer Albert Camus wrote his most famous novel of the absurd as the basis of the human condition. He concludes that the struggle to reach heights alone is enough to fill a man’s heart, but that we must imagine Sisyphus happy about that. The myth of Sisyphus is often treated in modern dance pieces. So often, that today this myth can be synonymous with delusion and illusion, although any negative connotation of myths simultaneously strengthens their power. I mean power in the romantic sense, where the myth is almost something romantic, sad and attractive, as the subject of some transcendental aura. This nostalgia of escapism is always an acceptable choice for processing in the performing work because it shows the lasting values of good and evil, courage, and heroism, although in this case, because of the connection with the character of Tesla and knowledge. Thus, myth is not just a literary form (genre) with divine symbols, which bring awe arranged through the narrative structure. It is a complex idealization and fantasy that deals with destiny, transition, existence, where the main characters are ordinary people who roll stones and superhumans, super-characters with special abilities. I’m talking about comics (and Dimitris is a cartoonist) that often thematize Superman, a man with divine qualities. The myth of Sisyphus is today an old-fashioned image of an absurd hero, as a symbol of persistence and nonsense. And is it possible to imagine this poor man happy today? Sisyphus, who will thus question the absurdity of a movement that does not really start, as well as persistence, which is always reduced to the starting point and the will to start again. Thus, it could be said that, in both pieces, on a visual level, the laws of the fragment in the service of the whole, as well as the whole in the service of the fragment, are re-examined. During this creative process, the author was guided by the idea of understanding the work and works of Nikola Tesla. There he dealt with the existence of things and objects (as well as man), as a source of energy, where everything is a matter of inclusion in different dimensions. These are emotional journeys that we are not even aware of. Dimitris’s interest is based on Tesla’s idea of the meaning of the so-called normality. They say that Tesla did not like jewelry because it was physically and mentally simply included in the space, that is, it was thus connected with great ideas. I was obsessed with Tesla, and in this piece, there are elements of Tesla that essentially influenced the creation of the idea. Black suits and men with mustaches who sit (exist) in a space, where they realize that they are hunting for a natural phenomenon. This concept of Tesla that caught lightning in the room is for Dimitris the clearest picture of human loneliness and emotion. As well as the questions of a man caught in a whirlpool of natural force