concept, devising and performance by Dimitra Kreps
King Agamemnon boasts after killing Artemis’ deer. To appease the goddess’ wrath he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Only then the Greek ships will be allowed to sail to Troy to revenge Paris’ seduction of Helen. Iphigenia’s myth long after Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides has moved Goethe, Racine, Ritsos to name but a few. Comédie-Française and multiple-award winning actor, director, playwright Jean-René Lemoine revisits this archetypal myth to create his own harrowing nocturnal tale of love and loss, innocence and war, eros and thanatos. Fascinated by Fayoums, the funerary portraits whose gaze physicalises the dignity of sadness and the aristocracy of soul, Dimitra Kreps’ site-specific performance conceives Iphigenia as a Fayoum who for the first time breaks the silence of her gaze to tell a powerful story with volcanic subversion that transgresses time and place, life and death.
The performance blooded principally by Maria Callas’ music is an English premiere adapted from Efi Giannopoulou's beautiful translation of Lemoine's Iphigenia. The 'in-memoriam' text in the same original edition is my own translation. Photography and lighting design by London-based artist Yannis Katsaris.
Conceived as a site-sensitive exploration, it will set off in London (in a gem of a space - a Mayfair gallery) next Spring; it will then voyage through Greece and France. (venues and dates tbc). Unlike Odysseus who reached his Ithaca, Iphigenia's voyage goes on and peripatetic always sympotic (like a Diotima?) she will be sharing her sacrificial beauty of a story and touch in some amazing (archeological or relic or...) sites beyond her dreams, well beyond..."η ζωή είναι ένα όνειρο που βλέπει ο θάνατος" (life is a dream seen by death, Dimitris Dimitriadis)
I am deeply grateful to Jean-Rene for entrusting/endowing me with his beautiful writing. About the author: http://www.mc93.com/fr/biographie/jean-rene-lemoine
http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2014/03/14/jean-rene-lemoine-se-glisse-dans-la-peau-de-medee_4382961_3246.html
"Perhaps, the two of us, having found that there's no comfort in the
world,
perhaps, for that very reason, the two of us (though each in isolation)
may once more succeed in giving, and maybe getting, comfort." Ritsos' The return of Iphigenia
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