Angela Brouskou – Theatro Domatiou and MiniMaximum ImproVision, Epitafios II, performance, 2016, photo: Stathis Mamalakis
Epitafios II is a collaboration between professional actors, musicians, students, performers, and the audience. A blanket of human bodies and objects covers the floor of the former headquarters of the Greek military police EAT/ESA. At a time when the world is plunged into economic, political, and social desolation, the performance formulates an ode, a musical installation, that is in dialogue with Pericles’s Funeral Oration from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War—read by an honorable citizen of contemporary Athens—with excerpts from Cornelius Castoriadis’s text The Problem of Democracy Today (1990).
Epitafios II is open to anyone who wants to participate for personal or shared reasons. The questions being raised deal with the concept of public grief and its expression, death, the end of sexual and family relationships, everyday crime, political and socio-political turbulence, violent displacement and existential dead ends, or simply time’s passing with no return. We are expecting the visitors to express and confess—together and separately—unthinkable public or private losses. The first version of Epitafios was presented at Kunsthalle Athena in 2012.
Angela Brouskou / Theatro Domatiou was founded in 1993 by Angela Brouskou (actress-director) and Parthenopi Bouzouri (actress) in Athens. Its core group of actors and other partners engage in workshops aiming to expand acting methods and practices, seeking a contemporary theatrical code. The company focuses on inquiry and experimentation in the broader sense of the terms, as their main concern is to connect theater with the extreme reality that we face daily. Modern and classical theater texts, as well as classical tragedy—the main axis of their research—form the basis for their work. Moreover, non-theatrical texts serve as a means to penetrate into a field of consciousness that allows for a reevaluation of the meaning of theater through issues topical to the cruel times we currently experience.
MiniMaximum ImproVision are musicians, architects, and visual artists who work on narrative concepts, using acoustic and electric instruments, sampled sounds, voices, texts, objects, and images. An improvisation evolves into a sound-image flow, with its elements composed and constructed around a basic narrative theme. Lately, their work has focused on incorporating live audiovisual installations in theater plays and performances. They form spaces using the three-dimensional installation of sound sources, exploring the use of music as a scenic element and an essential feature of dramaturgy. MiniMaximum ImproVision evolved from a duet (2005) to a sextet (2011–including a sound engineer) and has performed in Athens and other cities in Greece.