The great Tamer, the latest work by Dimitris Papaioannou, was recently presented at the SGT theatre (Onassis Stegi) in Athens before it started its world tour. A co-production with festivals and venues form Greece and abroad, the great tamer is a piece for 10 dancers/performers.
On a stage filled with rectangular, grey surfaces that act as a cover for "apparitions" and hidings of the performers and props, D. Papaioannou unfolds an uncertain version of a colonised, gender-oriented ontological myth of genesis, and consequently of death. The 100 minute piece is clearly a "vanitas", an allegory on Time [aka the great tamer[, and death. A piece form his latest, less ornated works but still of epic proportions, it is also a contemporary version of the baroque era genre, with its "lascivious" exposure of the naked body, especially the male one. Or rather an exposure of the male genitals, while the female body is cunningly disguised and "elevated"; its evasive status notwithstanding it was evident that in this hard-core male dominated world, women were seen as mysterious peripheral bodies, as "slots" of chaos within which male perception of the self occasionally glides.
The great tamer aims at being contemporary with its affiliation to queer(ness) but it fails because it is extremely one-sided, it is more a reverse of tradition with a ghetto libre of "queers" than a free-flow of desire. I would tend to see it more as an activist piece than a contemporary view of people in "gender trouble". It is also a type of a myth of Genesis borrowing slightly from Plato's Symposium, the story about the separated bodies that looked monstrous before the pity of the gods.
The great Tamer is a long piece, with three or four missed opportunities for a great ending; it is a vanitas that rests on vanity and what makes it attractive is the life that it has sucked out of the original Vanitas. Wherever the Great Tamer acts as a museum of masterpieces it gains momentum and meaning (whatever that may be). When it is stripped of any Rubens, Peschier, Claesz, Miradori, it becomes tedious and blabbery; when it takes on again the questioning of the great painters of the Baroque era, it regains its strength and so on, like the mythic Antaeus who wrestled against strangers and whenver he got tired, he would touch his mother Earth with his feet to regain his strength.
One thing though should be said about this piece if one wants to be fair with it: that it is the one and only effort on the part of D. Papaioannou to get back to his unfinished journey with his version of Dracula, an old piece of the late '90s. I was always in favour of that piece and the Great Tamer has honest bits and pieces that relate to it. The decapitaed/castrated Dracula is to beseen again in the moments in which misogyny withdraws and the male body becomes a mystery of mixed identities. The male body becomes a cry for identity beyond activist firecrackers of dubious scientific value. It founds its private space during a very simple, almost naif questionning of the meaning of concrete and symbolic castration. In the very few moments that the director of the piece becomes a young human again and his questions override norms, age and ideologies. Then the Great Tamer ceases to be pompous, vain and a museum of Baroque art.
A point-manque: the gender-awkwardness left at the surface and not explored. By gender-awkwardness, I mean the point in which D. Papaioannou's activism arrives at a level when genders cannot be explained by turning to male fertility cults and the superiority of the phallus, but the discourse of (male) power cries bitterly over a symbolic (?) castration -hence the affiliation with the director's agonising, camp and queer Dracula of the late '90s.
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