Children Of The Dictatorship by Kostis Kornetis

Author:Kostis Kornetis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2016-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.4. The avant-garde theater group Elefthero Theatro performing John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1970. The group, which decided to abolish the director-dictator in a symbolic antiauthoritarian move, exemplified the fusion between politics and the arts. (Courtesy Giorgos Kotanidis)

By this point, audiences interpreted Elefthero Theatro’s productions as political commentary with great potential and impact.94 Rena Theologidou remembers the performances of …And You’re Combing Your Hair as “a revolution within the [Junta’s] ‘Revolution’—a real revolution”: “We used to go to [the theater of] Alsos every night, I could go on stage and play it. We knew it by heart, the dialogues, everything” (Theologidou, interview). Even though magazines of the time attest to the fact that the greatest and most enthusiastic part of the audience was comprised of students, the massive numbers of people that flocked to watch the show reveal that performance theater with a political edge was becoming mainstream.

By 1973, even mainstream companies, such as that of popular actress Jenny Karezi, staged political plays. Karezi, with her husband and fellow actor Kostas Kazakos, commissioned Iakovos Kambanellis to write a play that was performed in the spring of 1973 and was about to become one of the most popular anti-Junta theatrical events of the entire dictatorship period: Our Grand Circus [To Megalo mas Tsirko]. Academic and antiregime activist Giorgos Koumandos claims that the performances of this particular play “became massive political demonstrations, the biggest ones during the seven-year dictatorship—before the events at the Polytechnic.”95 The play was based on a series of historical vignettes that were filled with allusions and references to the Greek people’s suffering throughout the centuries from either foreign rule or domestic autocracy. In an alternative reading of Modern Greek history, Our Grand Circus paralleled authoritarian moments of the past to the rule of the Colonels and to US neocolonialism. Ostensibly in reference to the constitution granted by the first sovereign of Greece, the Bavarian King Otto, in 1844, characters in the play voiced the slogans “The people’s voice equals God’s rage” and “Constitution”—drawing an inescapable comparison to the savage violation of constitutional rule by the Colonels ever since 1967.

The play was highly charged emotionally, not least because of a very powerful music score by Stavros Xarhakos that was performed by dissident student idol Nikos Xylouris.96 Through an unconventional stage and seating arrangement it granted multiple occasions for direct interaction between the performers and the members of the audience, who were mutually exposed.97 As drama scholar Gonda Van Steen explains, “The majority of the spectators could … observe other people’s reactions which encouraged self-observation and self-reflection, especially when the actors fired difficult questions at them.”98 The fact that the audience, mainly composed of students, went off to demonstrate soon after the play’s premiere, demonstrates the clear agitprop effect of the play and its metatheatrical elements. Playwright Kambanellis recalled with emotion that the popular response was so enthusiastic that youths at later performances did not simply ask for tickets, but for “tickets to freedom.”99 In November 1973, some of

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