Deos

Exploring the ideas and narratives of sacred, the 3-week residency culminated in a few small showings and an individual performance piece based on the character of sthygas - Part human part animal part nature. Theatre is a question of a gathering which is subordinated to ritual: nothing is represented or shown, but we participate in a ceremonial which releases the collective unconscious." Extracting from Grotowski's process of sacred, the director and guide, Stamatis Efsthathiou - ATROPOS theatre, posed the serious question of what we held sacred. In emotion, thought, action, feeling, touch, sight, and sound. What process was sacred? What had we lost in the process of growing up?

Note from the director
ON THE EDGE
“The first requirement that each work has from us, no matter which art it serves, is to surrender to it. Look. Listen. Become receiver. Step back, give place. Do not ask if the work you have in front of you deserves such self-giving - you will not be able to learn it, if you will not surrender to it” C.S. Lewis
"On the edge" could be the answer to the question how is the experience of ENERGIA project after 5 times that been done so far. In other words: Between dissolution and resurrection. During about a month that the group gathers in a more or less isolated place, it has to deal first of all with its expectations, both individual and group. This means that people with remarkable skills and abilities in theatre art, often following unconventional paths, decide to come with their bag full of “I WANT”. In search of further knowledge or and of a total experience. Feel nostalgic of what they live in their dreams and haunt them in the first wishes of every morning..
Here and now, on the other hand, the group is "surrounded" by a huge dose of physical and vocal training, of nature, of isolation, while it is getting in contact with the local community. At first, the EGO is shaken because the participant is getting out of his "COMFORT ZONE", even out of what he believes to be his limits and in a second phase emerges the FEAR. An EGO that does not easily condescend to change its viewing angle and to face the world as it really stands in front of him, not like in its memories or like he likes to shape it according to his expectations and personal rhythms or esthetics. An EGO that assimilates and "defecates" fasts the light and it is getting trapped in the DARKNESS, facing it as an enemy and not as the inevitable frame of the light. An ego that believes that LOVE, PAIN, PEACE have already been experienced and that they only have to be reproduced. But under the conditions of the past and not under the conditions of the UNKNOWN which is inevitably connected with the PRESENT. Like the kiss, the "I love you" like the fresh water, like the warmth of the hug that no matter how many times they happen each time they are born from the beginning ... Like the theatrical act that no matter how many times it is repeated only when it is reborn again and again reflects the light, it generates vibration ...
There, where the EGO is entrapped it generates screams of FEAR. It is the moment that stands the dilemma: either CHANGE using as the vehicle the UNKNOWN or STEP BACK holding oneself desperately from what is KNOWN... What does, however, "CHANGE" mean? It is about changing habits, body, voice, and skin?.... In my opinion, the CHANGE is connected with what is ETERNAL, with what transcends my life and my WANTS like I experience them in Athens, in Moscow, in Madrid or wherever else in the historical present. It is the time a tiny and invisible cosmic time’s layer, like the snow that comes from above the sky, melts over me, through me, and despite the cold and the frost, slowly, creates streams, rivers irrigate my understanding of the world and comes to place me at the INITIAL POSITION of the human being. Where man becomes an artist-creator using as material nothing or better what he must dare to face, dusting every unnecessary and additional weight he has accumulated in his life. And while the participant actor-human is working-living in the isolation THIS becomes a seed, a tree, a garden that imperceptibly grows and comes to embrace the community. The community is waking up in a state of awareness. It opens. At a first level it is entertaining itself. At a second level, however, it embraces the "garden", it becomes part of it, grafting it with generosity and the will of a meeting without preconditions. Just people being with people in a state of awareness, delicacy, mutual respect and communicating through a non-necessarily socially correct code.
The time is not short or long. The quantitative measurement of time is a weight of the past. Time is what it is, as the winter lasts as long as it lasts, so the spring, Summer and Autumn, as the day and night do not ask us if we are ready. The survival instinct overpasses the EGO and this in turn it is HUMILIATED. Yes HUMILIATED and consequently, it is tuned to the CHANGE. To the continuous small and imperceptible CHANGE. Because no matter how many dams build the EGO, the "WATER" sooner or later will either demolish them or will pass by and the EGO will just become a viewer. A viewer of an eternal dance that touched him but did not leave it to irrigate him...
In ENERGIA all this process takes practical dimensions: From the early morning opening of the eyes, the " morning train" process, the big amount of training hours, the limitation of personal needs to the minimum necessary, the sleep and the relaxation that acquire another density, the isolation that “contradicts” the cohabitation with very recently known colleagues often coming from different culture, the unexpected of the weather changes, the survival’s solutions that suddenly have to be found here and now, with the REPETITION of the theatrical material but getting new dimensions every time, day to day, in a VERTICAL and NOT HORIZONTAL DIMENSION. With the DETAIL and NOT with what is RADICAL NEW.

So the theatre feeds itself with ETERNITY and it does not become a pure “ZOOLOGY”. And through ENERGIA, in Poland, in Bulgaria, in Greece, tomorrow somewhere else, the theatrical practice is not just an asset for the next audition, for the next show. It is neither DIDACTIC nor MORALISTIC. It is MOMENTUM, it is fire, it is there where life reaches its highest intensity and calmness at the same time...
Stamatis Efstathiou