ICH TRAUME MANCHMAL VON ATHEN *
How does one speak of heroes? How does one –even worse- speak of national heroes? To escalate crisis, how does one criticize the very deeds that co-created a/the so-called national hero? Criticism has to permeate the collective crave for glory, national pride, the need for heroes, the myths surrounding them, especially after the mythologizing response of the “world” to them the “next day”: “Efharistoume Hellas!”
Every hero, call him, Moses, Hercules or Siegfried, has a cycle regarding his birth and deeds. The setting for the birth of our hero was the night of the 13th of August 2004, the night that saw his rising to glory through firecrackers on top of the famous Calatrava cover of the Olympic Stadium, in Athens. No better occasion for the birth of a hero than the mighty Olympic Games, which promote ideas of victory, strength, solidarity, harmony, health (for everyone), and grace (for the females) with a slight touch of paedophilic craze in the case of eurythmics (strictly for “bendy”, ultra thin, very young girls). Dimitris Papaioannou, lifted on his trained and trim shoulders his country that night, delivering the show that “dazzled the world”. It is not easy to raise questions or demand answers in a patriarchal, repressive (yet with the will to change) society, but it is equally not easy to restrain oneself from being awe-stricken in the view of the floats bearing “tableaux vivants” from the glorious past of the nation.
But let’s take it from the beginning. What was it exactly that we saw the nights of the opening and closing ceremonies in Athens, on the occasion of the 28th Olympic Games? The opening ceremony started with the consolidation of the ideology of the Games: the uninterrupted continuity from the ancient games to those of our times, more specifically, of today. Wild drumming by two young men in pseudo-military trousers (last year’s fashion, and a recurrent reference to the director’s old teacher in painting, Yiannis Tsarouhis, who depicted in several of his works soldiers and young boys doing their military service in the navy) grew louder, building a rhythm of anticipation of the great things to come. Ancient old ideologies but with a flare for the new appeared in front of us, as technology helped to have both drummers simultaneously “present”, one in the stadium in Athens, the other in Olympia. In turn, this scene gave way to the “comet” that lit the five circles on the surface of a “lake” created in the Colliseum mode in the middle of the “arena”. (The exact order of the scenes is not so significant to our purposes here, nonetheless we shall try to keep it, as much as the chronological distance allows). We had “gotten the picture” so far, and yet, the organizers of the ceremony did not cease to amaze their audience: a bouzouki orchestra appeared walking, performing live an old popular tune. This was quite a surprise as contemporary Greece has denounced the campaign of the Ministry of Tourism under the 1967-’74 dictatorship as well as the art of that period, which were both based on the triptych “bouzouki, souvlaki, Akropolis” (the “bouzouki, tzatziki, moussaka” variation was also legitimate). It also pulled a chord of nostalgia as we remembered the famous scene in an old Greek B-movie in which the bouzouki icon of the time, Yiorgos Zambetas, (a man who used to play for tychoons and who also led during a party, respectable members of the British society to burn their ties (sic)), brought close to the end of the film, an orchestra of more than a hundred musicians all playing in uniformity one the favorite tunes of the time in an extremely fast tempo. And what can one say about the little boy in the “paper” boy, this abuse of every code of sentimentality…
Next came the red Centaurus, throwing his mighty spear an action that led to the high point of the event: where the spear stopped, civilization was symbolically born. Practically, there rose a humongous head of a statue of the Cycladic period in art, which opened to reveal a classic statue, which in turn like a Russian “baboushka” doll, opened again to reveal a neoclassical one. Hanging from invisible “strings” the remains of the statues looked overwhelming, but this is the point isn’t it? This gave the chance for deep contemplation: i.e. “how great our art is”, “how much we have given to the world”, “they wish they had done it themselves”-this last one for ultra-nationalists with a vengeance. After this call to remembrance, oops! came the couple which run to the lake in a “From here to eternity” style, “madly in love” and in exuberant joy from the intoxicating prospect of the Games. What a coy image: girl in the arms of the boy, executing a duet which was so utterly old-fashioned that brought the previous ultra-high tech set of images, to dust. Next high point, the floats, with Eros “flying” on top, in a homage to Trisha Brown’s last century’s “Orfeo”. The floats…I believe they called such things “outdoor spectacles” in the Renaissance Italian cities, passing in front of the city’s authorities and the crowd…(A surviving tradition in Rio and in Patras-Greece during carnival). Lovely floats, brought back the unforgettable tradition of so many authoritarian regimes, especially the 1936-1940 and its kitsch rebirth in 1967! Amazing times! When people from all over Greece volunteered to show the escapist possibilities of folk dancing, symbol of the untouched communities of an archaic innocence, to play music and to taste the discipline of the ladies who organized them in circles, squares and processions in the eurythmics manner of their Dalcrozean experience…Oh! The Happy Days! It was all there, on the 13th of August, at their natural space, the stadium, once more. Lovely images: the Minoan frescoes, the Mycenaean warriors (all straight from the museum shop but in real-life size), the Parthenon marbles, Alexander the great, the Byzantine emperors hand in hand with the Saints of the Orthodox tradition, the folk dancing, the costumes, the ancient theatre tradition…a “galaxy of Hellenism”. A ruthless parade, chocking the spectators with an unstoppable “feeding” of history in a way that until then was thought of as extinct. Two more points on the opening ceremony: the misogynist image of the “pregnant” woman who “holds with her motherly primary instinct the world and peace in her hands” and inside her –illuminated- womb, and the shape of the torch bearing the flame: an absolute blast-furnace. (As for mermaid-overdressed Bjork, I guess that everybody went to sleep with her enchanting singing…)
“What goes up must come down”, as the song has it, and the Olympic Games finished on the 29th of August. In between, everything went truly well, the athletes were reliable as ever (anorexic or in get-today-the-superpower-muscles hormones and “drugs”), security was impeccable, the ugly parts of the city were successfully and nicely covered (hopefully the “Olympic spirit” will be kept), therefore fun was in the air…What followed surprised us more than the opening ceremony. A helter-skelter, let’s-get-over-it-and-go-for-holiday, the closing ceremony did not appear to have any aspirations or pretenses to pass as “high art”. “Gypsies”, “tourists”, boys and girls harvesting, more boys parading and posing as the months of the year (the Pirelli calendar for boyz or parts of the Greek gay guide), a scene from a traditional wedding in ‘70s costumes, poor athletes who had to come into the “arena” without their most valuable asset, that is order, songs from different parts of Greece, a hundred dancers doing the pyrrich (like the Irish jig in the “Rhythm of the dance”), more bouzoukia and lots, lots and lots of sentimentality. Sentimentality that one gets in movies in which the characters are so grotesquely depicted, that the gay guy is the one who cries his heart out watching a soap opera. There was also singing; by Greek artists, of greek songs, in greek –ONLY! This means that the so much awaited-for feast was local and remained local, while the objective was participation and everything that goes with it: reconciliation, friendship, acceptance, tolerance.
I believe that large scale spectacles such as those we see on occasions of mass celebrations should not be considered as art and should not be judged as such, and the person who is in charge should have the courage to acknowledge this; at least he/she will acquire a better perspective and a clearer mind regarding his/her task. Furthermore, the feasts and ceremonies which are organized on the occasion of athletic events, and especially the very important ones such as the Olympic Games, cannot possibly avoid to show the affiliation of such events as well as of athleticism itself, with sheer power, indirect aggressivity, ethnic symbols and clichés. The situation is more difficult when the welcoming country is “the very territory where the (Olympic) Games were born…”
It is true that the ceremonies were both delivered correctly, with no mistakes whatsoever, and with great enthousiasm on the part of those who participated in it. It is also true that they pleased the Greeks enormously, as well as people from other countries, who responded positively to them. It is therefore understandable that the point of view expressed here, might find objections not just within the greek community, but also within people who have an aspect of Greece in the light of the ancient tradition. Nonetheless, the ceremonies left a silent minority very thoughtful and puzzled because of the handling and bringing to the spotlight of the most conservative elements of greek culture and the consolidation on a national level, of a new pact of acceptance of the “old” as (a distorted) “new”.
A few more comments before closing should definitely refer to the position of the female in these spectacles: traditional, subordinate, maybe “sexualized” but definitely “made from the side of Adam”, which constitutes a misogynist placement of women in the unwished for confinement of their “traditional” roles and domestication. Last but not least, the lack of any sense of humour. Had the shows been more humorous, they wouldn’t have been “fearful”, they would have been trustworthy. As for the camp parts of them, they were undermined, though detectable. I guess that with a couple of Barbra Streisand songs and Lindsay Kemp to assist in the rehearsals, they would have risen in full glory. Undermined was alsothe kitsch aspect of the show, although it was there, consciously included in the ceremonies to ease the tension that the symbols which were used would create. It was however stripped from its potential playfulness and fun, because of the overall seriousness of the enterprise. Pity, because from the point of view of musical accompaniment, Costa Cordalis, had so many lovely compositions to offer in his new CD with the prophetic and accurate title “Athen 2004”…
* Title of a song from the album “Athen 2004” by Costa Cordalis
(published in Ballet/Tanz, October 2004)
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