No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The immaterial presence of women in contemporary Greek theatre*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
Since the beginning of the 1970s the women’s/feminist theatre has gained a dominant position on the European and the American stage. Women have stormed the postmodern stage either as solo dramatists and artists or as collaborative teams, forging a new female theatre language and training audiences to new ways of theatre reception. The publication of Lizbeth Goodman’s Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own (Routledge, 1993), one in a long series of recent studies on women’s theatre, already heralded an advanced epoch of a polyvocal feminist theatre embracing a multiplicity of female differences along the paradigms of gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity. Within the dynamic spectrum of development and inter-cultural exchange that ensued in the field of women’s theatre the Greek women’s contribution is faceless and anaemic. The situation is both distressing and calling for systematic research, especially since the scanty sociological studies concerning the position of women in contemporary Greece are inadequate in throwing full light on such a complicated problem. In 1992 Savas Patsalidis made the first serious attempt to analyse the foetal state of women’s theatre in Greece in his article ‘Greek Female (Feminist?) Theatre: A Preliminary Approach’, published in the Greek journal Utopia (4, Nov.-Dec. 1992, 105-38). My own interest in the issue in my capacity as a feminist and drama critic springs from my long-standing research in British women’s theatre and my understandable comparative inquiry, as a Greek national, into the causes that might have led to the striking absence of an analogous phenomenon in my native country. I have deliberately used the word immaterial in the title of this paper in order to suggest, on the one hand, the relative lack of a distinct theatre discourse of women as speaking subjects and moving bodies on stage, inscribing female experience and female desire, and, on the other hand, the unimportance, in terms of power, of women theatre practitioners as still very few of them hold key positions in theatre institutions and the theatre industry.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1996
References
1. Sky Channel, 27 Aug. 1994.
2. Angelikopoulos, B., ‘Directing is a Male Profession’ (translation mine), in To Vima tis Kyriakis, 13 May 1990, 61 Google Scholar.
3. Ibid.
4. Thespis, special issue on ‘Creative Women in Theatre’, Al, Autumn 1993, 12.
5. Telephone conversation on 12 January 1995.
6. Thespis, op. cit., 7-8.
7. Apart from her commissioned directorial work for the commercial theatre Pateraki works on private projects which she directs and/or performs herself, such as her production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabier (1985), her much acclaimed two versions of Beckett’s Happy Days (1991) and her controversial sequel of The Lamentations of Electra for Megaron Mousikis (June 1992).
8. The prominent poet Maria Laina and fiction writer and poet Konstantina Vergou should be mentioned here. Kostoula Mitropoulou should also rank here as a prominent prose writer, though her theatre work is a much more central and steady preoccupation for her than for other women writers.
9. Those were the radical legislative changes that the two consecutive PASOK governments brought to the Greek civil law, which introduced the civil marriage and amended the position of women in the family, work and society. Such basic institutional changes in legislation made women’s street militancy appear absurd and unnecessary.
10. See also the article of Savas Patsalidis ‘Greek Female (Feminist?) Theatre: A Preliminary Approach’, Utopia, 4, Nov.-Dec. 1992) 105-38.
11. The works of Ann Devlin and Winsome Pinnock in the UK are notable examples of a poised interweaving of such parameters as gender, race and nationality.
12. paper, Melberg’s “Theatre Translation and Directional View’ is included in the special issue of Thespis, op. cit.,11 Google Scholar.
13. ‘That was a work exclusively done by women. Six women did theatre uniting their efforts…. That collaboration was a unique experience … I have worked as set and costume designer with almost all men Cypriot directors of the Theatrical Organisation of Cyprus and also several from the commercial theatre. My collaboration with them was without any problems. But what I felt during the production of ‘Night Mother’ was very different.’ I have translated the extract from Zaharaki’s original paper, published in Thespis, op. cit., 13-14.
14. For an extensive analysis of Anagnostaki’s dramatic work and the problematic inscription of gender see Sakellaridou, Elizabeth, ‘evels of Victimization in the Plays of Loula Anagnostaki’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, special issue on modern Greek theatre (14 [1996] 103–122)Google Scholar.
15. The Art Theatre announced the production of a new play by Anagnostaki, , To Taxidi, Makria, in autumn 1995 Google Scholar.
16. See particularly Lauter, Estella, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (Indianapolis 1984)Google Scholar and Sakellaridou, Elizabeth, ‘Feminist Heterologies: Contemporary Women Playwrights and the Rewrite of Myth and History’ in English Studies in Transition, edited by Clark, Robert and Boitani, Piero (London 1993) 306–19 Google Scholar.
17. A collage of newspaper clippings reporting this dispute forms the background decor of the front cover of the published edition of I Dalika (Athens 1985).
18. See also Patsalidis, , op. cit., 117–19 Google Scholar, for a discussion of Lyberaki’s innovative theatrical form and revisionist mythmaking in the midst of the stale realism of the modern Greek stage.
19. Ioannidou’s play received the first prize of the State Theatre Award in 1987.
20. The contemporary British playwright Sarah Daniels is a characteristic example of this sort of analysis, despite her often radical feminist views.
21. Vergou, , O Gamos tis Antigonis (Athens 1993)Google Scholar.
22. Diamond’s, Elin excellent essay ‘Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism’, Drama Review 32.2 (1988) 82–94 Google Scholar is very informative in this respect.
23. In his director’s note Papamihalis quite honestly discloses the exact theatrical situation: ‘New play! New writer, new director, designer, composer. The theatre, “aged” — some call it conservative — it still trusted us’ (Programme of Skiste ti Gata, State Theatre of Northern Greece, 1991).
24. The views of earlier mentioned designer Zaharaki and translator Melberg bear strong testimony to this.
25. The production was staged at the theatre Empros in Athens in May 1994 by the new theatre company Opseis and was directed by Aspa Tombouli. After its first success it had a second run in the same theatre space in the following winter season of 1994-95.
26. In comparison, I can only recall Roula Pateraki’s exquisite production, with her all-female team, of Fassbinder’s, Reiner The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant in 1987-88 Google Scholar.
27. Especially interesting for a gender analysis of the male critical reception were the reviews of Georgousopoulos, Kostas in Ta Nea (6 June 1994, 38)Google Scholar and Varveris, Yiannis in Kathimerini (26 June 1994, Magazine Section: 22)Google Scholar.
28. It is a sad truth that the 1994 first prize of the State New Play Award was withdrawn on the grounds of the poor quality of the plays that entered the competition. See the relevant report ‘Bad News for Theatrical Work’ (translation mine) in Thessaloniki, Wed. 21 Dec. 1994, 37.
29. The long list would include names such as Marsha Norman, Rose Goldenberg, Margueritte Duras, Catherine Anne, Yasmina Reza, Caryl Churchill, Louise Page, Nell Dunn, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Charlotte Keatley etc.
30. The play was staged at the Nea Skini theatre in Athens in January 1995 and was directed by Lefteris Voyiatzis.
31. Eleni Haviara’s other official collaboration was with the same male dramatist, Dimitris Kehaidis (who also happens to be her husband) on Dafnes kai Pikrodafnes in 1979. However, in an interview published in the programme-text of Me Dynami, Haviara makes covert hints at her unacknowledged collaboration in Kehaidis’s other dramatic works.
32. For the politics and aesthetics of women’s performance art see Sue-Ellen Case, ed., Performing Feminisms (Baltimore 1990) and Goodman’s, Lizbeth Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own (London 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33. Lagios’s, Ilias The Story of Lady Othellos Google Scholar also deserves special mention both for its thematic subtlety and the high poetic quality of the text as well as the beauty and sensitivity of Olia Lazaridou’s solo performance in it. Dimitris Kehaidis’s latest play Me Dynami apo tin Kifisia (a collaboration with Eleni Haviara) must also be stressed as a remrkable achievement since it is his first play where women not only become centralised but, primarily, feature as the solo subjects of the theatrical discourse.
34. I am paraphrasing here Ziogas’s publicly expressed view in the general discussion with the audience that ensued at the end of the conference ‘Women and Literature’, organised by the Municipality of Komotini in November 1991.
35. In a brief assesment of the activities of the Greek stage in the theatrical season of 1994-95, published in To Vima tis Kyriakis (8 Jan. 1995, T5), theatre critic Eleni Varopoulou appears quite optimistic about the emergence of a new ‘resisting’ audience, small in number but dynamic, which ‘supports kinds of texts and theatrical forms, theatre spaces and experiences that deviate from the conventional methods of the media’.
36. Eleni Haviara, in particular, appears especially alert to the key position that the word power (‘dynami’ in Greek) has attained in our recent cultural and political life. The word ‘dynami’ plays a series of semantic variations through its frequent use in the different contextual instances of the title and the dramatic text alike. See ‘Conversations’, extracts from an interview between the director and the co-authors of the play, op. cit., 28.