“I once passed by and made a mark at a point in space, on purpose to be able to find it again two hundred million years later, when we would pass that way again at the next turn. […] The sign was there where I had left it to mark that point, and at the same time it marked me, I carried it with me, it inhabited me, it possessed me entirely, it came between me and everything with which I could attempt a relationship. […] I had done it precisely to know how long it would take me to find it again, and until I found it again I would not know.”
A Sign in Space (Un segno nello spazio) – Le Cosmocomiche, Italo Calvino, 1993.
Although ‘INK’ by Dimitris Papaioannou at the Berliner Festspiele – Performings Arts Season 2023 is a combination of references to classical myths (e.g. Saturn Devouring his Son) and contemporary metaphors, I couldn’t help but think several times of the short story ‘a sign in a space’ contained in ‘Le Cosmocomiche’ by Italo Calvino. Who knows if it is intended?
In Papaioannou’s performance, space, time, light and two bodies are perfectly orchestrated in a cosmos unfolding like a tableau vivant. The marks left by the two bodies alternate rhythmically and are positioned in this universe about to explode on stage, a symphony governed by constant symmetry.
These traces, which Papaioannou leaves on the space, are always found, they mark history like the needles of a different time unit. Not seconds, minutes or hours, but signs in time. The present is conceived as a spatial dimension and no longer temporal, as its Latin root, pres-ente suggests: at the entity.
The performers, defined as ‘dressed man’ – Dimitris Papaioannou and ‘nude man’ – Šuka Horn, are a chromatic, generational and sexual yin and yang. However balanced they are, they tell an unequivocal power relationship. This is the story of a man’s nightmares. Of motherhood experienced through the male body, with violent, ironic, homoerotic and absurd implications. The naked beast is totally at the mercy of his tamer, except for a few moments of rebellion that break the rhythm. Like a son insulting his parent for the first time, triggering a father/mother wrath that takes on dark, red tones for half of the show is slightly confusing.
Water is the accidental element that orders everything. Rain, steam, lake, sweat; water, or ink, in fact, is tinged with shadow through a masterful play of light. It becomes air or ocean according to the rhythm of the story. Used to clean the stage and the performers’ actions or crystallised in a membrane that encloses the stage wings; or reflected beyond the fourth wall as a reverberation of light on the spectators’ gazes.
In this universe narrated by Papaioannou, each element is conceived as a performer. There are no scenic elements, but bodies of different materials that express themselves through their opacity and transparency, luminosity and shadow. Like ink that, if enclosed in a bottle is an unreadable presence, if spread on paper can narrate a story. Ink is an indelible material that, like wax, mercury, or varnish, one must be sure to know how to use, it could backfire and be an indelible impression of a mistake. Like the actions of a father on a son, or of a man who leaves marks in the universe to create measurable distances between himself and the void that surrounds him.
