Celebrating Dada's 100th Anniversary With a Brand New.... Relic !

As the centennial year of the birth of Dadaism is drawing to a close, one performance stands out as a worthy tribute and possible heir to the controversial movement that has altered the course of art forever. Relic , the one-man show conceived and performed by New York trained Greek actor and performing artist Euripides Laskaridis that took the continent of Europe by storm throughout 2016, opens today at Londons Barbican Center for a series of sold-out performances.

Thomas Mann said that one could tell the nature of a play, without having seen it, by observing the expression on the faces of the audience as they would walk out of the theater. This was certainly the case for me in Bios, one of the most experimental stages of Athens, where Relic returned to its birthplace last November, after an extensive European tour for a one-month run of sold-out back to back double performances before reaching London for its grand finale.

As I waited in the lobby for the hall to be clear of the matinee crowd so that the evening performance could proceed, I began observing the audience coming out. There was such an air of enthusiasm of the people walking out that my observation soon turned into a comparative study of smiles. Bright, gleaming, glowing, some stretching the lips others exposing teeth, every face etched with recently experienced hilarity.

Relic is a forty-five-minute performance, a tour-de-force one-man show which was originally commissioned by the Athens Festival. Whether in Dublin, Paris, Bordeaux, Prague, Amsterdam and Lausanne , the performance was greeted with unanimous critical acclaim. The one word on which most reviews seem to concur with across the continent is delight, a word were not used to hearing often in these odd times.

Delightful was also the term audiences selected to define another form of experimental performance when it first appeared on the stage of Zurichs Cabaret Voltaire a hundred years ago, in June 1916. Karawane was a briefly dramatized poem by German poet Hugo Ball delivered in a nonsensical language

Just as 2016 was a strange year, to say the least, 1916 was certainly not a good year for humanity. For two years, the youth of Europe had been fighting a gruesome war in the plains of France and Western Russia. Trapped in muddy trenches in the company of rats, young men from all warring sides were disheartened as they realized that the only way out of these trenches would be by charging against the enemy lines into the mouth of death, which welcomed them with barbed wire, shell explosions and of the constant rattling of machine guns. And as they did so by the hundreds of thousands, the seemingly endless war took on an absolutely nonsensical quality. This was perfectly reflected by one of the earliest musical manifestations of the movement when pianist Arthur Rubinstein arrived at Cabaret Voltaire to play Camille Saint-Saens Dance Macabre; a musical piece inspired by a French poem in which skeletons rise up wrapped in their shrouds to lead everyone in a frenzied dance to the netherworld.

Asked whether he considers himself an actor/director or a choreographer Mr. LasKaridis responds:

A choreographer in the literal meaning of the word. As you know choreographer is a Greek word literally meaning to write with dance. It is like using the body to write within a well-defined space. But the body is not alone in expressing the unfolding of the plot, for subtle glances can become more important than gesture.

However, when touching upon the notion of the well-defined space Mr. Laskaridis, who has worked alongside artists of the magnitude of Bob Wilson and Pina Bausch, uses as reference another giant of the theater and the worlds greatest advocate of the bare stage:

The stage is an empty archetypal space, as Peter Brooke would say. It awaits to become energized by you, to be acted upon by the performer. Thats all you need to do, to know how to go about it.

In this uniquely creative space, light also comes into play, not just standard theatrical lighting generated by spotlights or footlights but as an extension of the performers movement.

This is why on some occasions I hold a light in my hand which moves along with me.

Dadas first theatrical steps were short performances whose lack of meaning touched a chord with the public, contributing to the meteoric rise to fame of the movement. Dadaism was in fact embraced by countless people, its approach to situations as unfathomable as the incomprehensible world into which they were being thrown.

Parallels are to be drawn between those terrible years of the First World War and our equally incomprehensible times. Just like the Dadaists, Relic was conceived by the artist during the initial years of the economic crisis that relentlessly pounded Greek society.

The Age of the Memorandums (as this period has come to be called after the three consecutive, hateful Memorandums which were signed to enforce economic sanctions ) was a period where one would witness people jumping out of windows upon being handed foreclosures on their homes, or driving their cars off a cliff in the hope that their children would reap the benefits of their life insurance, with their families begging authorities not to stamp suicide on the death certificate so that the victims would not be refused religious burial.

Another striking feature of Relic is its sound. Mr. Laskaridis continues:

Sound is an intrinsic part of this performance. I would actually say, throughout the whole show, Sound is indeed my partner.

Sound was also an ideal partner of Dadaist theater as spoken sequences of nonsensical words would blend into a bizarre sound tapestry . Beyond sound effects, like those of the female protagonist of Relic pounding against the wall with a hammer marked by constant crescendo of a hammering that gradually mounts to a deafening explosion, the lady also addresses the audience directly with a remarkably high wispy voice completely out of proportion with her statuesque size reminiscent of caricatures of old-time operatic prima-donnas. The fact that her utterances are delivered in a non- existent language adds to the comic effect.

This gibberish is the reflection of another term that came into being with Dada when referring to nonsense, a term that has come to haunt the theater even now: absurdity. ..As more and more playwrights began treating contemptuously all standards by which drama had been judged for centuries, they were also presenting unmotivated actions, shocking audiences for years on end until the arrival of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco who were to introduce such plots into the standardized theater. No wonder Mr. Laskaridis explains:

Unlike most plays and performances Relic is not about narrative storytelling. In fact there is no linear narrative in the work. It was inspired by my love for the theater of the absurd. However, its dramaturgy works because of the performers performance. It gives the audience the opportunity to interpret it their own way. So everything is open-ended in a sense. In fact I call it an open poem.

Dada and The Theater of the Absurd make fun of and mimic a real world which defies the surreal as it has been filled with horrible scenes of misery and human degradation,and furthermore contrasted with the bailout of billions of euros for saving Greek banks that were the culprits of this downfall and should instead have been left to their fate. On a wider scale, absurdity should come to represent a European Parliament incapable of even defining what Europe (the supposed object of its contention) is all about, paired with the nonsensity of a Brexit and a US presidential election that were to become the envy of any playwright dedicated to the Theater of the Absurd.

How did you conceive such an extraordinary work?

It just came about. It all started with the draft and a few sketches. As began being drawn things began falling into place. Once the costume was suggested by Aggelos Mentis then everything fell into place.

In such a nonsensical universe from day one, the human being itself were to become the crucial element to be transformed. The performances of Karawane at the Cabaret Voltaire revolutionized world theater by having the central performer wear a costume influenced by Cubism, which totally deconstructed the human shape. This was the first time a protagonist was consciously dismantled into an abstract, undefinable being.

Mr. Laskaridis character falls perfectly in line with this tradition. However, he clarifies:

Well, it is about a voluptuous lady that feels as light as a pigeon, while her volume betrays her ideal self.

Even so, the play never turns neither bitter nor malevolent, as we see the character transform itself from a woman into the prima donna caricature and into a harmless. vampire. Finally, the catharsis comes with Mr. Laskaridis most effective transformation and one of the favorite characterizations of the Theater of the Absurd: the Lion Tamer. As with Dada and the ensuing Expressionism, this stock character is here to remind us that the world surrounding us is nothing but a circus. The marriage of the overblown androgynous Botero-like curved figure with a touch of Federico Fellinis La Strada to boot is perhaps the most striking feature of this performance. In all its grotesque glory, theres great delicacy and sensitivity emanating to contrast the characters gaudy looks.

This extraordinary multi-faceted personage reminds me of something Giulietta Massina (the protagonist of Fellinis La Strada) told me many years ago about the iconic film:

Federico used such characters only to show the beauty and kindness that hides behind all ugliness.

In a world marked by seemingly increasing turbulence, it must be this benevolent beauty and kindness that brought the vast array of smiles to the faces of audiences all over Europe.