ANALOGIO FESTIVAL 2018

The Politics & Poetics of Contemporary Theatre

Thomas Tsalapatis

«Μonica Vitti does not remember anymore»

Direction Nicole Dimitrakopoulou

Work in progress

WITH  ENGLISH  SUPERTITLES

Saturday 22 September, 20:00-21:00

Greek Art Theatre Karolos Koun – Frynichou

Monica Vitti does not remember anymore.

Looking at the horizon, she distinguishes nothing anymore.

Because space is now the same as time,

with no exit escapes

Direction: Nicole Dimitrakopoulou

Visuals: Konstantinos Frangopoulos

Cast: Amalia Kavali, Kitty Paitazoglou, Loukia Pistiola

Music, Sound design: Manolis Manousakis

Light design: Nikos Vlasopoulos

Communication: Chryssa Matsagani

Assistant Director: Alkistis Nikolaidi

The play

Three women narrating on stage. Versions, deviations and identifications of the same events. Different journeys of the same starting point, different endings of the same journey. The forest, the resort, the building at the edge of the city. Together the memory, its documentation and its absence. The trauma, the rebuilding of the world through a vague past. The memory in the time of its absolute documentation and at the same time, the memory as an element that defines, alters and gives birth to identity. What is the politics of memory? What is it like to forget in a time where everything is documented? And eventually, what happens when we remember an event that hasn’t really occurred but we remember it as real? Is it real? And how does it affect our present? Among videos, photos and other means of documentation, among monologues that are repeating, conversing and breaking, two women are narrating trying to build the identity through memory, the person through reflection, the communication between words that won’t let them remember.

«You understand. I go into the forest to protect myself. Feet naked in the mud. My feet hardened from all the barefoot summers, the sand, the rocks. The mud. And the smell of the wet soil before rain. One thunder and then a second one and the sky above me lighting up. Like… I don’t remember. And everything around me flashing like… I don’t remember…like sudden flashes, like they are suddenly photo shooting us. But…but…a thunder, I don’t remember. Words don’t let me remember…

And if they ask you what I saw you will say: trees and rocks, branches, branches, branches.

And if they ask you where I went you tell them: to the forest, to the forest»

«Monica Vitti does not remember anymore. Not even me and you, looking at her in a world empty of people. Looking at her, almost like comforting her»

Director’s note

The first objective on the first station of this play is for words to find their place in space and body. To unfold the journey of the memory in order to end up in a recollection probably repressed. To assist the actors on stage to speak the entire author’s words, knowing that “words don’t let you remember”. In order to convey the audience – each one by its own journey- to the final residence, the fever. In his own forest, a night with a rain of ashes.

Thomas Tsalapatis was born in 1984 in Athens. He studied theater at the University of Athens. His first collection Daybreak is Execution, Mr. Krack received the National Poetry Prize (2012). His second collection Alba was published in 2015 and has been translated and published in French by Nicole Chaperon in 2017 by Desmos editions. In 2016 he wrote Encore, a play which staged in Attis Theater in Athens, directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos. The text and the poems of the performance were published in 2017 by Mov Skiouros editions under the name Pnigmos.

In 2018 he won the first prize for poetry Premio InediTO – Colline di Torino, for the poetical section Peristatika [Circostanze]. He would participate in the festival Parole Spalancate di Genova as part of the prize. In the same year his play Monica Vitti ne se souvient plus was staged for reading in Maison de la Poésie in Paris as a stage reading, directed by Laurence Campet and translated by Clio Mavroeidakos. Since 2008, he has been writing articles, for newspapers, magazines and web magazines. He is currently a columnist for the Saturday edition of “Efsyn” and for the Sunday edition of “Epochi”. Several of his poems have been translated in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and have been included in more than 7 anthologies. He has translated and published poems of W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden. His writings can be found at Groucho Marxism: http://tsalapatis.blogspot.com • Email: zarkadi8@yahoo.gr

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