Theatre Movement: “Polarity 1.0: Work in Progress”
The Theatre Movement took place in Greece.
At a time when contradictions and sharpening polarities are particularly acute, differences are intensified not only between social groups, individuals, and identities but also between lifestyles. In this case, and on the occasion of the theatrical performance Polarity 01: work in progress. Clytemnestra vs Agamemnon, which will be analyzed below, the dipoles that concern us concern both aforementioned categories and, specifically, gender identities on the one hand and, on the other hand, the modern way of life.
In the post-COVID-19 era, both the socio-political scene and the way of life and interaction between individuals and social groups changed harshly, completely changing the hitherto known environments and relationships between us. The pandemic has brought to light social pathologies that have existed over time; the massive upsurge in domestic violence and, more generally, gender-based abuse, has brought to the surface the timeless issue of patriarchal social construction, which ostracizes femininities, posing them as “children of a lesser god”. At the same time, the same condition, overturning the hitherto usual way of life and imposing successive restrictions on social interaction and cohabitation, set new standards in everyday life, emerging another dipole: that of nature, or the more traditional way of life, in general, and that of digital transformation, which progressively occupies more and more aspects of psychosocial experience, especially after the upsurge and abrupt evolution of artificial intelligence. These basic dipoles that emerged or were intendified even more in the post-COVID-19 era were the central inspiration and core of the theatrical performance Polarity 01: work in progress. Clytemnestra vs Agamemnon, which was presented at the Cleo Theatre, in Thessaloniki, on December 22, 2023, as part of the European project Theater in Palm. The performance was directed by Elena Stamatopoulou and Dimitris Varkas.
More specifically, it was a modular performance, which was divided into two communicating parts, which, differently, used and touched on the concept of polarity and bipolarity, but also on how in one dipole there may be conditions that reinforce another dipole. In this case, these dipoles were: male-female and natural world-digital simulation; patriarchy-liberation, and nature-information. The contradictions, through the two separate parts of this alternative performance, were outlined through the axes that directly concern today’s social reality: gender and, by extension, patriarchal social construction on the one hand, binary code, and uncontrolled digitalization on the other.
