After Howard Barker, the Odeon Théâtre de l'Europe is offering its audiences the opportunity of discovering another great contemporary European playwright : Dimitris Dimitriadis. Two different creations, one reception, but also readings, round tables, funding for a global project to translate his unpublished and hitherto yet untranslated works, coordinated by the European Workshop for Translation and the Maison Antoine Vitez, are all part of our desire to unveil this very unique voice, more than forty years after the first Prix de la révolte au marché noir by Patrice Chéreau.
Is Dimitriadis Greek ? First and foremost he is an author. « What does one mean by a Greek work ? » he queries : « is it from one's nationality that one must evaluate an artistic work or rather from its importance ? ». Let us start then, with the writing : we find the same defiance of all boarders. Dimitriadis is in fact, a poet and a prose writer, novelist, essayist, playwright ; he is also a great translator. This wide diversity of literary practices testifies to his considered and well thought out desire to undermine the finiteness of literature, to never allow literature to get too comfortable, to use it as the instrument and the terrain for his essential quest, in the name of a driving need to lead a writer worthy of the name, into the « center of the human being and the manner of decrypting its inaccessible secrets. » How can a secret, if it is truly inaccessible, lend itself to being decrypted ? Writing, according to Dimitriadis, follows its own logic, which is intimately linked to the impossible. It is not an abstract operation without any link to the real, but an act full of sense, whose ambition, quoting Dimitra Kondylaki, one of his translators, is to intervene in the world, « aiming, through all means possible, to transform it. » : writing « destroys so that the world may be reborn, decomposes in order to recreate - even if it proves to be impossible, even if the fatal cycle - Desire, Expenditure/consumption, Catastrophe - is destined never to close. » Writing in a way, turns against its own foundations, in order to proceed with the purifying, liberating, furious destruction of that which, at the same time, both grounds it and alienates it.
We can see why the question of « Greekness » is so crucial for Dimitriadis ; we can also understand why theater and its relationship to writing, is such a privileged act for him. The Greek man or woman according to him, is too often an equivocation, allowing his or her contemporaries to appropriate a past and an illusory identity - a mask that real artists, must tear off, a mask whose flip side must be shown : « myths must be turned inside out, must be seen from behind the scenes. » In order to do that though, they must be held at a distance : one must separate oneself from them without actually letting go, balancing on the limits where body and text transgress, each thanks to the other, by unveiling themselves without reserve, to others in that « courageous affirmation of the ephemeral..." It is only by doing this », concludes Kondylaki, « that Dimitriadis's writing is theatrical . » : for him, theater is by definition, a place of « vital disrespect ».
Je meurs comme un pays [Dying as a Country] directed by Michael Marmarinos
Le Vertige des animaux avant l'abattage (The vertigo of animals before the slaughter) directed by Caterina Gozzi
La Ronde du carré (The circle of the square) directed by Giorgio Barberio Corsetti
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