'Simplicity is the problem of our time. Simplicity is labelling. It should be about fluidity and confusion.' The Greek opera maker Elli Papakonstantinou, whose star has risen rapidly in recent years, brings to the Holland Festival this year a contemporary version of Euripides' classic tragedy 'Bacchantes'. In that 405 BC play, wine god Dionysus (also known as Bacchos) robs the women of Thebes because the king rejects his divine status. That king, against his better judgement and disguised as a woman, follows those Bacchants, is discovered and, led by his ecstatic mother, is torn to pieces, just like earlier inhabitants of a mountain village that was in the way.
Elli Papakonstantinou's production premiered in Mulhouse, France, this spring. It is a modern take on the old play. It is opera, but also a rave, it has pop music and a DJ. This is confusing for people expecting a classical opera. I spoke to the Greek director and asked about her motivation for this choice.
Of all the plays produced since 405 BC, why did you choose Bacchae?
'I wanted to make a piece about political correctness and what is happening in our world with micro-labelling and the MeToo movement. I'm really interested in myths. Not only in classical mythology, but also in how we continue to create such stories. This is how national myths are created. That combination of ancient and modern myths comes together very well in the story; of the god Dionysus and what it shows about queerness.'
Friedrich Nietzsche
'You should know, Euripides wrote this play after his exile from Athens. He was therefore free to comment on the Apollonian rationality that prevailed in Athens.'
Apollonian rationality? Elli Papakonstantinou thus refers to a concept of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche contrasted the Apollonian with the Dionysian, named after the Greek god Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy and unbridled emotions. The Apollonian stands for clarity, order, logic and intellectual discipline. Dionysus is there for chaos, emotion, intuition and the irrational.
Nietzsche saw art as typically Dionysian: not all aspects of the world can be understood through mere rationality. He encouraged the exploration of mystical and transcendental experiences.
'Euripides felt connected to the mystics of northern Greece. Such mystical orders still exist there. Back then, they were really secret societies and if you joined you had to swear secrecy too. They were important as an undercurrent in Greek society. Not only did they surface in the oracle of Delphi, but they also represented the animalistic, uninhibited in society. That's why I was really interested in this piece, to put it in a contemporary context.'
You see political correctness as Apollonian and 'queerness' as typically Dionysian?
'Yes. We learn to live with rules, corrections and self-criticism. We internalise our guilt. In Dionysus, I see the joy of desire and longing. What happens to desire that cannot be described, does not fit into the boxes? How does microlabelling affect our freedom?'
'It is of course good to name things and create new spaces for that as well, but I think we need to find a more fundamental way of giving desire space in our society. We need to be more open to ambiguity.'
False affiliation
So microlabelling, naming gender identity and (sexual) preference as specifically as possible hinders our freedom, and deprives us of the big things in life?
'We live in a very transparent world, where we can let anyone into our personal lives and intrude into anyone's life. This creates a false idea that we are connected. We no longer think esoterically or look at ourselves. After all, human beings are a mystery. We are not transparent at all. We don't fit into criteria. Do we fit into a micro label or not? This is how boundaries and duality arise in the world.'
'With this piece, I seek connection to a great stream that we are all part of, so that we can continue to evolve esoterically without even having an idea of what we are becoming, without necessarily fitting in anywhere.'
'We don't always have to have that pressure in our society to take sides. I am also an activist, so I know that struggle very well: I too fight for more inclusiveness. But for me, it's more about the way we do things and how we think about our personal development.'
Don't look up
Your case for the Dionysian is convincing, but there is also a flip side: in Bacchae, the feast in the mountains also leads to senseless violence. A village is looted and massacred. How optimistic are you? There is also a clear reference in the performance to 'Don't Look Up', the film that impressed last year by showing how people prefer to look away when a major disaster is announced.
'I am deliberately not referring to that particular film. It's about the development in pop culture in recent decades. Humanity is facing a major catastrophe, and we have known that since the 1980s. Back then, too, such films were a mass product, a part of pop culture.'
'I wanted to make a real pop project with Bacchae, because I also like pop music a lot. I'm interested in how pop culture assimilates these stereotypes into new narratives and retells the story in a more progressive way, with the aesthetics of pop.'
'Then I think it's really worth exploring and understanding all these catastrophes and all these ideas of destruction and of the end and maybe putting them in a different context. So yes, as you said, there is also violence. In Europe there is a lot of violence, but at the same time there is also a new way of living.'
Conservative and traditional
Culture is also about setting yourself apart from another. You are an opera director by name, but it is a world is where there is a lot of debate about how to perform opera, how to create opera, how the genre is defined. There's a movement that says opera should be performed the way it's written, in any way. And then there are those who modernise things. Where do you stand in all this? I saw a multi-coloured performance. There was beautiful opera singing, there were raves, there were beats, there was noise.
'I love music because it is transcendental. Music can flow from one genre to another in a way that no other art can do as well. I need that for this piece because I am interested in queerness. What is queerness? The piece raises this question. Therefore, my aesthetic is free. I can say that I move freely from one zone to another without thinking about how they fall well, whether they go together artistically: then I just flow with them.'
'I really wanted to raise this question for the audience. Maybe sometimes it's attractive, maybe sometimes it creates a kind of monstrous aesthetic grotesqueness. I didn't really wonder what category this performance would fit into. Even though everything in our industry revolves around categories.'
'I find it very difficult to fit into a box. But the opera world, which I really love very much, is a conservative and traditional world, where the genre has to be respected and reproduced.'
Aesthetics is a political choice
'I actually like the in-between space. Aesthetics is a political choice. It is up to us to break the patterns. As soon as you break the expectation pattern of the audience, you break a pattern in the mind. That's how you create space, a grey space between certainties. That's what this play brings.'
'I wanted to do this in a playful way. I didn't want to show real violence. That was a political choice for me: I didn't want to show violence against femininity. The play is not about feminist violence. I wanted to break down certainties and create electric shocks, but in a playful way.'
How did this fall when you presented it to the actors? It's a very diverse ensemble, from real opera singers to an androgynous pop star like Ariah Lester. How did the classically trained opera singers react to your plans?
'It was a challenge to bring people from different areas, with a different way of looking at art and a different way of working. They all had different expectations at different stages of the work. That offered surprises all the time. All our certainties were gone. Added to that were the strikes in Greece, which arose after the train disaster where so many people died, so there was an extra uncertainty to deal with.'
'In the end, each piece finds a method. Like we were prepared by the universe, working in such a way that we really lost control. That's the theme: losing control to find ething. It's not about foolishness or madness.'
Ukraine
'For me as an artist, that loss of control was instructive, also to avoid burning out. I was able to connect more deeply. That was not my intention, but it happened. And it's not the first time. My last work was with Ukrainian opera singers, and we were rehearsing when Russia invaded Ukraine.'
'So part of the rehearsals took place in shelters, in bunkers, under the earth. And then they came here. That's how life drifted into art: one day, eight people knocked on my door. Then it wasn't about art, it was a matter of finding musical instruments for them, finding a place to sleep, finding something to eat. They came in to our safe world and so you felt very well what art means in this context and what it meant to them. That was touching, because that was all they had. They enjoyed art in moments of complete crisis. That was very important to me. My life has been testing me lately.'
Fascists
This show is about queerness. By criticising microlabelling, there is also always a risk of being criticised, precisely by the queer world. The contradictions are huge, before you know it you will be up in arms with the far right, as a critic of microlabelling. How do you prepare for that?
'I don't open a dialogue with fascists. I open a dialogue with my people. It is really important not to think in black and white. We have to remain open to complexity and depth. Simplicity is the problem of our time. Simplicity is labelling. It should be about fluidity and confusion. This is what queerness is about: bewilderment. We must try to find a new path in life and take new steps. As a possibility, as a potential something that is present and not dead, not looking at the past and fixing you in a name, but constantly changing and evolving and constantly in dialogue with the world, which has not accepted this way of being.'
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