In Performance: I TRY by A. Papatheodorou (New York)

I TRY :

a performance on Athens and politics by Anastasia Papatheodorou

A city that is experiencing cultural and political upheavals requires new ways of living and thinking. Through a filmic tour along the streets of contemporary Athens, we are confronted with an open dramaturgy searching for those transformations along the urban landscape. Do people change their ways of walking? Do places change their function, or represent differently meanings they used to? What narratives do spaces and places convey? How does it feels to be a woman, an artist, a wife, a partner, a daughter, a want-to-be-mother, a sensitive person amidst today’s personal moral political global crises ?

Driven by an open set of questions about city life and contemporary politics — from gender issues to matters of labour, democracy or ethics — I TRY is a journey across human memory, the material city and everyday practices, with music, newspaper information, occasional words or voices. Echoes of the city signal every step of the performance, inscribing in the urban landscape sights, actions and emotions that make the city readable, that is: open to quotations, disparate references and ambiguous. As De Certeau puts it, «The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations (…). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (…)» (de Certeau, 1984: 101).

The performer invites audience to take part of this poetic-visual tour, and to grasp a place within the city space, be it a memory or an imagined / desired location. A presence or an absence, the «in-visible identities of the visible» (De Certeau).