by Leigh Witchel
You can have a nose for delivering an eyeful, but that might not add up to a meaningful performance. Dimitris Papaioannou began his career as a painter and comics artist. His visual sense – the idea of the eye-popping scene as a coup de théâtre and a procession of Boschian hallucinations to add up to a show – recalls Pina Bausch. In fact, he was the first artist to make a full-length work for her company after her death.
That sense of tableau was all over his 2017 work “The Great Tamer.” The show opened on a stage covered with uneven slate-colored flats: human-sized sheets like huge tiles on a strange Parisian rooftop. As the audience sat, Christos Strinopoulos, sporting a suit and a pornstache, looked around and at us in the usual non-opening.
The lights dimmed and the piece formally began when he re-tied his shoes and took his feet out of them, but left the shoes where they were. He walked upstage to a stool, took off his shirt and everything else until he was buck naked. Then he picked up one of the slate-colored flats, flipped it over to reveal a white reverse, and lay down as if sunbathing.
Two men came to him. Yorgos Tsiantoulas, a big hulk, snapped a white sheet and laid it over Strinopoulos. Another, shorter, man approached, took another flat and dropped it so its wind blew the sheet off Strinopoulos, uncovering him so he lay there again naked. And again, again and again in a persistent, silent argument.
Music started. If this had been Bausch, it would have been a tinny recording of tango, or bal-musette. Instead, it was the “The Blue Danube,” which served the same ironic purpose.
The smaller man headed to the shoes left at the front, stepped into them, put them on, but found that they were rooted to the stage. Literally. In order to move, he had to rip them out of the stage and they came up with the tendrils of a root system. He walked on his hands off the stage like an uprooted plant.
Meanwhile Tsiantoulas revealed another naked man, Alex Vangelis, caught between his legs. And the series of phantasms went on. Two men and a woman created a centaur-like creature, with each man providing one leg. The men put high-heeled shoes on and staggered about. “The Great Tamer” had the similar feel of linked sketches that some of Bausch’s work had. It got a similar reaction, as if the sight gags were Mummenschanz.
More visions. An astronaut came down from the back, loudly breathing, to start excavating at the center, pulling out rocks. When the suit was removed, we discovered the astronaut was a woman, Pavlina Andriopolou.
Later, three women, voluminous cloths wrapped round them as skirts, surrounded Vangelis, posed like Botticelli’s Venus. They blew at him gently, moving his limbs into different poses, sometimes with his penis uncovered, sometimes not. The cast suddenly donned neck ruffs and the scene changed to one of Rembrandt’s famous anatomy lessons, only that turned into a cannibals’ feast, where people pulled out the Vangelis’ entrails and feasted on them.
Besides getting eaten, Vangelis had the dance solo in the evening, of slinky and gelatinous torso motion and rolling arms. Later, he reappeared in a full-body plaster cast. Someone crushed the cast off him section by section, like shelling a hard-boiled egg.
Each moment was striking in itself, but it read less like a point of view and more like one thing after another: Papaioannou’s instinct for thrilling visuals wasn’t backed up with a sense of knowing how to connect those images, or move them through time. The world of “The Great Tamer” didn’t add up to paradise or hell. There was too little Bosch and too much Mummenschanz.
The best of the images was a hail of thin, flower-like arrows that rained down on to the stage, and after that, a final excavation of tiles and dirt that produced a skeleton. It slowly crumbled and dissolved as it was displayed to us. But Papaioannou didn’t know what to do with that obvious ending, or the three others before it. Instead, he opted for a non-ending of one man blowing a Mylar sheet around in the air. “The Great Tamer” was only 100 minutes without intermission, and you’d still have wished it were shorter.
Mummenschanz would have known better.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“The Great Tamer” – Dimitris Papaioannou
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY
November 16, 2019
Cover: “The Great Tamer.” Photo © Max Gordon.
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