Stage work for nine dancers (2021)

Age of Crime, a dance piece choreographed by Lenio Kaklea, was commissioned by the Athens Festival on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the War of Greek Independence (1821-1829). As in every national anniversary, celebrations are not merely an act of remembering; they mark an event upon which memory is organized and identity is performed. Thus, their formality guarantees a certain understanding of history, both lived and narrated. Greece, however, was more than a nation that struggled to declare its independence from the Ottoman Turks. Philhellenism as conceived by European intellectuals and romantic literary figures —‘We are all Greeks’ stated the poet Shelley among others— gave the rebellion an imagined noble purpose and ‘revamped’ Greece as another project of demi-Orientalization.

The piece aims, therefore, to revisit the above historical narrative and reveal the complexities behind the invented continuity between present and past, investigate critically the erasure of facts caused by the idealized representations and mediated memories. By dismantling those complexities, one comes upon a disturbing image of modern Greece; the indiscriminate plundering and victimization of both Turks and Greeks during the War, a sort of vicious heroism that was often legitimized by the misconception of bandits as brave revolutionaries. By bringing to ‘life’ such matters, despite the persistent narratives, the choreographer invites the ‘living dead’ onto the stage to tell their own version of the story and even dares to debunk victimhood by applying an unexpected accumulative form of narration.

Duration: 1 hour