Labillusions-Helix Action Theatre presented on July 9 and 10, 2021 its latest production, Kaspar Machine at the Lipasmata Cultural Space of the Municipaliti of Keratsini-Drapetsona-Silo. Based on texts by the Austrian Peter Handke, the project was the outcome of collaboration of Greece, Poland, Italy and Romania and was implemented with support from the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation.
DIRECTOR’s NOTE
Kaspar Machine is an art event, a site-specific installation that attempts to combine street theatre, dance theatre, performance and technology. The starting point is certain texts by the Austrian avant-garde writer Peter Handke: a short excerpt from Offending the audience, fragments from the theatrical monologue Kaspar and the entire text of Calling for help.
Described by their author as oration texts, the define the actor’s relation to the audience as frontal, which fits in well with folk events and street theatre.
In terms of its content, the spectacle has at its core the question of confinements and aims firstly to define this different relationship between the stage and the audience, setting the viewers within the unfolding events, and secondly to take these events off the conventional theatrical space and into the public space—albeit a space in limbo between a past and the advent of an unspecified future.
The spectacle at this temporal threshold tires to draw attention to a disquieting present, taking the stage events into an urban space and striving to turn the inert audience into participating citizens, placing at the centre of the spectacle and at the hub of the show.
“There is no world other than yours. You are no longer some intruding visitors. You are the subject; you are the centre—the core of our words.”
Nikos Chatzipapas
