Epos (working title) | Nikos Karathanos

A production of epic proportions, where poetry intertwines with battle, violence with glory, the mortals of the plains and mountains with the Olympian gods. “Indeed, what little I know about morality, I learned it on football fields and on theater stages, which will forever remain my true universities,” said the French intellectual Albert Camus, a passionate football fan and a goalkeeper himself in his youth. And although no one in Karathanos’ Epos travels to the shores of Troy to fight, the battle-cry meets the songs and jeers of football supporters in a decentralized, rugged rhapsody. Maria Kavogianni and Amalia Moutousi, as female coaches, players, and villagers, together with a group of outstanding footballers such as Giannis Kotsifas and Giorgos Zygouris, alongside Karathanos and the music of Angelos Triantafyllou, prune trees, make tackles, sacrifice goats before the penalty kick, jeer, sweat through their shirts, and exhaust themselves.

In the forgotten football grounds of the villages and their fiercely contested championships, bitterness, hatred, and restrained passions mingle, tensions released during the week in only small doses at the butcher’s shop, the coffee house, the greengrocer’s, and in the bedrooms. Epics may not be written about the five-day working week, but the tensions of the weekend are immense and therefore comparable.

Giannis Asteris writes in his note: “What miracle could open windows onto the epic, allowing words and faces so completely our own to burst through, as though we existed only because we were dreamed up by a sweating mountain boy, running back and forth, all hormones, fury and terror, between celestial glory and the abyss? And who are the spectators that make up the anonymous crowd, freezing like a column and trembling like someone in a seizure? There is something erotic and intimate in the idea of war. It draws us in with its fierce attraction, seduces us, and insidiously drags us towards the sweet encounter of battle, the intimacy of war, because we are made from earthly and heavenly materials, according to a secret recipe and in unknown proportions.”

Every Sunday, you fleece me for a grand,

I shell out for every asshole with a whistle,

hoping he might call a foul, and you’ve got the match fixed,

so I can keep you living like kings, you oxen!

And then you go and concede three goals, three goals.

Do you have any idea what three goals are, you idiots?

Three goals are three bells hanging round my neck!

Do I look like a sheep to you?

Tomorrow—listen up—tomorrow,

not one of them will get away

not mother, not father

not even the child inside its mother’s womb

you will crush them, you will wipe them out

and they will leave no trace behind —

In the Iliad, concepts such as war and vision are named in many distinct ways. There are many ways of looking: forward or backward, sideways, deeply or prophetically, with blazing eyes or with calm observation. There are many ways of fighting: shouting, grappling, chasing, striking, making noise, churning the waters of the sea. Reality is not a single thing; it is constantly breaking apart, and you search for fragments with which to assemble images that carry meaning, until those too slip from your hands once again. One moment Athena is quarreling with the others in the council of the Gods, the next she descends to aid Diomedes. Divine wings flutter above the warriors’ heads. The divine and the human, the visible and the Unknown, consume one another in a supernatural act of mutual devouring of unimaginable intensity.

What miracle, then, can make a small village in Evrytania, Thrace, or Laconia, and its dirt football pitch scattered with gravel, resemble an epic scene? What miracle can make Loukakos, Bletas, and Koutsothodoris worth measures of bronze, gold, and hammered iron? What miracle can open windows into the epic and allow words and faces so completely our own to burst through them, as though we existed only because we were dreamed up by a sweating mountain boy running back and forth, all hormones, fury and terror, somewhere between heavenly glory and the abyss? And the spectators who make up this crowd, freezing like a column and trembling like someone in a seizure, uttering a single phrase through thousands of mouths, shrieking like a mouse caught in a Roman trap, without whom neither battle nor match can be conceived, who are these spectators? The anonymous crowd, the shadow of events, through whose presence alone the spotlights illuminate the celebrated few: “I will not speak of this crowd, I will not name it,” says Homer.

And one more thing: I, who charge furiously straight ahead, cannot help but see in my opponent, in the one I want to destroy, something of myself. Otherwise, where does my longing come from to cast all reason aside, surrender to this deadly shimmer and, like a madman, either slaughter or be slaughtered myself? There is something erotic and intimate in the idea of war. It draws me in with its fierce attraction, seduces me, and insidiously pulls me towards the sweet encounter of battle (πολέμου ὀαριστύς), because I am made of earthly and heavenly materials, according to a secret recipe and in unknown proportions.

– Yiannis Asteris