We are in the Army Now
Elias Adam
Dates
Tickets
Venue
Time & Date
Information
YouTube Premiere
Saturday 10 April 2021
21:00
Suitable for
Audiences aged 18+
Duration
1 hour & 20 min
Introduction
“We live in a time of monsters, between a dying world and another battling to be born.” Four wannabe superheroes. Cyberspace(s). Video games. Smartphones. New realities. A camp, personal army. Will you put your trust in them? The time has come – this is a call to arms. On the Onassis Channel on YouTube.
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Elias Adam: "We are in the Army Now"
Forget the Upper Stage you once knew: it has been transformed into a hybrid social medium, something between an Instagram account and an iPhone screen. Forget theater as you knew it too. Everything here sparkles with an ultrapop cyberspace aura.
The four performers are reminiscent of Power Ranger superheroes, Pokemon, and the sexy being that is Cardi B. Everything unfolds in a camp atmosphere, filled with snapshots from the lives of borderline millennials, TikTok-style choreographies, and Britney Spears music videos, all set alongside deeply confessional selfies and memes on the controversial relationships between socio-environmental justice and social media platforms. Except that what’s posted here is the collective rage and urgency of an entire generation, coupled with the fierce humor that pervades it.
Might we all in fact be superheroes, ready to do battle? Can Steve Jobs and working class people from the Athenian Nikea neighborhood sit side-by-side in the same selfie? Are homophobic Greek fathers and religiously devout Greek mothers just another work in progress? Can ideology be explained through the use of emojis?
In a time that seems to lack doers, where things are fluid and seem incomprehensible, who exactly will our heroes fight? Generation Z take up weapons and welcome us into a new world where emojis and Pokemon coexist with extreme sensitivity and dissident activism, and all inside a theater form as digital as is it incurably physical.
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Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
This is the second time Elias Adam is working with Onassis Stegi. In April 2020, he directed a short-form film-performance titled “HAMLET, a desktop performance” as part of the Onassis Stegi ENTER program, which commissioned artists from around the world to create new works within 120 hours during quarantine lockdown. This work by Elias Adam sees Hamlet wander his computer desktop. Themes and motifs drawn from the play by Shakespeare are revealed through the use of technology. Love, grief, anti-depressants, death, and self-destructive tendencies interlace with an endless stream of associative references to Internet pop culture, cartoons for kids, and current events during the course of an afternoon spent screen-mirroring.
Elias Adam notes the following about his works on his website: “I like to be confessional and to build bridges from the personal to the political. To create alternative narratives, and give visibility to voices that are silenced. I am fascinated by the transformative power of autobiography intermixed with fiction. I adopt elements of the camp style: artifice, frivolity, pretentiousness, and shocking excess. Born on the threshold of the new century, I incorporate pop culture references into my works.”
In 2021, within the framework of the Moving Borders EU project, and following a commission by Onassis Stegi, ʽKivotos Channelʼ emerged, a ʽTVʼ channel conceived, directed, and dramaturged by Elias Adam.
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