The House | Dimitris Karantzas

“The tiles always looked ready to burst, as if behind the walls were the hands and lips and feet of those who lived there previously, but they never did so; they remained there as a diary of which year we did what we did and the lives of those people.”

Our house. Our little corner of the world. Our definitive retreat. Where we are safe. Or perhaps not? A new, original work—elliptical and revolving mainly around action in silence—comprises the textual material of the parable forged by Dimitris Karantzas and his team, featuring scarce dialogue, relentless tension, and two actors—Alexia Kaltsiki and Fidel Talampoukas—carrying out the daily housekeeping ritual at their home until the world’s violence breaks in and uproots all.

In "The House", two figures, a woman and a man (Siblings? Flatmates? Partners?) spend a typical day in their home, which may be in Athens, Tokyo, London, Madrid, Amsterdam, or New York. In any metropolis where people live in cell-houses, bereft of identity and where everything looks alike. The two figures perform their chores, arrange the shopping, pay the bills, fold the clothes, and tidy up the space and their structure. The art of doing nothing substantial is elevated to a poetic parable, with the daily routine seizing the hinges of the heroes’ thoughts and conquering the stage. Both of them entrench themselves to avoid confronting reality and soothe the nooses that the outside world has in store for them.

Yet, a window feeds and is fed by them. A window of the house faces a quiet street in which, from time to time, passers-by stroll. As their day moves on, the window transforms into a funnel, a hellish kaleidoscope, in which various manifestations of our era’s violence and extreme instances of contemporary 21st-century history parade. The two figures, passive recipients of the images’ violence, try to follow up the maintenance of their space and microcosm until the moment violence invades their retreat and displaces them. All that remains is the hum of catastrophe.

Ten years ago, in 2013, Dimitris Karantzas made his debut at Onassis Stegi with the “The Circle of the Square”, by Dimitris Dimitriadis, a work dealing with the merciless equations of erotic relationships. A year later, in the summer of 2014, the play was presented at the Festival d’Avignon, with Libération newspaper championing it as “one of the best productions of the festival.” The play was subsequently presented at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

Following “The Circle of the Square”, Dimitris Karantzas returned to Onassis Stegi twice. In 2017, he directed—in the framework of Teenage Theater—“The Waves” Virginia Woolf, a paean to friendship, love, and diversity. In 2018, he staged the work “Rob” by multi-awarded screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, ritual around love that drew inspiration from “Roberto Zucco” by Bernard-Marie Koltès and was also later presented at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes in April 2019.

“The House” marks the first, after a dozen of years, dramaturgical attempt of Dimitris Karantzas in creating an original work, in collaboration with Geli Kalampaka and following a commission by Onassis Stegi. In the past, he has directed the plays “Snow in the Mouth” (his first play directed at the age of 19 and presented at the Notos Theater Company—Amore Theater in May 2008) and “The Sitting Woman” (2011) at the Arti Theater.

The performance is a multimedia experiment with image, movement, and silence as its primary tools while drawing inspiration from the short story “The House Taken Over” (1946) by Julio Cortázar and the one-act theatrical play “The Parade” (1965) by Loula Anagnostaki, as well as architectural research around the spatial reception of the uncanny.

In 2018, as an Onassis AiR fellow, Dimitris Karantzas conducted research on ancient Greek drama, attended plays, and met with representatives of theatrical bodies at major European festivals and organizations that focus on contemporary performance, such as Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), Alcantara (Lisbon), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), Vooruit Arts Centre (Gent), etc.