The Great Tamer

History is often made of floors and ceilings, and in The Great Tamer, Dimitris Papaioannou doesn't hesitate to challenge his eleven performers to find their balance and projection points on an inflated stage constantly going through a process of deconstruction, swelling up, absorption, and even rejection. Starting from this metaphor of man in a position of research, the show becomes a sensorial and primitive epic. “The point is to dig and bury, then reveal. We're talking about identity, about the past, about legacy and interiority.” Revealing the small tragedies and great absurdities of our modern lives, bringing together well-known and ambiguous figures from the world of the circus—the clown, the acrobat—the work of the Greek choreographer is at once melancholic and funny, and plays on theatrical conventions with the audience, in all simplicity. Between levity and tragedy, within a plastic world that pays homage to some of the greatest European painters—Botticelli, Raphael, El Greco, Rembrandt, Magritte, Kounellis—Dimitris Papaioannou sets the bar high and asks all of us to “exhaust our lives” and to give everything we can before leaving this world. This quest for grace and beauty is neither relaxing nor contemplative.

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