Onassis Festival NY 2016, Antigone Now.

Saturday, October 15. Onassis Cultural Center New York. 

Photography: Beowulf Sheehan

Nomos_The Land Song Performance Lecture belongs to a work-in-progress focusing on the animalistic dimensions of tragedy. The ancient greek word for tragedy, τραγῳδ-ία, can be read as a composite noun from the two words “τράγος” / “billy goat” and “ᾠδή," / “song, ode”. The research project connects poetry to animal husbandry, especially for goats, on the Greek land. The view points come from the beast, the female, the animal, the nomad, the dispossessed, against the sovereign, the male, the man.

The perfomance addresses thus the issues of animality, gender, land and dispossession.

The word Nomos is the ancient but also modern greek word for “Law," and its various ancient meanings had to do with the verb νέμω, signifying “to share, to distribute”. Thus Nomos first meaning is that of the shared word, the song, and Nomi, is the pasturage, shared land as food. Both Nomos and Nomi are related to Nomadism. 

Starting from the right to burial acclaimed by Antigone, this lecture performance is a double weaving of a questioning about the origins of tragedy and the right to land, the nomadic freedom of movement and freedom to settle, in other words the right to citizenship. Nomos ends by presenting the sacrifice as the primal scene for tragedy.

"The poem is thus a word for more than one, a speech that its now is holding more than one inside, a speech that collects more than one in its interior”. Jacques Derrida

Credits

Concept, Dramaturgy, Texts: Phoebe Giannisi

Direction: Isabella Martzopoulou

Performer: Phoebe Giannisi

Chorus Performing Voices: Goats, Stergios Bares, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Alexander Douras, Phoebe Giannisi, Isabella Martzopoulou, Yannis Mourtos

Studio Recordings: Nikolas Vamvakas Lab of Environmental Communication and Audiovisual Representation(LECAD), University of Thessaly, Greece

Video-Audio Design and Editing: Chara Stergiou

Text Translation: Michael Eleftheriou

Poem Translation: Brian Sneeden  who reads also two of his translations