1961
A sonic excursion to the ruins of the present

One actress, two voices, six instruments

C_Music NOW

1961 is an act of musical theatre lasting approximately seventy minutes. It has been conceived as a portable work, capable of unfolding in open-air sites: building courtyards, canopies, and transitional spaces of passage and shelter. At its core lies an entanglement with the thought and imagery of modernist architecture in the 1960s. More specifically, the work longs to be performed within the Xenia hotels of the Greek National Tourism Organisation – those designed by Aris Konstantinidis between 1955 and 1965, now largely forgotten, abandoned, hovering on the threshold of ruin. Scattered across the Greek landscape, they stand as silent witnesses to a contemporary world surrendered to the fever of development, to construction as an end in itself, to an almost manic fixation on the future.

Alongside this meditation on building, ruination, and our relation to what is no longer present, the work stages an excursion into a past that belongs to the dead, to the shadows. It is conceived as a weave of sonic and linguistic gestures: texts and musical fragments drawn from the era of its title – words, songs, shards of works – reassembled into a new musical architecture, one that seems to have arisen from the creators’ own sleep amongst the ruins they have inherited.

The work invites the audience into a ruin that, for a brief span – an hour and a little more – will breathe again, flicker back into life, and allow its faint voice to be heard.

With a handful of portable lights and a modest sound setup, the event evokes the atmosphere of a film shoot, as if lifted from black-and-white photographs. The musicians form a circle; at its centre stands a figure – a woman – who tells her story. It is her life, and at the same time, her time. At moments, a male voice is heard, an unseen presence we never encounter. Elsewhere, a young girl appears outside the circle: she sings, or remains silent.

We, the audience, seated in a semicircle, observe what unfolds within – not with nostalgia, nor with melancholy, but with a gaze that builds worlds; or rather, with a gaze that truly sees: an attentive, desirous gaze.

The creators extend an invitation: to inhabit, if only for a moment, a ruin.