FROM TESTIMONY TO HETEROGLOSSIA: THE VOICE(S) OF LAMENT IN WE ARE THE PERSIANS! 1

ARTÍCULOS FROM TESTIMONY TO HETEROGLOSSIA: THE VOICE(S) OF LAMENT IN WE ARE THE PERSIANS!1 DEL TESTIMONIO A LA HETEROGLOSIA: LA(S) VOZ(ES) DEL LAMENTO EN WE ARE THE PERSIANS! Marios Chatziprokopiou University of Thessaly (sarmasighster@gmail.com) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8469-8041 DOI: 10.32621/ACOTACIONES.2021.46.06 ISSN 2444-3948 Abstract: We are the Persians! was a contemporary adaptation of Aeschylus’s The Persians presented in June 2015 at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival. Performed by displaced people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and directed by Yolanda Markopoulou, the piece grew out of the Station Athens group’s five-year theatre workshops. Extracts from the original play were intertwined with performative material brought to the project by the participants: from real-life testimonies to vocal improvisations, poems, and songs in different languages. Highlighting the historical thematic of the play, this adaptation was presented as a documentary theatre piece, and the participants as ‘modern-day heralds’ who provided on stage ‘shocking accounts’ concerning ‘contemporary wars’ (programme notes, 2015). After briefly revisiting the main body of literature on the voice of lament in ancient drama and in Aeschylus’s The Persians in particular, but also after discussing the recent stage history of the play in Greece, I conduct a close reading of this adaptation. Based on semi-directed interviews and audiovisual archives from both the rehearsals and the final show, Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. Págs. 151-182 151 Recibido:15/01/2021 - Aceptado:12/04/2021 ARTÍCULOS I argue that the participants’ performance cannot be limited to their auto-biographical testimonies, which identify their status as refugees and/or asylum seekers. By intertwining Aeschylus with their own voices and languages, they reappropriate and reinvent the voice(s) of lament in ancient drama. In this sense, I suggest that We are the Persians! can be read as a hybrid performance of heteroglossia, which disrupts and potentially transforms dominant ways of receiving ancient drama on the modern Greek stage. Key Words: lament, voices, displacement, Persians, heteroglossia. Resumen: We are the Persians! es una adaptación contemporánea de Los persas de Esquilo, presentada en junio de 2015 en el Festival de Atenas y Epidauro. Interpretada por personas desplazadas de Afganistán, Pakistán y Bangladesh, y dirigida por Yolanda Markopoulou, la pieza surgió de los talleres de teatro del grupo Station Athens, desarrollados durante cinco años. Los extractos de la obra original se entrelazaron con el material performativo aportado al proyecto por los participantes: desde testimonios de la vida real hasta improvisaciones vocales, poemas y canciones en diferentes idiomas. Si se destaca la temática histórica de la obra, esta adaptación se presentó como una pieza de teatro documento y los participantes como «heraldos de hoy en día» que proporcionaron en el escenario «relatos impactantes» sobre las «guerras contemporáneas» (notas del programa, 2015). Después de revisar brevemente el corpus literario principal sobre la voz del lamento en el drama antiguo y en Los persas de Esquilo en particular, pero también tras tratar la historia escénica reciente de la obra en Grecia, realizo una lectura atenta de esta adaptación. Basándome en entrevistas semidirigidas y archivos audiovisuales tanto de los ensayos como de la espectáculo final, sostengo que la actuación de los participantes no puede limitarse a sus testimonios autobiográficos, que identifican su condición de refugiados y / o solicitantes de asilo. Al entrelazar a Esquilo con sus propias voces y lenguajes, se reapropian y reinventan la(s) voz(es) del lamento en el drama antiguo. En este sentido, sugiero que We are the Persians! puede leerse como una interpretación híbrida de heteroglosia, que perturba y potencialmente transforma las formas dominantes de recepción del drama antiguo en la escena griega moderna. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 152 ARTÍCULOS Palabras Clave: lamento, voces, desplazamiento, persas, heteroglosia. Summary: 1. Introduction. 2. The voice of lament: modalities between the «other» and the «I». 3. The Persians on the Modern Greek Stage. 4. Beyond testimony. 5. Conclusion. 6. References. 7. Interviews. 8. Notes Copyright: © 2021. Este es un artículo abierto distribuido bajo los términos de una licencia de uso y distribución Creative Commons 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0) M arios Chatziprokopiou is currently a postdoctoral researcher and a teaching fellow in performance studies at the University of Thessaly. He earned an MA in social anthropology (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de Paris), and a PhD in theatre and performance studies (Aberystwyth University). His articles appear in international edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Greece. His research interests focus on performances of migration and refugeeness, contemporary re-readings of ancient drama, performances of gender and sexuality, ritual performances of lament, as well as on the intersections between ethnography, narrative, and performance. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 153 ARTÍCULOS 1. introduCtion The increasing militarization of Europe’s external borders has led to severe human cost, not only during the ‘refugee crisis’, as it has come to be called since 2015, but at least since the early nineties.2 The dead bodies of displaced individuals reach European shores, in many cases unrecognizable and often without any known bonds of friend or family that would allow them to be grieved. The Mediterranean Sea –more specifically, the Aegean– has been accurately characterized as a ‘watery grave’: an expression that emphasizes the impossibility of localizing death, while alluding also to the question of unidentified, unmourned bodies. Even when survivors exist, the bodies of their drowned loved ones are often not taken out of the water, at least not immediately. The bereaved are impelled to continue their journey to their final destinations, when they do not find themselves in detention centres, or struggling to survive in Greek cities. Yet, as Jacques Derrida points out, ‘without a fixed (arreêté) place, without a determinable topos, mourning is not allowed’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, pág. 111).3 Meaning both fixed and stopped, the French word arreêté suggests that displaced people are often deprived of both spatial and temporal frameworks that would allow them to engage in ‘the work of mourning’ (Derrida, 2001). Moreover, to use Judith Butler’s terms (2004, 2009), the lives of displaced people are considered as less worthy of being grieved than others, or as not worthy of being grieved at all. This hierarchy of grief reflects, in Butler’s analysis, the exclusion of these ‘Other’ lives from the very category of the human: ‘the derealization of the ‘Other’ means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral; (2004, pgs. 33-4). In the contemporary conditions of displacement, mourning is not allowed to take place; suspended, it enters into a ghostly state of limbo. How, then, can displaced mourning be transformed through performance?4 How can displaced people who survive the dangers of crossing the border speak about their experiences of loss and mourning through the language of theatre, and of ancient drama in particular? What is at stake when their laments are mediated by staging practices and cultural institutions of the reception country? And what are the dynamics between the overall framework of the performance and the performative material proposed by the participants themselves?5 With these questions Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 155 ARTÍCULOS as its point of departure, this article examines the performance We are the Persians: a contemporary adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Persians, directed by Yolanda Markopoulou, and performed by the Station Athens Group (Chalil Alizada, Reza Mohammadi, Hossain Amiri, Reza Muosevi, Aidim Joymal, and Ramzan Muhammad), displaced people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Growing out of the group’s fiveyear theatre workshops, the piece premiered on the 3rd of June 2015 at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, at the postindustrial venue of Pireos 260.6 Extracts from the original play by Aeschylus were combined with performative material brought to the project by the participants: from real-life testimonies to vocal improvisations, poems, and songs in their different languages: Farsi, Dari (Persian as it is spoken in Afghanistan), Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, English, and modern Greek. Highlighting the historical thematic of the play, this adaptation was presented as a documentary theatre piece, and the participants as ‘modern-day heralds’ who, through ‘shocking accounts’ of both their journeys to, and their lives in, Athens, connect ‘the war-torn zones of Kabul’ with ‘incidents of violence and racism in everyday Greek society’ (programme notes, 2015). In what follows, after briefly revisiting the main body of literature on the lamenting voice in ancient drama and in Aeschylus’s The Persians in particular, but also after discussing the recent stage history of the play in Greece, I will conduct a close reading of this adaptation. Based on semi-directed interviews and audiovisual archives from both the rehearsals and the final performance, I will argue that an appreciation of the participants’ performance cannot be limited to their auto-biographical testimonies that identify them as refugees and/or asylum seekers. By intertwining the words of Aeschylus with their own voices and languages, I will suggest, they reappropriate and reinvent the lamenting voice of ancient drama. In this sense, We are the Persians! can be read as a hybrid performance of heteroglossia, which disrupts and potentially transforms dominant ways of receiving ancient drama in modern Greece. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 156 ARTÍCULOS 2. the VoiCe of LaMent: ModaLities Between the ‘other’ and the ‘seLf’ Attic tragedy has been widely cherished in modern Greece as a ‘national heritage’. Lament was a key trope in the construction of cultural continuity between modern Greeks and their supposed ‘ancestors’: searching for ways to interpret the ancient thrēnos, ‘revivals’ of Greek dramas have often recurred to the mimesis of bodily and/or vocal elements of laments from rural Greece (Sampatakakis, 2016), which were in their turn considered as ‘survivals’ of an uninterrupted oral tradition (Zambelios, [1852]1986; Politis, 1914; Chatziprokopiou, 2018). These ideological premises have a deep imprint: according to Vasiliki Lalioti’s ethnographic account, for many Greek theatre artists, the heritage of ancient drama is seen as something ‘naturally’ related to their origins, often compared to a stream which ‘flows in their blood’ (2010). Lalioti’s interlocutors consider that, ‘as descendants of ancient Greeks, they own the privilege to stage correctly ancient drama’ because ‘the body remembers’ (ibid, 101, emphasis in original). Foreigners cannot grasp the meaning of ancient drama because they are not born in Greece; ‘like people, art grows from the land’; ‘ancient theatre grows from the earth together with the grass’ (pg. 129). But if tragedy, the art of mourning, is so strictly associated to a topos, how then can displaced people, whose mourning is deprived of a determinable topos (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000), lament on the modern Greek tragic stage? The choice of location is significant: We Are the Persians! was presented indoors: not in the one of the numerous open-air ancient amphi-theatres where tragedies are performed every summer, growing ‘from the earth together with the grass’, but at the post-industrial venue of Pireos 260. How then can those excluded from the nation-state re-cite, re-appropriate, or even reinvent its central dramatic canon? Theatre and nationalism have been connected in modern European nation-states, Marvin Carlson reminds us: national theatres in particular have contributed to ‘the formation of a unified and univocal people by presenting the history and myths of that people in their own language’ (Carlson, 2009, pg. 4). Cases such as We Are the Persians! disrupt this homogenizing univocality7 allowing different voices to emerge. In studying the using and mixing of multiple languages in the theatre as part of an increasingly globalized world, Carlson takes up Mikhail Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 157 ARTÍCULOS Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, focusing on the idea that ‘languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways’ (1981, pg. 291). Although Bakhtin had in fact seen theatre as a monologic form (1984, pg. 17), Carlson extends the concept of heteroglossia to theatre and performance. Connecting James Clifford’s reading of heteroglossia as a ‘bewildering diversity of idioms’ which gives place to ‘inventive syncretism’ (1988, pg. 23) with Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘cultural hybridity’, which ‘entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’ (1994, pg. 25), Carlson shows how the model of a ‘dominant monoglossia’ is being replaced by multivocal, multilingual performances, ‘coming together in a particular power relationship, but producing a wide and by no means predictable variety of heteroglossic compromises’ (2009, pg. 107). This becomes even more relevant for the adaptation under study, where the nation’s Others intersect diverse voices and languages in their performance of the nation’s heritage. Ιt becomes especially relevant in that The Persians itself can be seen as one of the earliest examples of theatrical heteroglossia, Carlson remarks, in its ‘attempt (…) to give dramatic expression of the voice of the Other’ (2009, pg. 24), and to depict confrontation of languages. Studying the style and language in the play, Edith Hall (1996) unpacks the use of several exotic words through which Aeschylus attempts to approximate the sounds of Persian, and points out that there is a sharp difference between the Greek bellicose scream (ὦ παῖδες Ἑλλήνων, ἴτε) and the ‘confused clamour’ (ῥόθος) of the Persian army, whilst the enumeration of the Persian names (Pharandakes, Dotamas Agdabatas, Psammis, Sousiskanes, Seualkes, Memphis, Tharybis, Masistras, Artembares, Hystaikhmas, etc.) would possibly have sounded unusual for Greek audiences. The choice of the earliest extant Western drama for an adaptation by refugees and asylum seekers from Asian countries is in danger of being seen, nonetheless, as imbued by colonial stereotypes. For Εdward Said, The Persians is one of the first examples of Orientalism in Western cultural production, in the sense that the East is represented according to the imagination of a non-Eastern poet, whilst it is compared with the West (here: Athens) on the basis of binary contradictions: ‘Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant’ (1978, pg. 57). With his point of departure an Athenian victory, Aeschylus stages the laments of Others; as Gail Holst-Warhaft puts it, in this play ‘[t]he Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 158 ARTÍCULOS defeated hero is a Persian, an Eastern barbarian. His mourning can be staged in a way that could not be acceptable in a Greek hero’ (1992, pg. 130). Juxtaposing rationality with frenzy, self-control with excessive corporeality, structured discourse with inarticulate shrieks, civic thinking with despotism, masculinity with femininity etc., otherness in The Persians is staged on multiple levels through the performance of lament. Edith Hall underlines that ‘the dirge, unusually, is performed by men, and is of inordinate length and emotional abandonment; excessive mourning practices were considered «barbaric» and discouraged in Athens’ (1989, pg. 86). Calling the men of the chorus to join him in the final antiphonal lament —through a desperate refrain, repeated three times— Xerxes, the defeated Persian King, evokes gestures of excessive lamentation: ‘and keep striking breasts and keep crooning wails’ ‘Din back my howling, my thumping’ (καὶ στέρν᾽ ἄρασσε κἀπιβόα τὸ Μύσιον, Πέρσ. 1054), ‘and tug, pull out white hair from your beards (καί μοι γενείου πέρθε λευκήρη τρίχα, Πέρσ. 1056), ‘and rip heavy robes with fingers hooked’ (πέπλον δ᾽ ἔρεικε κολπίαν ἀκμῇ χερῶν, Πέρσ. 1060), ‘and strip out your hair, lament an army lost’ (και ψάλλ’ έθειραν και κατοίκτισαι στρατόν, Πέρσ. 1034).8 Tearing their beards and clothes, beating their own bodies, emitting piercing cries, the Persians become ‘the antitype of the idealized [Greek] male’ (Foley 2002, pg. 29). From the mourning gestures described above, to the explicit ‘references to Mariandynian and Mysian styles of mourning’ (Ibid), the performance of lament that is represented is ‘distinctively un-Greek’: it is a proof of oriental barbarity and feminization. Although Aeschylus’ The Persians has been studied from the point of view of Orientalism, more complex readings unpack its potential to work out, and possibly challenge, the binaries between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. As Nicole Loraux famously argued, through the ‘interplay between Athenian-Persian, man-woman, soldier-citizen, barbarian-civilized, Athens invents itself’ (2006, pg. 57). Drawing on Loraux, Olga Taxidou suggests in her turn that ‘this play proceeds to undermine these oppositions and show them as interchangeable, in the same way as the Athenians can be the Persians’ (2004, pg. 16) Thus, the tragedy is not simply a patriotic paean, depicting oriental Others, but ‘a historical critique that places both ourselves and the victims within a historico-political trajectory’ (Ibid). David Rosenbloom (1995, pgs. 91-130) and Pierre Judet de la Combe (2011, pgs. 87-103) also remark that Aeschylus seems Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 159 ARTÍCULOS to invite his co-citizens to mourn a disaster that could potentially harm them, warning them about the possibilities of such a perspective. Following these scholars, I wish to avoid a rather superficial critique of the performance as an orientalist staging of ‘the pain of Others’; conversely, I aim to demonstrate how, through the materiality of their hybrid lament, the participants do not simply bear witness to their woes, calling out to the compassion or sympathy of Greek audiences, but address the spectators’ empathy, and redefine the reception of ancient drama. Focusing on ‘the sound of the cry’, Nicole Loraux exposed in her study the vocal aspects of ancient drama that are frequently dismissed in contemporary translations and/or adaptations. The key point of her analysis is the juxtaposition between aiaî (αἰαῖ), the tragic interjection, often translated into English as alas, and aeì (ἀεί), the temporal adverb that means ‘ever’. According to Loraux, aeì, the adverb, refers to the political sphere manifested through articulated discourse (lógos); to the city, democracy, and eternity. In contrast, aiaî, the interjection, marks what she calls the ‘anti-political’ voice of the tragedy (phō nē ), the ‘index of the tragic’: lying beyond language, this is another language of lamentation’ (2002, pg. 60). In contrast to the official funeral oration (epitáphios lógos) that eulogized the community of andres, the autochthonous male Athenian citizens and soldiers (polítes-oplítes), the anti-political voice of the tragedy encompasses the broader unity of the merely mortal, the rest of humanity (ánthropoi), including the women, the migrants, and the barbarians. And further, Loraux suggests, aiaî is untranslatable: it is a pure signifier. Its function is purely aural. Connecting theatre scholarship and practice, Loraux recounts that it was from her personal experience of the vocally charismatic performance of French actress Maria Casarés as Hecuba at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers (1988) that she ‘understood that aiaî not only should not be translated as alas, but it should not be translated at all’ (Ibid, pg. 151). She also points out that ‘it is in Aeschylus, in The Persians, in this long lamentation in barbaric idiom as it is imagined by a Greek, that we can follow very closely the sonic variations of the cry and the work fulfilled by tragedy on the register of mourning’ (2002, pg. 64). As Loraux underlines, the dilemma of the self and the other that cuts across several tragic texts is exemplarily illustrated in the cry uttered in Aeschylus’ The Persians: ‘[t]here we hear the name the chorus gives the Ionians, Iaonon. This name of the conquerors resounds, toward the end of the tragedy, Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 160 ARTÍCULOS like a variation on an interminable lamentation’ (2002, pg. 41).9 But how has the vocal materiality of lament, and the dilemma between the other and the self, been worked out in the stage history of this play? In what follows, I will attempt an indicative revision of The Persians’ reception on the modern Greek Stage, limiting myself to three major directors whose projects are significant for my discussion here: Dimitris Rondiris, Karolous Koun, and Theodoros Terzopoulos.10 3. The Persians on the Modern Greek staGe As Edith Hall has demonstrated, ‘the play’s patriotic sentiments have long since made it a favourite in Greece’ (1989, pg. 24). A key example in this direction is Dimitris Rondiris’11 staging in 1939, 1946, and 1948; the last two times in the midst of the Greek Civil-War (1945-1949). Here, the victory of the Athenians over the Persians becomes a metaphor for the future victory of the ‘National Army’ (Ethnikos Stratos) over the ‘Democratic Army’ (Dimokratikos Stratos) of the left-wing partisans,12 and it was used by both the Greek right and the National Theatre ‘as a nationalist tract to sanction their repressive brand of political consolidation’ (Van Steen 2016, pg. 209). Theatre as a constitutive trope of a univocal, uniform community which excludes ‘dangerous Others’ is fully at play here: when The Persians was presented on the island of Rhodes (on the 11th of July 1947, only a few months after the ceding of the Dodecanese to the Greek state) writer Stratis Myrivilis, himself the vice-president of the Board of the National Theatre at that time, introduced the play with a speech in which he called the audience ‘to recognize in every Persian onstage ‘a Greek guerrilla-fighter, or a Russian invader’11, not necessarily with the director’s approval, but with no less than the artistic director’s tolerance’ (Sampatakakis 2021, pg. 19). This nationalist reading of The Persians was materialized in the eurythmic ‘joint reciting of the Chorus parts’ (pg. 16), the ‘stylistic canonization of the choral odes into one monophonically psalmodic «voice»’ (pg. 17), at odds with the antiphonal structure of Aeschylus’ lamentation which, as I will contend, is reinvented by the Station Athens group.14 In contrast to Rondiris’ monophonic Sprechchor the music, of the avant-garde composer Yannis Christou for the staging οf the play by the pioneer theatre director Karolous Koun attempted to render audible Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 161 ARTÍCULOS the modalities of the lamenting scream through a polyphonic universe which pushed the voice to its limits. According to Hall, this notorious production, which premiered at London’s World Theatre Season in 1966 –the parameters of international touring already disrupting the aura of a univocal, monoglot community of spectators, introducing surtitled translation (Carslon, pg. 168)– is ‘perhaps the first to use the play to criticize ‘the barbarian within’, the internal tyrant embodied in the hard right-wing of Greek politics’ (Hall 1989, pg. 24). It is noteworthy that the international impact of the performance contributed to the philhellene currents which would soon put pressure on the Greek dictatorship of 1967-74. As Hall remarks, ‘[d]uring subsequent revivals, the figures equated with the tyrannical Persian king become, paradoxically, Greeks themselves: the loathed dictators’ (Ibid, pgs. 24-5).15 From a representation of enemies, internal or external, Aeschylus’s The Persians became, at the beginning of the 21st century, a springboard for undoing any binary between ‘enemy’ and ‘friend’, ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’. In 2009, Theodoros Terzopoulos staged the play with a mixed cast of both Greek and Turkish actors, exclusively male. In the director’s words, this nationally and linguistically diverse chorus ‘represents the two neighbouring people that lament their common destiny’ (2013, personal interview). Pushing Christou’s and Koun’s exploration of the ancient scream even further, Terzopoulos composed in this performance an antiphonal structure, alternating between Turkish and Greek sounds, namely between Attic exclamations and ecstatic Sufi laments. Mixing a text which is often regarded as part of the Greek ‘national heritage’ with the language of the ‘national enemy’, and vocalizing a hybrid, syncretic lament, this Turkish-Greek production materialized on stage, and to a great extent transcended, the tensions between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ that are raised in the original. The Persians is therefore a play that haunts the Greek stage, posing the problem of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ in different ways: from 1946 Rondiris’ nationalistic view of the communist threat –both internal and external–, to 1966 Koun’s and Christou’s ‘enemy within’ with reference to the loathed dictators and, finally, to 2009 Terzopoulos’ reconciliatory co-performance between two neighbouring peoples, historically considered ‘enemies’. These ideological displacements are materialized, I suggest, through the very modalities of lament: from Rondiris’ monophonic Sprechchor to Koun’s/Christou’s polyphonies and, Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 162 ARTÍCULOS finally to Terzopoulos’ post-confrontational intersection of different languages. Keeping in mind this stage history helps us grasp the adaptation under study, in which the trope of The Persians emerges once again in order to depict the nation’s Other: now not the enemy, but the displaced. It also allows us to follow this trajectory from monoglossia to heteroglossia and to trace how the voice of lament is reinvented in its antiphonal modalities. Let me then focus, from now on, on what takes place on stage. Figure 1. We Are the Persians!, photo courtesy by Elina Yanounli 4. Beyond the testiMony Before the lights go out, the participants are already on stage, talking loudly in their mother-tongues. The first scene reminds one of a diplomatic assembly: six formally dressed men sit behind a long conference table. Each one has the flag of his country placed in front of him. One after the other they stand-up, take the microphone, and introduce themselves to the audience in Greek. Chalil Alizada, Reza Mohammadi, Hossain Amiri and Reza Muosevi are in their thirties, Afghans of Hazara background.16 The middle-aged Ramzan Mohammad, mostly known as Lefteris, comes from Pakistan, and the young Aidim Joyimal from Bangladesh. Chalil begins by defining the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’, while Hossain explains the complex regulations regarding the Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 163 ARTÍCULOS movement of displaced people in Europe. The participants proceed into more personal narratives, and they take turns in revealing their reasons for fleeing. Regardless of their nationality, they all agree that their life was in danger: they fled in order to survive. Hazara Afghans speak about the successive wars that have shaken their country during recent decades, but also about the harsh persecutions they suffered at the hands of the Taliban: ‘My father kicked me out of home in order to save my life’, states Chalil, ‘otherwise, I may not be here to tell you my story’. ‘My mother died because of the war’, states Hossain, states, in his turn, ‘my father never came back’. Although their countries have not been fully destroyed by war, Lefteris and Aidim have also felt their lives in danger: from everyday violence to kidnappings, terrorist attacks, but also extreme poverty. Being refugees in Iran since their very early childhood, Reza Muosevi and Reza Muhammadi explain that in this country Afghan people are deprived of basic human rights, and they suffer extreme racist exclusions; as Muosevi suggests, Afghans are treated in Iran just as Albanians, at least some years previously, were treated in Greece: as ‘not-entirely humans’, as ‘cockroaches’, Reza says. After this point, Hossain revives his memories from the war in Afghanistan. The arrival of the Taliban is reenacted. The stage lighting turns dark blue. We listen to the first verses of The Persians in Farsi. Then, a vocal, rhythmic music emerges, serving as the background to the recorded voices that will follow. A large boat is placed in the centre of the stage, while the participants recite Aeschylus’ verses in modern Greek. The lights are focused on the boat, leaving the conference table at the front in the dark. Do the painful testimonies included in this initial scene suggest that we should approach the performance in terms of documentary theatre? The director foregrounds such an approach in the programme, and she further connects it with Aeschylus’ own participation in the battle of Salamis. As Attilo Favorini argues, ‘Aeschylus’ fact-driven Persians can be identified as the first extant example of the documentary impulse in Western theatre’ (2008, pg. 47) not only because of the participation of the poet in the events he narrates, but also because it ‘initiates an argument of how theatre represents history that persists to the present’ (Ibid). ‘I was there. I can tell you, no hearsay’ (Pers., , pgs. 266-7) (καὶ μὴν παρών γε κοὐ λόγους ἄλλων κλύων, Πέρσαι, φράσαιμ᾽ ἂν οἷ᾽ ἐπορσύνθη κακά) asserts the messenger, and this Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 164 ARTÍCULOS phrase can easily connect to the participants on stage as eyewitnesses of the stories they tell. Yet, does the core of the performance lie in the truth of the participants’ testimonies? And how is truth defined? To make a story out of an experience is always a performative inventio, let alone when one’s life literally depends on the persuasive power of this telling. For an asylum seeker, an ‘infelicitous’ performance of his/her displacement –infelicitous in relation to the predefined terms of asylum services– can lead to the rejection of the application and, possibly, to a return to the country of origin, where (s)he faces life-threating conditions.17 As one of the performers had asked in the previous, fully autobiographical, show by the group, where he was telling his personal story: ‘what if somebody from the asylum services comes to see our show, and realizes that my two stories are not exactly identical? Will this mean I had not told the truth?’ Although some critics emphasize the documentary aspects of the play, describing the connections with Aeschylus’ text as ‘too loose’ (Koltsidopoulou, 2015) or ‘perhaps superfluous’ (Petasi, 2015), while refusing to judge the outcome in aesthetic terms, others do highlight its artistic value. Theatre scholar Dimitris Tsatsoulis describes ‘some excellent singing parts but also the movement competence of the performers’ who presented their testimonies ‘in proper theatrical and artistic manner’ (2015, my translation).18 In his study on intercultural theatre and the reception of ancient tragedy, Tsatsoulis underlines how the participants’ mother tongues, untranslated, work in the performance under study, ‘enriching it with polyglossia and therefore with a character of multicultural theatre, which in its turn becomes a niche of another culture within the national (geographically located) identity’ (2017, pg. 41). Pushing Tsatsoulis’ point even further, I will explore how this is achieved through the vocal and the –untranslated– poetic material of the performance, creating a condition of heteroglossia on stage (Carlson, 2009). Although most of the lyrical parts of the ancient text cannot be heard in this adaptation, I propose that it is precisely the participants’ voices that reinvent them, as they articulate their own, antiphonal response to the ancient lament.19 Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 165 ARTÍCULOS Figure 2. We Are the Persians!, photo courtesy by Elina Yanounli Towards an antiphonal lament Once the boat is out, the lights are directed to the front. The participants’ narratives move from their experiences of forced displacement to their attempts to cross the borders: from the Asian mainland to the maritime Turkey-Greece border of the Aegean. Evoking the ‘watery grave’ of the Mediterranean, the lack of a determinable topos of mourning, the participants pay tribute to those who lost their lives in their attempts to cross the border through the same route. Taking-up the enumeration by Aeschylus of the Persian army’s deceased leaders (Pers., pgs. 296-326), they mention names, nationalities, and quantitative data of today’s displaced dead. Fragments of Aeschylus’s text which depict the maritime disaster of the defeated invaders are used here in relation to the losses of refugee lives in the same sea: the imagery of the Aegean today overflowing with corpses emerges through the narratives of the performers as an antiphonal response to fragments from The Persians, such as the chorus’ question (Pers., pgs. 274-279): ‘No nonono/ you’re saying/ those we love are floating, foundering awash/ dead men shrouded/ in sea-drowned cloaks?’ (ὀτοτοτοῖ, φίλων/ πολύδονα σώμαθ᾽ ἁλιβαφῆ/κατθανόντα λέγεις φέρεσθαι/ πλαγκτοῖς ἐν διπλάκεσσιν;). Or, a few verses afterwards, the Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 166 ARTÍCULOS messenger’s testimony (Pers., pg. 413-5) that ‘saltwater vanished before our eyes/ shipwrecks filled it, and drifting corpses/ Shores and reefs filled up with our dead’ (θάλασσα δ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἦν ἰδεῖν,/ ναυαγίων πλήθουσα καὶ φόνου βροτῶν,/ ἀκταὶ δὲ νεκρῶν χοιράδες τ᾽ ἐπλήθυον). The performers identify themselves as simple soldiers who, in this contemporary reading of the ancient play, come back to life and narrate their stories, before falling down dead once again.20 At some point, they begin swirling all around the boat. After a while, Hossain collapses on a mattress; this alludes, under the pale green lighting of the stage, to a military bed, or a tombstone. His colleagues surround the body. They hold one minute of silence. Lefteris stands up; holding in his hands the misbaha (the Islamic ‘equivalent’ of the Christian rosary containing ninety nine beads that correspond to the names of God), he recites the funeral prayer in Arabic. Gradually, one after the other, the performers fall to the floor. Reza Muhammedi stands in front of the bodies, and begins to sing, in Dari: Oh, what the habits of these times are. This is the tale of the leaf that trembles in the autumn wind. People are leaving nothing but memories about them remain Where is that lane? What happened to that house? Where its people are now? God knows.21 Singing forced displacement, human absence, but also memory as a unique presence, Reza evokes places which once upon a time were alive: ‘that house’, ‘that lane’. What has been loved -the house, the lane, peoplebecomes a question, to which it is impossible to respond. The following strophe links even more places with things and people, by juxtaposing a world which goes on (the world of flowers, places and even perfumes), with the fleeting world of humans who have to flee their homes in order to save their lives, or die: The jasmine of the beloved father still at the garden’s corner, inside the flowerpot its perfume has gone seven houses longer but where father himself is, God knows. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 167 ARTÍCULOS In this song, time, seasons and humans are in movement, in contrast to the still resilience of places. Each strophe is followed by a refrain: ‘people are leaving/nothing but memories about them remain’. The act of fleeing is recounted in the present tense; departure takes place now. They are leaving; in Farsi and Dari, miran. The use of this word is significant. In Farsi and Dari, verbs have two roots; one in the present, and one in the past tense. The verb to leave has the root ro (‫ )رروو‬for the present tense (that can also be read as rav), and the root raft (َ‫ )تفرر‬for the past tense; here, it is heard in two different tenses. Miran is its first version, composed by the root ro: rd 3 person plural, they are leaving, as it appears in the song above. The other, using the root raft, is raftan; past simple, 3dr person plural (they left). This word is heard repeatedly in the performance, as part of Aeschylus’ text, translated into Farsi, but also in the two final songs. Αs the performance’s musician states (2015), the word raftan works as a leitmotif, and marks the end of the performance when it is heard in two different songs. Moreover, the repetition of the verb ‘I leave’ in both tenses connects with similar repetitions in Aeschylus’ text: the verb οἴχομαι (to leave) appears five times: twice (the first at the beginning of the play) in the present participle (οἰχομένων), once in the present perfect (οἴχωκε) and once in the present tense (οἴχεται). The repetition of miran and raftan, but also the themes of the songs in which they are heard, work in counterpoint with the insistence of the ancient text on issues of fleeing, loss, and death. Figure 3. We Are the Persians!, photo courtesy by Elina Yanounli Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 168 ARTÍCULOS Unlike the complete disaster and the outburst of grief in which Aeschylus’s play culminates, We Are the Persians! challenges the perception of the refugee subject as a mere survivor, moving from death and mourning to regeneration and reintegration into life. To do this, the performers shed light on their current lives in Athens. Departing from Atossa’s dream in the first scene of The Persians, they speak about their own dreams, desires, and achievements in the Greek capital. The lights get brighter. Lefteris stands up and dances, moving his hips, singing into the microphone: ‘I’m a disco dancer!’. At intervals between his singing, he recounts that, although as a teenager back in Pakistan he really liked theatre and dance, he was afraid to express this interest, presuming that his family would be against it; now that he has the opportunity, he is ‘flying in the sky’. Through this quite unexpected act, I suggest, Lefteris playfully disrupts the ‘horizon of expectations’ (Jauss, 1982) of the audience, but also of the director, and the researcher. Instead of an exclusive use of ‘traditional songs’ ‘in their own languages’, Lefteris inscribes himself on the globalized stage of pop culture, mingling the Persian court’s lament with disco tunes. This twist does not lead to the one-sided happy-ending story. The stage does maintain the haze of nostalgia. Mirroring Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ (1940), the participants seem to be directed towards the future whilst continuing to look backwards: their mourning is never fully complete. It becomes memory: in the following scene, the performers address themselves to their relatives, alive or dead. Taking-up the invocation of King Darius and his spectral appearance, the performers address their loved ones in order to seek advice, but also (and here they digress from Aeschylus) in order to let them know about their current lives. In this sense, the performers operate on what Carlson calls a ‘haunted stage’ (2002); haunted not only by Aeschylus’ heritage, but also by the ghosts of those left behind. These ghosts are literally invoked on stage: during the scene, Hossain sings a lullaby which, Reza adds, ‘my grand-mother used to sing for me’. Its tune is tender; the verses though combine maternal memories with references to war and disaster, but also with hope for resistance: Lululay, lululay, my child Lululay, light of my eyes When the child will grow up the house will be destroyed Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 169 ARTÍCULOS but the child will become an Afghan lion-child an enemy of the foreign invaders22 Finally, a recorded lullaby begins to be heard, sung by two Greek performers, in Farsi. Repeating the word raftan once again, this draws on a Persian poem by Musharrif Od-Di ̂ n Sa’adi: The little flowers are watching and following the white-white waters the birds left, they left in order to watch and to follow the winds23 The lights turn blue. The participants start leaving the boat and move backstage, leaving Reza alone in the centre. While the stage empties and the lullaby continues, he sings the following lament, marked again by the repetition of the word raftan: Everybody left, nobody stayed with us the ‘written fate’ of our soul, nobody read it Everybody left, but my heart is burnt by the unexpected How many ups and downs this world has how frigidly life treats us once upon a time I used to have a hundred friends but you see, today I find myself completely alone24 If, in the lullaby, raftan inscribes the condition of fleeing in the changing rhythms of nature (the flowers or the birds), in Reza’s lament the ones that depart are, once again, the people. The world’s ups and downs: the key tragic element of peripeteia, is interwoven here with solitude and abandonment. According to Reza (2015), the word raftan depicts the solitude of somebody who is bikas: ‘who has lost everybody, as everybody has left’. Moreover, he explains that ‘the song has its specific tune but, when I sang it, I changed some parts. At the end, when everybody is leaving, at the boat, I sing it with more voice, I am «dragging it» a bit’ (Muhammadi, 2015). This ‘dragging’ of the voice is essential for my argument. As Reza told me, this prolonged vocal improvisation he performs draws on the Iranian singing mode tahrir: a ‘technique of falsetto break or cracking of the voice’ (Azadehfar, 2004, pg. 301) that typically ‘does not carry Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 170 ARTÍCULOS poetic syllables; it rather carries some supplementary syllables, which sometimes are even meaningless’ (Ibid). The most common one is the meaningless sound ya, connected with the word yar (beloved), or the Arabic exclamation ya (equivalent to the English oh). Other particular words that can be used in the tahrir are jan or jun (soul), janam or junam (my soul), del or dele (heart), or delam (my heart), aziz aziz or aziz-i man (my dear), mahub-i man (my favourite), and even aman: this is an untranslatable exclamation widely used for vocal improvisations in several music cultures, among them the Greek style amanes.25 ‘I know that here in Greece there is something similar to tahrir in songs like rebetika,26 but in Iran we do it even more’, Reza explains. Having grown up in Iran as a refugee from Afghanistan, without having the opportunity to study traditional Persian music, he still skilfully makes use of one of its characteristic aspects that requires guided, specialized study. With the dream of becoming a professional singer, he brings this non-Afghan musical tradition to his new country of residence, as his own material in a loose adaptation of an ancient Greek play. In this sense, he navigates across countries and cultures, not only pushed by the urgency of survival but also by means of performance, as he articulates his own hybrid lament. At the end, the stage is empty, whilst Reza’s voice keeps emanating from backstage. Could we then hear this final ululation of the Iranian tahrir, through the voice of an Afghan performer, as an antiphonal response to the tragic aiaî which, as Loraux suggests, is a pure signifier, ‘another voice of lamentation’? Figure 4. We Are the Persians!, photo courtesy by Elina Yanounli Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 171 ARTÍCULOS 5. C onCLusion Throughout the performance, different languages and voices intersect: the participants utter Aeschylus’ text in Farsi and in modern Greek translation; poems and songs –both pop and traditional– in Dari and in English; informal chat in Urdu, Bengali, and Dari; testimonies in modern Greek; a prayer in Arabic; a poem in Farsi, recorded by the voices of two Greek performers. Complex power relations cut across this intersection of different languages: beyond the obvious inequality between their mother tongues and modern Greek, the language which dominates the performance, we also have to at least take into consideration the Afghanistan-Iran tension as it is reflected in the intersection of Farsi and Dari, the religious significance of classical Arabic, and English as the globalized lingua franca. The fact that most of these other languages, whose use is significantly limited in relation to modern Greek, remain untranslated and are not surtitled, does raise issues regarding the possibilities for the reception of the work, given the relative homogeneity (Greek and European) of the Athens Festival audiences. Yet, at the same time, it enhances what Carlson calls ‘linguistic collage’ in performances of postmodern heteroglossia, where languages intersect in a musical way, beyond meaning, as ‘a formal element of the composition’ (2009, pg. 174). This is particularly the case for tahrir, which functions in Persian music as a ‘pure signifier’: a sound, often wordless, that brings the human voice to its limits: to the falsetto, the crack, the break (Azadefar Ibid). It also brings us back to the sonority of the interjection αἰαῑ as it has been analysed by Nicole Loraux: as an ‘index of the tragic’, beyond language, as a pure signifier. Connecting Carlson’s study on theatrical heteroglossia with Loraux’s analysis of the mourning voice (2002) which focused on the untranslatable utterances and the sonorous materiality of words which are lost in translation, I suggest that, through the several songs performed in different languages, the use of leitmotif-words such as raftan, the recitations of the ancient text both in Farsi and Modern Greek, the initial informal chat in their mother tongues, the funeral prayer in Arabic but, above all, through the function of tahrir as a pure signifier, the participants compose their own syncretic, hybrid lament, and they articulate their antiphonal response to the vocal materiality of ancient lamentation. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 172 ARTÍCULOS This is how, I suggest, although excluded from the nation-state, the participants in We Are the Persians! cite, reappropriate, and at the same time creatively disrupt, the canon of Attic tragedy through the performative material they themselves bring on stage. Thus, We Are the Persians! cannot be interpreted exclusively as a documentary and/or auto-biographical theatre, in which the ‘refugee testimonies’ borrow the status of a Western form of ‘high art’, strategically used by the modern Greek state as a constitutive trope of national identity. At once performers and co-authors, the participants come to take ownership of this ‘classical heritage’ which, as I have shown, is to a great extent perceived as an exclusive property that ‘flows in the blood’ of native Greek (Lalioti and Papapavlou 2010). Twisting the potentially colonial utterance We Are the Persians! in their own terms, they de-colonize, even if temporarily, the modern Greek stage (Balme, pg. 1999), as they unsettle and redefine dominant ways of receiving ancient drama. However, the question as to whether refugees and/or asylum-seekers could ever be invited to engage with ancient Greek drama as anything other than Persians or Supplicants remains open. Would an Afghani Oedipus, or a Pakistani Antigone, be allowed to appear, this time not in the post-industrial venue of Pireos 260, but in the ancient theatre of Epidaurus? And, more importantly, would the logic of representation inscribed within the practices of the Greek stage remain untroubled by the increasingly dynamic stage presence of displaced people? 6. r eferenCes Aeschylus, The Persians, translated by Janet Lembke and C. H. Herington (1991). New York Oxford: Oxford University Press. Almohanna, Mohammad (2016). ‘Greek Drama in the Arab World’ in Betine van Zyl Smit (ed.), A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama, John Wiley & Sons: Chichester, pp. 364-381. Arvaniti Katerina (2010). Η αρχαία ελληνική τραγωδία στο Εθνικό Θέατρο. Τόμ. Α΄: Θωμάς Οικονόμου – Φώτος Πολίτης – Δημήτρης Ροντήρης (Ancient Greek tragedy in the National Theatre. Vol. I: Thomas Oikonomou – Fotos Politis – Dimitris Rondiris). Nefeli: Athens. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 173 ARTÍCULOS Azadehfar, Mohammad Reza (2004). Rhythmic Structure in Iranian Music. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Bakhtin, Michail (1981). Discourse in the Novel. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. ______ (1984). Problems in Dostoyevski Poetics. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London. Balme, Christopher (1999). Decolonizing the Stage. Clarendon Press: Oxford. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge: London and New York. Butler, Judith (2004). Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso: London and New York. ______ (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?. Brooklyn: Verso. Cabot, Heath (2014). On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece. University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia. ______ (2013). ‘The social aesthetics of eligibility: NGO aid and indeterminacy in the Greek asylum process’, American Ethnologist, Volume 40, Issue 3, pp. 452–466. Carlson, Marvin (2003). The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor. Clifford, James (1988). The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography. Literature, and Art. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England. Chatziprokopiou, Marios (2018). ‘Queering the Archive of Greek Laments’, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Volume 4, Number 2, pp. 223–238. ______ (2017). ‘Hosting the lament(s) of Others? Tensions and antinomies in Dries Verhoeven’s No Man’s Land’, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Volume 3, Number 2, pp. 161-176. ______ (2017). Displaced Laments. Performing Mourning and Exile in Contemporary Greece. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Aberystwyth University, Wales, U.K. Derrida, Jacques (2001). The Work of Mourning. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle (2000). Of Hospitality. transl. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford University Press: Stanford. Favorini, Attilo (2008). Memory in Play. From Aeschylus to Sam Shepard. Palgrave Macmillan: New York. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 174 ARTÍCULOS Foley, Helen P. (2002) [1992]. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton University Press: Princeton. Glytzouris, Antonis (2011). Η σκηνοθετική τέχνη στην Ελλάδα. Η ανάδυση και η εδραίωση της τέχνης του σκηνοθέτη στο νεοελληνικό θέατρο (The art of directing in Greece. The emergence and establishment of directing in the modern Greek theatre). Irakleio: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis. Hall, Edith (1989). Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York. Hardwick, Lorna and Carol Gillespie (2007). Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Holst-Warhaft, Gail (1992). Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature. Routledge: London and New York. ______ «Amanes: The Legacy of the Oriental Mother» [http://www. umbc.edu/MA/ index/number5/holst/holst_0.htm (17.1.2020)]. Jeffers, Alison (2012). Refugees, Theatre and Crisis. Performing Global Identities. Palgrave Hampshire, Basingstoke. Judet de la Combe, Pierre (2011), «Il mito interpreta la storia. I Persiani», in Αnna Beltrametti (ed.), La storia sulla scena. Quello che gli storici antichi non hanno raccontato, minutes of the International Conference Attica di V secolo [in the original: Padua 18-20 febbraio 2010, Carocci: Rome, pp. 87- 103. Karaoglou, Tonia (2014). «Από τη Μαρτυρία στη Σκηνή» (‘From testimony to the stage’), elculture, 18.11.2014 [https://www. elculture.gr/blog/article/efyga-apo-proto-xeri/], without page enumeration. Koltsidopoulou, Anni (2015). «Περσών Προσφύγων Αναζήτηση» (‘Searching the Persian Refugees’), Kathimerini 21.06.2015 [https://www.kathimerini.gr/culture/theater/819873/personprosfygon-anazitisi/], without page enumeration. Lalioti, Vassiliki and Papapavlou, Maria (2010), «... Γιατί κυλά στο αίμα μας». Από το αρχαί ο δράμα στο φλαμέ νκο. Επιστρέ φοντας την Ανθρωπολογί α στο πεδί ο της εμπειρί ας (‘... Because it’s in our blood’. From ancient Greek drama to flamenco: bringing anthropology back to the field of experience.), Kritiki: Athens. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 175 ARTÍCULOS Last, Tamara (2016). ‘«Who is the ‘Boat Migrant»? Challenging the Anonymity of Death by Border-Sea’, in Violeta Moreno-Lax and Efthymios Papastavridis (eds.), Boat Refugees’ and Migrants at Sea: A Comprehensive Approach, Brill: Leiden, pp. 79-116. Loraux, Nicole (2002), The Mourning Voice. An Essay on Greek Tragedy. Trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, Cornell University Press: Ithaca. ______ (1986). The Invention of Athens. The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. Trans. Alan Sheridan, Harvard University Press: Cambridge. Monsutti, Alessandro (2007). ‘Image of the Self, Image of the Other: Social Organization and the Role of «Ashura» among the Hazaras of Quetta (Pakistan)’, in Alessandro Monsutti, Silvia Naef και Farian Sabahi (eds.), The Other Shiites. From the Mediterranean to Central Asia, Peter Lang AG: Bern, pp. 173-194. Moullas, Panayotis (1992). O λό γος της Απουσί ας (The Discourse of Absence), MIET: Athens. Petasi, Eleni (2015). «Είμαστε οι Πέρσες! Κριτική θεάτρου» (We Are the Persians! A theatre critique), clickatlife, https://www.clickatlife. gr/theatro/story/57777. 22.6.2015. without page enumeration. Remoundou-Howley, Anastasia (2015). ‘The Suppliants of Syria: Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement in Refugee Performances of Greek Tragedy’, The Arab Journal of Performance Studies, 5, pp. 16-30. ______ (2019), ‘Intercultural Performance Ecologies in the Making: Minor(ity) Theatre and the Greek Crisis’, in: Charlotte McIvor και Jason King (eds.), Interculturalism and Performance Now. New Directions?, Palgrave Macmillan: New York, pp. 283-309. Rosenbloom, David (1995). ‘Myth, History and Hegemony in Aeschylus’, in: Barbara Goff (ed.), History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, University of Texas Press: Austin, pp. 91-130. Said, Edward W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Sampatakakis, George (2021). ‘Chorus Lines: Cultural Formalisms, Crisis, and the Death of Continuity in Modern Greek Theatre’, in A. Bakogianni (ed.), Creativity vs. Tradition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 176 ARTÍCULOS Sampatakakis, George (2019). «Πικροθρηνωδώντας ως βαριόμοιρη. Το ιδεολόγημα των εθνικών τραγωδών και η επιτέλεση του θρήνου» (‘The ideology of national tragedy and the performance of lament’), 14th International Symposium of Ancient Drama: ‘Lament in ancient Greek drama’, Cypriot Centre of the International Theatre Institute-Minister of Education, Cyprus, Nicosia, p. 135-150. Taxidou Olga (2004). Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburg. Tsatsoulis, Dimitris (2015). «Πρόσφυγες: Οι Aλλοι Πέρσες» (‘Refugees: The Other Persians’), Imerodromos, [https://www.imerodromos.gr/perses (17/1/2020)], (without page enumeration). ______ (2017). Δυτικό ηγεμονικό «παράδειγμα» και διαπολιτισμικό θέατρο. Για την πρόσληψη του αρχαιοελληνικού δράματος στην Ελληνική και μη Δυτική Σκηνή (Western hegemonic ‘paradigm’ and intercultural theatre. On the reception of ancient Greek drama in Greek and non-Western Stage), Papazisis: Athens. Van Steen, Gonda (2015). Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Vourloumis, Hypatia (2014). ‘«Come and see what we do»: Contemporary Migrant Performances in Athens, Greece’, Theatre Journal, Volume 66, Number 2, pp. 241-255. Wilmer, Stephen E. (2016). ‘Cultural Encounters in Modern Productions of Greek Tragedy’, Nordic Τheatre Studies, Volume 28, Number 1, pp. 15-26. 7. interViews Amiri, Hossain, interview in Greek, July 2014, outside, Metaxourgeio, Avdi Square. Azivada, Chalil, interview in Greek, July 2014, cafe, Exarchia. Joyimal, Aidim, interview in Greek, January 2015, cafe, Metaxourgeio. Markopoulu, Yolanda, interview in Greek, November 2015, her office, Kolonaki. Muhammadi, Reza interview in Greek, November 2015, Synergy-O. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 177 ARTÍCULOS Pigounis, Lambros, interview in Greek, November 2015, cafe, Ano Petralona. Ramzan, Muhammad (Lefteris), interview in Greek, September 2014, Metaxourgeio, outside. Rezaian, Arezu, interview in Greek, November 2015, cafe, close to Panteion University. 8. Notas 1 2 3 This article is based on fieldwork research I conducted for the purposes of my PhD thesis (Chatziprokopiou, 2017). I am grateful to my interlocutors Hossain Amiri, Chalil Azivada, Aidim Joyimal, Reza Muhammadi, Muhammad Ramzan, (Lefteris), Lambros Pigounis, and Yolanda Markopoulou for their confidence, and to Arezoo Rezaian who generously translated and transcribed the songs in Farsi. I would also like to thank Elina Younanli for kindly granting permission to her photographs from the show. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for her/his insightful remarks, and to Julie Northey for proofreading the entire text. According to the Deaths at the Borders Database, 3,188 people trying to reach Europe were found dead between 1990 and 2013, whilst ‘65 per cent of bodies retrieved by local authorities along the external borders of Greece, Malta, Italy, Gibraltar and Spain from 1/1/1990 to 31/12/2013 remain unidentified by those authorities’ (Last 2016, pg. 79). Reflecting on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Jacques Derrida reminds us that the place of Oedipus’ grave remains, by his own will, unknown to everybody except Theseus. It is precisely because Antigone ignores the exact location of her father’s grave, Derrida suggests, that she ‘weeps at being deprived of a normal mourning. She weeps for her mourning, if that is possible’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, pg. 111). Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 178 ARTÍCULOS 4 5 6 In a previous work (Chatziprokopiou, 2017), I refer to other modern Greek productions that have recently addressed the issue of forced displacement and dangerous border-crossing. See, for instance, Themelis Glynatsis’sstaging of Angélica Liddell’s ‘And the Fish Rise Up and Wage War Against Mankind’ (Athens Festival, 2014) which poetically addressed the Mediterranean as a ‘watery grave’; Anestis Azas’ Case Farmakonisi or The Right of Water (Athens Festival and National Theatre’s Experimental Stage, 2015), a documentary theatre piece investigating one of the numerous deadly shipwrecks related to border-crossing attempts in the Aegean; or Vangelis Theodoropoulos’ staging of Anders Lustgarten’s verbatim play Lampedusa (Theatro tou Neou Kosmou, 2016), which revolved around the 2013 shipwreck a few miles from the Italian island that cost the lives of more than 300 refugees. In that article, I examined in detail Dries Verhoeven’s walking performance piece No Man’s Land (Onassis Cultural Centre/ Fast Forward Festival, 2014) which, in contrast to the works mentioned above, was performed by migrants, refugees and/or asylum seeker themselves, whilst it was not presented on a theatre stage, but in the public space of Athens. Similar questions regarding contemporary reappropriations of ancient drama are examined by recent scholarship from the point of view of reception studies. See indicatively Hardwick and Gillespie, 2007, Almohanna 2016, S. E. Wilmer 2016, Remoundou-Howley 2015. For an analysis of the performance We Are the Persians! as a case of ‘minor literature’, in the terms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, see Remoundou-Howley, 2019, pgs. 283-309. The group begun working on the thematic trope of the journey with the performance Station Athens in 2011, and they continued with the idea of a new ‘station’ with the open rehearsal/performance We Are Home in 2012. The group started working on Aeschylus’s The Persians, presenting a first version of it in 2013. From that process, life stories of forced displacement, mourning, and exile emerged, and were articulated in the performance I_LEFT (2014). Combining personal stories and material with ancient tragedy, the group presented We Are the Persians! which premiered at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival in 2015. Produced by Polyplanity Productions – Synergy-O, the show toured in festivals in Finland, and was repeated in Athens in the ‘mind the gap festival’ in May 2017. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 179 ARTÍCULOS 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 We have of course to take in consideration that this homogenizing univocality in the Greek case is relative, as Aeschylus in the original remains incomprehensible to the average modern Greek reader, and thus is mediated through –intralingual– translation. Throughout this article, I follow Janet Lembke and C. H. Herington’s translation of Aeschylus’ text (1991). This is repeated in the following variations throughout the piece: Iaonon (twice), Iaon (twice), Ianon. Moreover, in We Are the Persians, the Farsi name for Greece and the Greeks –Yunan and Yunani– is also repeated several times, resounding the sonority of ‘Ionians’. A more detailed historical revision, which would exceed the purpose of this article, could start from the first performance of the play by the National Theatre of Greece, directed by Fotos Politis (1934) –the first director of NTG–, and include major productions of this play such as those directed by Dimitris Vogiatzis (1999), Dimitri Gotzscheff (2009), and Aris Biniaris (2017-19). Rondiris was the head of the Greek National Theatre for over two decades (1934-1955), and he defined the canon of ancient drama revivals in 20th and 21st century Greece. For further information, see indicatively Arvaniti 2010, Glytzouris 2011, Papazoglou 2014. That was the official army of the Greek state, supported by Great Britain (1945-1947), and the U.S.A. (1945-1947). ‘Theatrika Nea’, Ethnos, 1.8.1947, quoted in Sampatakakis 2021: 19. Having studied at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna (with a scholarship granted by the Academy of Athens) in the early thirties, and highly influenced by Wilhelm Leyhausen, Professor of Music at Humboldt University, whose version of Aeschylus’ play had been presented in Athens at the Herod Atticus Odeon in May 1934, Rondiris had extensively used the technique of Sprechchor. Yet, as Sampatakakis reminds us, ‘Sprechchor is not just a method of voice collectivization; it is a “totalitarian” machine, which eradicates undertones and consumes personalities for the sake of collectivity’ (16). That said, as Sampatakakis correctly remarks, ‘the reading of this performance as a political metaphor does not have any (visual, aesthetic, verbal) anchor in the performance itself (personal contact, 2019). Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 180 ARTÍCULOS 16 17 18 19 20 The Hazara people constitute around eight per cent of Afghanistan’s total population and, in contrast to the Pashtun majority, they are Shia Muslims. According to Alexandro Monsutti, ‘[m]any negative connotations are attached to them: religious heterodoxy, political marginality, geographical isolation, cultural backwardness and poverty’ (2007:189). Hazaras have been successively victims of persecutions and massacres, especially since the Afghani civil war that followed the Communist coup in April 1978, deepening the split between Sunnis and Shias that would radically be reopened with the rise of the Taliban to power (Ibid, pg. 176). For an analysis of ‘bureaucratic performance’ to which asylum seekers are forced and of the ‘social aesthetics of eligibility’ to which they are pushed to respond, see resepectively Jeffers 2012 and Cabot 2013. In a similar vein, critics such as Tonia Karaoglou had written about I_ LEFT (E_FYGA), the previous performance of the Station Athens group) that the participants communicate their stories ‘not like messengers but like actors who address the audience’; they do not just have ‘powerful stories to tell’, but they create ‘a work of art with a defined aesthetic framework’ (2014). Commenting Jean- Paul Sartre’s 1965 adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, directed by Georges Wilson, Loraux remarks that the author eliminated the lamenting parts of the ‘most lyrical’ of Euripides’ tragedies (2002:8). According to Loraux, Sartre was more interested in extracting the ‘lesson of the tragedy’ in the service of political issues related to the Algerian War (1954-1962), and, for this purpose, he had to expurgate from the ancient text its lyricism (2002, pg. 22). Loraux suggests that Sartre perceives The Trojan Women as an oratorio which he tries to transform into ‘engaged theatre’ (Ibid). Challenging such a radical distinction between poetics and politics, Loraux claims that the Trojan Women is both ‘engaged theatre and oratorio’ (Ibid, emphasis in original). Following this line of thought, I suggest that in We Are the Persians! there is a similarly double function of both engaged theatre and oratorio. This shift is one of the main ways with which the group relates to Aeschylus’ text and the theme of war. In the first adaptation of the piece, presented in 2013, the participants had focused on the silent faces of the generals who are simply enumerated, giving them their own voices and shifting the attention from the chorus of the elders at the Persian court to the stories of warriors who have fallen in the battle and with whom they identify. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 181 ARTÍCULOS 21 22 23 24 25 26 All songs in Dari were translated into Modern Greek and transcribed in Latin characters by Arezoo Rezaian. The verses we listen during the performance are quoted here in phonetic transcription: ‘ajab rasmie/ rasme zamoune/ qeseye bådo/ barge khazoune/ miran ådamå/ azuno faqat/ khåterehåshoun/ bejå mimoune/ kojås un kouche/ kojås oun khoune/ ådamåsh kojås/ khodåmidoune’. ‘Lourelay lourelay båche må/ A½y nour e do dide må/ Båche az måkalån shawa/ Våli e Båmiån shawa/ Sherbåche ye Afghån shawa/ Doshman e ajnabiån shawa. Sockofecha Betamatchae Apchae Sebid Sebid/ Parandecha Betamachae Batcha/ Raftan, Raftan. shokoufehåbe tamåshåye åbhåye sepid sepid/ parandehåbe tamåshåye bådhåraftan, raftan’. ‘Hame raftan/kasi dorobaram nist/ chenån bikas shodam/dar båvaram nist’. This mode of singing is considered as a sort of ‘cultural outcast’ by dominant Greek institutions because of its oriental roots and connotations, a point that could inform obliquely the elimination -in a specific Modern Greek canon of staging ancient tragedy- of the ‘oriental pathos’ in favour of the ‘occidental sobriety’. For a cultural analysis of amanes as ‘the legacy of the oriental mother’ see Holst-Warhaft 2000. For a discussion on the re-appropriation of rembetika songs by a group of migrant performers in contemporary Athens, see Vourloumis 2014. Acotaciones, 46 enero-junio 2021. 182