The artistic language of Euripides Laskaridis, the director and actor, is untranslatable. Relic is a series of moods juxtaposed, often in paradox. It is extraordinary as long as you stop demanding explanation. When the creature with exaggerated feminine curves stands in front of the microphone, “she” is speaking and singing in a strange language that we don’t understand. However, the timbre of her voice and tones convey: joy, frustration, futility, anger… Everything onstage is perceived not through a dramatic plot (there isn’t any!) but through the interaction between body, objects, and space, which becomes a fresh vibration, an unprecedented atmosphere.
Relic is almost about the staging of backstage, about a theatre that is not ready, not finished, not polished, about an actress who is endlessly rehearsing her living, living as a rehearsal. The audience is watching a show with beautifully funny “imperfections” and “mistakes”: the set is shabby, filled with what looks like construction materials and cheap domestic decorations; the lighting and sound, controlled by the creature herself, often “go wrong,” completely miss the cue, or create inappropriate effects; not to mention how clumsily the creature moves and performs, how many times she fails when aiming for a dramatic climax.
For whom is she performing? Her solo performance in the poorly decorated space makes us aware of her isolation, as if she had been forgotten a long time ago but didn’t accept oblivion as an answer to her state. Like a clown or an animal in the circus left alone, she keeps trying to bring back something familiar by playing with objects from the past, staging an exciting scene. But her face is as ambiguous as the stage props, obscured by layers of masks and memories. This is a world worn out in time.
There is something dark in the nostalgic sentiments revealed and ridiculed by the creature simultaneously. After she hammered a nail so heavily into the wall that the whole theatre shook with the sound, she cheerfully hung up an empty frame. The audience laughed, for she had done so much for something so trivial. Yet this scene encapsulates the absurdity and fragility of her existence: so much strength goes into sustaining an ephemeral state, if not futilely. But she continues to perform and transform into different figures, searching for something we don’t understand but vaguely sense in the air. No matter what it is, it must be spectacular.
So the creature dwells in the Relic amid failures, playing with props as if they were cohabitants. Her presence, so unneeded and uncomprehended, keeps talking to the inevitable loss of time restlessly, playfully, personally, and sweetly. A never-ending lullaby in the face of ruins.
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