“The Great Tamer” performance, conceived and directed by Greek experimental theater stage director, visual artist, and choreographer, Dimitris Papaioannou, invites spectators to get out of the rut of traditional thinking through a revealing and somewhat unsettling tour running from March 2nd through March 29th, 2018.
“The Great Tamer” tour will include performances in prestigious cultural venues including Lisbon’s CCB – Cultural Centre of Belém (March 2 and 3) and Porto’s Teatro Municipal do Porto, Rivoli (March 9 and 10). The powerful masterpiece of Dimitris Papaioannou will, also, travel to Belgrade’s Belgrade Dance Festival (March 15), Paris’ Théâtre de la Ville at La Villette (March 20 through 23), and Luxembourg’s Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg (March 29).
The Greek artist has already introduced his latest work to over 31,000 spectators in Athens, Amsterdam, Naples, Barcelona, Madrid, Avignon, Seoul, Basel, Stockholm, Taipei, and Moscow. “The Great Tamer,” inundated with corporeal poetry, is a bold invitation for its dancers to undergo a process of immersion, scrutinization, denial, and expansion to find their points of projection and balance. This bizarre play, depicting ambiguous images from the circus’ world, exposing modern life’s trivial tragedies and great nonsenses, and paying homage to great European painters, is striving to compose and decompose the history of man’s existence on Earth. The inspiring artist’s show, using both humor and melancholy, promises its audience to explore humanity’s existence, from birth to death, and even beyond.
Dimitris Papaioannou has been continuously struggling to explore the non-quintessential circus of the absurd during his thirty-year career. In his creations, human bodies interact with raw materials and turn into hybrid forms to develop visual illusions. His deep roots in fine arts give his performances a robust visual feel as he successfully incorporates playful references from Art History, conventional and unconventional artistic practices, as well as questions on our origins. Papaioannou aims to the appearance’s absolute simplicity that is not simple at all to implement intending to highlight the sacredness inherent in every basal and unholy state.
The creator of over 40 comic books, painter, illustrator, performer, costume, and lighting designer Dimitris Papaioannou drew international acclaim after his artistic direction of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. He had previously founded “Edafos Dance Theater” with Angeliki Stellatou, totally transforming Greece’s experimental dance scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of his most brilliant productions are “2” (2006), “MEDEA2″ (2008), “Nowhere” (2009), and “Inside” (2011), while his great opening to the international cultural scene came during his return to simple artistic media in “Primal Matter” (2012) and “Still Life” (2014).