ULYSSES "your blue eyes and the Father Of The Imaginary Sea"

A performance inspired by a true story and dedicated to imagination 

Driven by his illness into an unconventional reflection on life, Ulysses creates a universe within which he confronts, re-examines, erases, and rewrites his personal journey. Suffering  from the amnesia of dementia and confined to his apartment, he bravely dives into the deep, turbulent waters of an imaginary survival struggle. Accompanying him on this journey are the two people who constitute his world.
The play presents moments from Fotis' daily life as he drifts further away from common sense, oscillating between different time periods, between dream and reality, as the line separating these almost quantum worlds is no longer distinct. It also explores the relationship between father and son as a reversal of power.
The journey of Odysseus in the play celebrates the human desire to cling to life – and defines life as poetic thought, the continuous function of the mind through imagination. While Alzheimer’s disease rapidly erases every piece of information that defines a personality until no trace of memory is left, Odysseus plunges into this darkness and recreates memories and information to avoid becoming Nobody at the bottom of his mental abyss.

"Alzheimer's is a language, a different language, and language is Nekyia, a different Nekyia, and Odysseus is the one who returned from there, from the Nekyia of language, who returned as someone else. Language is a disease that leaves its subject bewildered at its extreme position. And the hero of the play, suffering from Alzheimer's, is precisely fixed in this ecstatic position of language, surrendered to its degenerative parasite that disgraces it. Like Odysseus who is tossed by the waves of his return, so too is Fotis/Odysseus in the play mercilessly cast ashore on the uncharted coasts of a steep imagination and on the banks of an elusive reality, in hazy memories that do not surrender. The waves of this vortex will be relentless, waves that will continuously diminish him, will annihilate him, will erase him as an absolute availability, the weakest trace of a lost self, literally another. The theatrical stage, the hollow of this stage, becomes here the privileged field of these impossible echoes, a field that raises an impossible speech, this expressed silence of his. Fotis/Odysseus in this weakness of his becomes a unique witness, the witness of a truth, a truth of the human. All the characters and all his relationships are in a disorder, regain a different meaning, a different perspective, this perspective of death. At this extremity where everything is tested, and again at this point where everything is preserved."
Apostolis Artinos
Writer and Curator of contemporary art exhibitions

Concept - Direction: Lysandros Spetsieris

Text Writing and Dramaturgical Processing: Rafaela Martinez – Lysandros Spetsieris

Music Composition: Alexandros Dimitropoulos

Set Design and Video: Dionysis Christofilogiannis

Scenic Object and Costume Design: Konstantina Krigkou

Cast: Nicole Dimitrakopoulou, Tasos Palantzidis, Konstantinos Papatheodorou

Photographs: Niky Oikonomou @nickyeconomou

Special thanks for their participation to the Karolos Koun Theater Workshop of Estia Neas Smyrnis and for their invaluable help to Georgios Michos, Stefanos Lolos, Fanis Katechos, Michalis Argyrou, Rafika Saouis, Vasso Tzouti. 

Performances: Mikro Gloria Theater. Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from October 4.