Acropolis Remapped: on a Democratic Politics of Resistance

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Published: May 1, 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16226
Keywords:
crisis monuments ruins Grotowski Marmarinos Acropolis
Philip Hager
Abstract

In 2010, forty-eight years after Jerzy Grotowski's iconic 1962 performance of Stanisław Wyspiański's Akropolis, Greek director Michael Marmarinos presented to the Athenian audience Acropolis: Reconstruction. In his homage to the Polish director, Marmarinos asked the question that Grotowski (and Wyspiański before him) had raised: what is the contemporary Acropolis? Marmarinos’s Acropolis observes the ruins of contemporary Athens; frustrations, tensions and other dramaturgies of the crisis that was beginning to transform the urban fabric of the Greek capital. In this article, I map the in-crisis restructuring of Athens in dialogue with Acropolis: Reconstruction. Employing Deleuze’s idea of a ‘minor or minimising treatment’ of the classics, I examine the becoming-ruins of monuments in a city in crisis, by searching for the contemporary acropolises not in the ruins upon the hill (the remains of classical Athens and the symbol of its democracy) but in the ruins in its shadow.

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Author Biography
Philip Hager
Philip Hager is associate lecturer at the University of Winchester. His research interests include the study of the intersections between memory, history, space and performance, with a particular focus on European contexts. He has published on the cultural politics and histories of modern Greek theatre, European performance geographies and economies of radical performance. He is co-editor of Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe and co-convener of the ‘Inside/Outside Europe’ research network and the ‘Performance, Identity, Community’ working group at TaPRA.  
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