"The Age of Innocence", based on Doukas Kapantais' "The Empress"

“The years of innocence”, a chapter from Doukas Kapantais’ sophisticated pornographic novel “The Empress”, provides the source for this new venture from the Nova Melancholia theatre company. Having engaged with Georges Bataille’s “Dead Man” (in a performance included in the “Hypnos Project” at the Onassis Stegi, Athens), the company returns to the world of erotic literature with new material structured to reveal multiple facets of human desire and social conventions. Nova Melancholia freely adapted Doukas Kapantais’ tale of sadism and sexual arousal to create a performance which feeds into fantasies literary lust and an erotic utopia.

A strange law of the “New Earth”. An extreme show broadcast live to our television screens, an orgiastic ritual of sexual punishment meted out by a son to his lecherous mother. And with the adults gathered in the living room to watch the incestuous coupling on their sets, the children, peeping silently through the keyhole, are swept up and initiated into an orgy of unprecedented pleasure...

“As decreed by the puritanical nomenklatura of the age, art had to be political art, and everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, went around making this total song and dance about how their art was of the right kind. Especially in times of crisis and unrest, private introspection, or (even worse) an interest in physical pleasures, could even cost you your life”, Kapantais writes in “The Empress”.

In the words of the Nova Melancholia company: “It’s a game without rules, without an obvious goal, and without references to our conventional socio-political present; the performance engages in the playful and narcissistic pursuit of pleasure, laying claim to the right to a non-political art”.