ENA ENA

The performers’ presence goes beyond their conventional function. A series of transformations and replacements takes place; a waiter who transforms into his opposite or into his extreme, someone who replaces the camera with his or her gaze, who replaces the singer with his or her alienated voice, who controls space, who crosses borders.

The performance of "ENA ENA" deals with surfaces of memories, which sit on top of each other. The audience is invited to pass through shifting perspectives: from being the spectator, to being a spectacle for each other, to being the ones who are being watched.

Triggered by a childhood memory and spurred by the experience of a festivity cut unexpectedly short, the space and occasion that is a feast day celebration form the core around which many of my questions await an answer.

Taking my own personal experiences and their audial impressions as a starting point, I was drawn to feast day celebrations of the 1980s. During the course of my research, I studied a wide range of sound recordings, photographs, and event videos to discover a rich world of variations.

The outdoor feast day celebration and its transferal to indoor city venues – “klarina” (folk clarinet) nightclubs – to a large extent created a framework within which traditional Greek music took new paths. Gradually assimilating the possibilities of amplification brought on by electric power, a new aesthetic was formulated that affected how this music was both performed and received. A hybrid form since the start, I believe that it constitutes – right down until today – an overlooked and misunderstood part of the Greek folk art live performance tradition.

An intermediary space emerges between musicians and spectators. It imposes an intermediary function on all those inside it. Their efforts to participate in the proceedings become an attempt to provide answers to a series of dualities: presence-absence, male-female, core-periphery, loneliness-togetherness, fantasy-reality.

In “ENA ENA”, the deconstruction of elements comprising the event that is a feast day celebration creates the opportunity to reassemble these constituent parts in a new way. Through this reformulation, initial questions are rearticulated. The sound enrichment offered by this re-composition liberates musical expression, establishing a new set of conditions inside the space that is at once familiar and unfamiliar.
—Thanasis Deligiannis