The 7 deaths of Antona | bijoux de kant

“She shocks our lovely eyes” – so said Jean Genet of Betty Vakalidou. And it’s true, the novel-like life of this woman born a boy in Thrace, who was shut away in an orphanage before running away to Athens, then to America, who became a dockworker, immigrant, a cross-dresser, a sex worker, a writer whose autobiography caused a sensation, a founding member of the Greek Gay Liberation Movement, who underwent gender confirmation surgery, and who has captivated audiences for more than three decades as a film and theater lead, most recently appearing in “The Red Lanterns” directed by Vasilis Bisbikis.

Betty has lived many lives, and Antona is her theatrical alter ego: a character set slightly askew, inspired by her and dreamed up for her by the writer Glykeria Basdeki. Antona is a prima donna who once lorded it over the traveling Greek theater troupes of the last century, who dies in outrageously weird ways seven times over and is resurrected seven times too, just to tell the story of a life filled with astonishing experiences and incidents most absurd.

Set on the borderline between stage and screen, between reality and virtuality, “The Seven Deaths of Antona” – a video art project by director Yannis Skourletis, production designer and visual artist Kontantinos Skourletis, and the bijoux de kant company – sets up Antona, the anti-hero created by Glykeria Basdeki and performed by Betty Vakalidou, to run through the history of modern Greece and bring queer identity to life as it has been assimilated by Greek popular culture, as it manifests in public memory and the historical body.

Appearing with her on stage is Vasilis Ziakas, a Greek folk instrumentalist who graces her journey, her story with his music. A story as alien as it is startlingly familiar – perhaps because, as the writer Dimitri Dimitriadis once said: “We each bear a Betty inside us.”

The body-cum-country of Antona dies and dies and dies again, unable to deflect its course through history. The only possible resistance to predetermined death is to choose death on terms rooted in subjectivity. And this is what Antona – poor and hapless, raped by armed forces and tank treads – does: she chooses her own leave-taking, her last rites, “alone and of her own accord,” thus seizing hold of her freedom: “amaranths” – those never-fading flowers – that are entirely her own.

With her very own body-cum-country, Betty Vakalidou is both narrator and deliverer of her own story – the story of a Greece set outside the limits of accepted curricula. A Greece that had to die before getting the chance to tell the tale of its own death. And yet, the glory that crowns the eminent and the unsung, those proclaimed and those not, the prominent and the pariahs – ever with the same affection – now stands holding an amaranthine wreath before the speaking (at long last) body and crowns it too.

It is a great moment, an historic and moving moment of vindication. Antona-Betty is now a part of the curriculum.

-Glykeria Basdeki

Antona dies seven times. Strangely, suddenly, unjustly. Yet another dead body that never got the chance to be inscribed in the official annals of history. A heart-rending dead body that finds the strength to shoot a “to hell with you” at the prim and proper formal histories written by the victors, and to insist upon the setting down of her death and – at once – her life too.

Directing the deaths of Antona, this supramundane persona, I felt from the start as though I were assisting at a birth. Antona dies to be reborn, and is now chronicled as an historical fact of immense importance, winning herself the right to escape oblivion – to not be forgotten.

For me, Betty Vakalidou is the guide-body on this bijoux de kant visit to the land of those left unseen and those slain a thousand times over. Betty’s every word rewrites the history of Greece. Betty’s every word vindicates the teeming throngs, the ever so many so unjustly lost – be they living or dead – for their unrelenting efforts to come into being and to continue being.

-Yannis Skourletis, bijoux de kant

-The Antona character first appeared in Glykeria Basdeki’s “Amaranta” – a play presented at Faust Bar-Theater-Arts in 2017, directed by Yannis Skourletis – before being separated out and further developed to feature in her own one-act play: “The Seven Deaths of Antona”.

-The bijoux de kant company describe “The Seven Deaths of Antona” as an “in-between performance” that came into being during the course of a series of strict lockdowns, when all theater productions had been stopped dead in their tracks. Exploring notions of presence and performativity, and seeking out ways in which theater can exist in such extreme circumstances, bijoux de kant created “The Seven Deaths of Antona”, which sprang from an interplay between audio-visual creative activity and the live arts.

-Antona’s song “Pósa lambiónia” (“How many light bulbs”) – an example of the popular tsiftetéli form – was written by Vasilis Ziakas, with lyrics by Glykeria Basdeki.

-The digital version of the work “The Seven Deaths of Antona” was funded by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports.

-Elisavet Vakalidou’s autobiography – “Betty, Captain of my Soul” – was published by the TYPOTHITO / DARDANOS Press.

-The film “Betty” (1979) by Dimitris Stavrakas – the portrait of a trans woman some forty years before the legal recognition of gender identity that starred Betty Vakalidou in the lead role – was screened at Onassis Stegi in February 2022 as part of the “Zeta, Floretta, Niki” film tribute.