Dimitris Papaioannou participated in the Grec in 2017 with The great tamer, in 2021 he returned with Transverse orientation and now he comes to Barcelona, ??after the many impediments caused by the pandemic, with Ink, a show that has triumphed in Athens and in the other festivals where it has been presented.
The Greek artist created this show in 2020, where two men dialogue in silence, one dressed and the other naked, which can be seen from Monday 24 to Wednesday 26 July at the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc. Ink was commissioned with carte blanche by the Torinodanza Festival and I Teatri Reggio Emilia. Papaioannou shares the leading role of him with the Greek actor Haris Fragoulis, in a double cast, in which the naked man, Šuka Horn, always acts.
Ink means ink and on stage the two performers are literally bathed in dyed water. “This title is for the octopus,” explains Papaioannou. A friend gave it to me, who thought that my show is like extracting a black spermatozoon from an animal, with which one can write or paint”. The octopus is a very realistic reproduction.
Regarding the relationship established between the two performers, the artist does not want to advance anything: “You are asking me to narrate the entire work and I cannot do that, because it is like specifying something that I want you to meditate on, so I have some personal opinions about what it is, but I do not think they are very important and, furthermore, I do not want to impose them on the public”.
However, the program of the show points out some questions that the show raises: “Perhaps they are two artists from different generations; perhaps it is the sentinel of a dark world and a visitor who disturbs its existence; perhaps they are a father and a son; perhaps they embody youth and maturity or perhaps they are, one in a suit and the other naked, an image of civilization and the noble savage”. In any case, it will be the public, when they have seen your proposal, always full of captivating images, who decides what it is about.
Plastic images, which refer to the history of art. “I think this show is different in the dark aspect of it and in the fact that I’ve moved away from the Renaissance. There is some classicism in it, but I think there is much more expressionism. But this is the aftermath of creation, because I have not created it for this. In the same way, it is not created to narrate a certain relationship. It is created in search of something interesting between two specific personalities. But it is true that there is a strange predominance of darkness in this work compared to the previous one.
Regarding the fact that the presence of an octopus coincided in time with other proposals where this octopus also appears, Papaioannou replies: “I don’t have Netflix.”
