Performance
Marx remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as travesty.
(Olympia Bukkakis)
How am I to deal with all this? How can we accept the past? Where do shame and trauma live in the body? How does the telling of stories affect our present (and future)? How does one exist under an oppressive and seemingly inescapable gender binary? Can we consolidate an identity under a constant state of crisis? Do I look good in this dress?/*
In her masters graduation piece ›Tales From a State of Shemergency‹ Olympia Bukkakis interrogates our relationship with the the past and explores the potential of a number of different storytelling genres in reproducing our societal surroundings. Her research focuses on different ways of displacing the conventions of these stories in order to challenge the conditions by which narratives come into being and structure our lives.
/*I know I look good in this dress.
Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering, Olympia Bukkakis began performing while completing a BA in social theory at Melbourne University in Australia and kick-started the local alternative drag scene with her party Pandora’s Box. She has collaborated with Australian queer theatre company Sisters Grimm on a number of projects including Summertime in the Garden of Eden.
Since moving to Berlin in 2012, she has organised, curated, and moderated various queer performance nights including ›Get Fucked‹, ›Fancy‹ and ›Apocalypse Tonight‹. Since 2015 she has organised and hosted ›Queens Against Borders‹, a performance event in solidarity with trans and queer refugees. In recent years she has begun to perform in contemporary dance and performance contexts, performing in Jeremy Wade’s Between Sirens and Human Resources and in 2019 she completed a Masters in Solo Dance Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin with her graduation piece ›Tales From a State of Shemergency‹.
PERFORMED AND CREATED BY Olympia Bukkakis
DRAMATURGY Allison Wiltshire
SOUND DESIGN Collective Anxiety
VIDEO AND SET DESIGN Camille Lacadee
LIGHTING DESIGN Bryan Schall
COSTUME DESIGN Alexander Mersmann
SONG COMPOSITION Lyra Pramuk & Olympia Bukkakis
MENTORS Melanie Jame Wolf and Johannes Paul Raether
TUTOR Sandra Noeth
With the kind support of the HZT Berlin.
Guest performance made possible by the NPN-Gastspielförderung Tanz with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the Ministries of Culture and the Arts of the Federal States.