Jam Art company presents the dance theatre work “Anobium: the common chair criminal”, from Friday, January 16th to Saturday, January 31st, at 21.30 daily, at the new Cultural Conference Centre of Heraklion (Kommeno Bedeni). General admission: 10 euros.
Anobium is a small beetle insect from the family of the anobiids, also known as the common furniture beetle. It feeds on dry wood, such as that of furniture, inside which it also gives birth to toits larvae. It has strong mouth organs, which are suitable for digging long winding tunnels in the wood, no matter how hard that might be. The name comes from its habit of pretending to be dead as soon as something annoys it. Some of its species, during their breeding season, hit the walls of their hiding place with their prothorax in orderto attract the opposite sex. That rhythmic hitting is clearly audible through the night silence and this is why in many countries people call it the Death Watch.
In a democracy in free fall, fascism finds the ideal ground to come back to the foreground. In the JAM ART company dance theatre performance "Anobium- The common chair criminal", through the five performers’ action, we watch citizens’ corruption and apathy smoothing the way for the abolition of democracy; racism and violence that fascism proposes against the ideals of humanism; the mutation of humans in faceless monsters, the battle for power, the rise of the oppressors and their final, delectable fall…
The performance is divided in two acts. In the first one, the imaginary characters created for this work, based on human history as the key source, make us question the meaning of democracy and discredit the institution of voting. The strongest one wins and the many, recognize him recklessly as their leader. In the second act, new characters appear, inspired by anecdotes relating to dictators of the past and present. Through a series of allegorical actions, these new characters try to claim a chair in every way. Along all that same time, the anobium, without anyone having noticed, slowly destroys all chairs except for one…
"Somewhere somehow it happened that a beetle, which belonged to the Xylotrypes genus, an anobium or some other, penetrated into that or some other part of the chair, from which part it then traveled, gnawing, eating and discharging, opening arcades along the thinnest of the veins, until the ideal point of rupture, unknown it is how many years later. "(Excerpt from the short story "The Chair" by José Saramago, "Tales of the unknown island", Kastaniotis, 2001. Translation by AthenaPsillia).
CREDITS:
Concept/ direction/ choreography: Konstantinos Tsakirelis
Assistant choreographer: Charlotte Belec
Dancers: Gianluca Girolami, Jee Hyu n Hong, Benjamin Marchand, Manuel Molino Contralto: Maria Andrikopoulou
Original music: Emmanouil Sgouridis
Adaptation of José Saramago’s work: Odysseas Grammatikakis
Set design: Danae Syrrou
Costume design: Nektarios Vazakopoulos
Graphic design/ promotional material: Lazy Snail
Scenic construction: Tsakirelis furniture-lighting factory
Sound and lighting: Back Stage live (Prosound)
(Reservations number: 6936771594)