Arianna Economou’s performance piece ‘seeds’ took place on Saturday 24th May at her studio in Kaimakli – Nicosia, as a one-off performance outcome of a research project that Economou was undertaking with Theatre Alibi and the University of Exeter. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, UK. The performance also was presented in video documentation form, in the UK, in July 2003.
Part of One Square Foot project.
The performance was developed in the mountain range of the Troodos, at an altitude of 1,000 metres and near the small village of Kalopanayiotis. Just outside the village, up a short dirt road, there stands an old oak kokkoforos tree, its long branches supported by metal poles. The seeds of this tree, lying like foam on the ground beneath it, formed the starting point for the performance, with the dancer inviting each member of the audience to take a seed and to make a wish.
The 700 year old tree stands beside, and conceals, the small chapel of Panayia Theokaepastos, which translates as ‘the one who is concealed by God’ - and the narratives interwoven by Economou within the performance, told of the tree’s history as protector and granter of wishes. Significantly, and within a performance language that was simply and unpretentiously shared with the audience, those stories were interwoven and informed by four strands of the dancer’s autobiographical experience: the death of her father earlier this year, her grief, her sense of family ‘tree’, and, also, her own sense of ontological being at this time.
The first part of the performance comprised the re-enactment of a ritual connecting one square foot of earth beneath the tree with the poles supporting the tree, with a stone the dancer had found near where her father had fallen, with a handkerchief she had tied in the tree to make a wish for him, and finally back to the square foot again. These ‘connections’ were made with cotton from a old spool that was used for weaving cloth, and in the studio the thread was wound around the audience seating, stones placed in the space, a lighting flex hanging from the ceiling, and so on.
The second part began with a dance in which images of falling, and heaviness, and grief and mourning were explored and expressed. It began with the dancer’s arms full of stones found at the mountain site and ended with the stones balanced on and falling from different parts of her body. The dance was accompanied, in part, by an elegy by Britten played on the cello.
The fourth section began with Economou standing, like a ritual wax offering in the centre of the space. She then gently emerged from the wrapping, as if from a cocoon, leaving it standing in the space, surrounded by her fallen stones. Finally, the dancer stitched a hole in a lace cloth given to her by her mother and placed it, as an offering of thanks in the chapel.
The piece ended with the dancer sitting amongst the audience and referring back to the wishes they had been invited to make at the beginning of the piece. In a way, the performance - though drawing on intensely personal material - acted as an offering to make those wishes, and, by implication, the wishes of all communities, come true.