‘When Edward fell back dead, an emptiness opened inside her, a prolonged shudder went through her, and bore her upward like an angel. Her bare breasts stiffened: an ominous shudder bore her into the fantastic church where exhaustion, silence and the feeling of the irremediable finished her.’

This is the first collaboration between Nova Melancholia collective with the Onassis Cultural Centre-Athens, in the context of the Hypnos Project. Nova Melancholia gives its own interpretation of Georges Bataille’s short piece of erotic prose The Dead Man, written during World War II depicting the horrors of war.

Edward, Marie’s beloved, is dead. Marie spends a night of delirium – as if in a dream – and dies at dawn. The performance begins with the image of a woman lying naked on the cold floor. Next to her body begins a long line of excreta. At the back of the space, high up, a man is smoking silently in semi-darkness. Music is heard from a radio. Soldiers, ghosts, young men sexually aroused, and a deformed dwarf march around. Marie stares – her body apertures wide open. She surrenders herself to excess and ecstasy: naked, sweating from horror, sleeping, and dreaming. Her dream is ridiculous and indecent. The entire night Marie tries to reach death.

Director: Vassilis Noulas
Visual Arts Curator: Kostas Tzimoulis
Assistant Director: Elisavet Xanthopoulou
Performers: Vicky Kyriakoulakou, Alexia Sarantopoulou, Despoina Chatzipavlidou, Vassilis Noulas, Kostas Tzimoulis

Nova Melancholia uses the Greek translation of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man by Aggeliki Petra for Agra Publications, Athens.

The performance includes a poem by Miltos Sachtouris ‘Maria’, set to music by Vassilis Noulas. Maria is part of Sachtouris’ collection of poems The Spectres or Joy on the Other.