Marilena Zaroulia
I completed an undergraduate degree in Theatre Studies at the National University of Athens, before moving to the UK for MA in Research (Theatre) and PhD in Drama and Theatre both at Royal Holloway, University of London.
My PhD thesis 'Staging the Other/Imagining the Greek' examined experiences and politics of Greek national identity through the production and reception of post-1956 English drama on Athenian stages since 1974. A short article mapping the key arguments of the project was published in the online journal Platform.
Since the completion of the PhD in 2007, I have carried on working in areas of cultural politics and performance, having developed a strong interest in the intersection of identities representation and politics in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In January 2013, I launched (alongside Philip Hager) Inside/Outside Europe, a collaborative, interdisciplinary network investigating the multiple, post-2008 crises. The aim of the project was to study the crises of capitalism as performance while exploring the role of performance in a context of European crises. 'Inside/Outside Europe' brought together a group of early career researchers from theatre/performance studies and other fields in the humanities & social sciences, who study the multiple performances of crisis mainly in three European cities: London, Athens and Berlin. The project involved a series of workshops, seminars and public events from spring 2013 until spring 2014 and culminated in the edited collection 'Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe' (Palgrave Macmillan). Project's blog here: http://insideoutsideeurope.wordpress.com/
Other examples of my work on performance and cultural politics include: various pieces on the work of Scottish dramatist David Greig and British theatre as a way of thinking through the thorny relation between UK and Europe; book chapters and journal articles examining the performance of affect and belonging in spectacles such as the Eurovision Song Contest (2013) and the 2004 Athens Olympic Games (2008) or the 2012 Cultural Olympiad (2013). I have also written on the role of the Canon (and adaptations of the Canon)on national stages in moments of national crisis (Euripides Orestes in Athens) or staging of a classic that goes beyond the current historical moment (Ostermeier's Hamlet in Schaubuhne).
My new project [Performing Assemblies on Contemporary British Stages] develops questions around politics and performance as it focuses on spaces, practices and legacies of assembling, gathering, being 'held' together in the theatre in the context of austerity Britain.
I am the Secretary of Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA). Previously, I was one of the convenors of the Performance, Identity, Community Working Group.
Before joining the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Winchester in September 2008, I taught as Visiting Lecturer at the Departments of Drama/Theatre and English at Royal Holloway (2003-07) and Lecturer at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin (2007-08).
At Winchester I teach contemporary performance theory and practice and politics of performance in the undergraduate degree and supervising four PhD students.
Phone: 0044.1962.82.7665
Address: Department of Performing Arts
Faculty of Arts
The University of Winchester
Sparkford Road Winchester Hampshire
SO22 4NR
My PhD thesis 'Staging the Other/Imagining the Greek' examined experiences and politics of Greek national identity through the production and reception of post-1956 English drama on Athenian stages since 1974. A short article mapping the key arguments of the project was published in the online journal Platform.
Since the completion of the PhD in 2007, I have carried on working in areas of cultural politics and performance, having developed a strong interest in the intersection of identities representation and politics in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In January 2013, I launched (alongside Philip Hager) Inside/Outside Europe, a collaborative, interdisciplinary network investigating the multiple, post-2008 crises. The aim of the project was to study the crises of capitalism as performance while exploring the role of performance in a context of European crises. 'Inside/Outside Europe' brought together a group of early career researchers from theatre/performance studies and other fields in the humanities & social sciences, who study the multiple performances of crisis mainly in three European cities: London, Athens and Berlin. The project involved a series of workshops, seminars and public events from spring 2013 until spring 2014 and culminated in the edited collection 'Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe' (Palgrave Macmillan). Project's blog here: http://insideoutsideeurope.wordpress.com/
Other examples of my work on performance and cultural politics include: various pieces on the work of Scottish dramatist David Greig and British theatre as a way of thinking through the thorny relation between UK and Europe; book chapters and journal articles examining the performance of affect and belonging in spectacles such as the Eurovision Song Contest (2013) and the 2004 Athens Olympic Games (2008) or the 2012 Cultural Olympiad (2013). I have also written on the role of the Canon (and adaptations of the Canon)on national stages in moments of national crisis (Euripides Orestes in Athens) or staging of a classic that goes beyond the current historical moment (Ostermeier's Hamlet in Schaubuhne).
My new project [Performing Assemblies on Contemporary British Stages] develops questions around politics and performance as it focuses on spaces, practices and legacies of assembling, gathering, being 'held' together in the theatre in the context of austerity Britain.
I am the Secretary of Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA). Previously, I was one of the convenors of the Performance, Identity, Community Working Group.
Before joining the Department of Performing Arts at the University of Winchester in September 2008, I taught as Visiting Lecturer at the Departments of Drama/Theatre and English at Royal Holloway (2003-07) and Lecturer at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin (2007-08).
At Winchester I teach contemporary performance theory and practice and politics of performance in the undergraduate degree and supervising four PhD students.
Phone: 0044.1962.82.7665
Address: Department of Performing Arts
Faculty of Arts
The University of Winchester
Sparkford Road Winchester Hampshire
SO22 4NR
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Books by Marilena Zaroulia
Book Chapters by Marilena Zaroulia
Prometheus in Athens received its premiere in 2010 and has been associated with the Greek debt crisis. The essay particularly considers how the performance’s interpretation of the myth of Prometheus and the identifications created, coupled with its dramaturgies of participation, might unsettle commonsensical narratives regarding nation and belonging. In addition, it asks what types of spaces of resistance and communities can be produced to re-negotiate neo-liberal systems of organisation and knowledge and what is the role of the citizen and performance in uncovering those spaces. In pursuing this, I coin the term ‘precarious citizenship’ as one of my conceptual frames to reflect on the current state of uncertainty and lack of security in Europe which sanctions practices of safeguarding national security at the cost of human and citizen rights. Echoing Judith Butler’s (2005; 2009; 2013) understanding of precarity as both troubling and enabling, I examine how the adaptation of a classical myth around revolt and human rights serves as a platform for a new encounter with citizenship and precarious subjectivity as productive forces. I argue that, in interpellating its participants as citizens and interpreters of the myth, Prometheus in Athens sheds light on Other(ed) (in)visible realities and allows for different readings of citizenship and belonging. My analysis also considers the performance’s affective registers and the ways in which it engages its participants and audience as members of national and transnational communities in a line of ‘intersubjective communicability’ asking them to imagine the future ‘to come’.
Articles by Marilena Zaroulia
In the wake of the cessation in late 2014 of Italy’s European Commission-supported Operation Mare Nostrum migrant search-and-rescue programme, and with escalating numbers of deaths in the Mediterranean over recent months, theatre and performative protest interventions are occurring with greater frequency. We discuss two of the most prominent modes of representation and response. The first is the narrative or storytelling mode, based upon testimonies or fictionalized stories of survivors, rescuers and other witnesses to maritime migration. Works such as Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa (Soho, London 2015), and Case Farmakonisi, or The Trial of Water (Athens Festival, 2015) depend on narrative imagination and the ability of audience members to envisage the invisible, to witness the unknowable.
The second is what we call the ‘synecdoche’ mode, which uses techniques of protest and site-responsive installation art across Europe, employing visual and embodied grammars to trigger affective engagement in public places. Works such as Die Toten Kommen [The Dead are Coming] (summer 2015) by activist collective Center for Political Beauty raise a key dilemma that our dialogue also begins to probe: amidst this most urgent of contemporary crises, what is that we look to performance and activism for (ethically, aesthetically and politically)? Why is it important that migrants’ deaths occur under the watch of a community of European nations whose maritime technologies have, over the last five centuries, directly enabled the extensive exploitation of lands and peoples outside Europe? What may be the structural and psychological explanations for a collective failure of empathy (not just mere concern or compassion) by those of us who do not know what it means to be abjectly ‘at sea’ in a neoliberal world? What does performance that sits at the border of our earth-bound existence and the infinite sea—‘mare nostrum’ with its many unknowns—invite us to perceive, and what does it permit us to ignore?
Talks by Marilena Zaroulia
Prometheus in Athens received its premiere in 2010 and has been associated with the Greek debt crisis. The essay particularly considers how the performance’s interpretation of the myth of Prometheus and the identifications created, coupled with its dramaturgies of participation, might unsettle commonsensical narratives regarding nation and belonging. In addition, it asks what types of spaces of resistance and communities can be produced to re-negotiate neo-liberal systems of organisation and knowledge and what is the role of the citizen and performance in uncovering those spaces. In pursuing this, I coin the term ‘precarious citizenship’ as one of my conceptual frames to reflect on the current state of uncertainty and lack of security in Europe which sanctions practices of safeguarding national security at the cost of human and citizen rights. Echoing Judith Butler’s (2005; 2009; 2013) understanding of precarity as both troubling and enabling, I examine how the adaptation of a classical myth around revolt and human rights serves as a platform for a new encounter with citizenship and precarious subjectivity as productive forces. I argue that, in interpellating its participants as citizens and interpreters of the myth, Prometheus in Athens sheds light on Other(ed) (in)visible realities and allows for different readings of citizenship and belonging. My analysis also considers the performance’s affective registers and the ways in which it engages its participants and audience as members of national and transnational communities in a line of ‘intersubjective communicability’ asking them to imagine the future ‘to come’.
In the wake of the cessation in late 2014 of Italy’s European Commission-supported Operation Mare Nostrum migrant search-and-rescue programme, and with escalating numbers of deaths in the Mediterranean over recent months, theatre and performative protest interventions are occurring with greater frequency. We discuss two of the most prominent modes of representation and response. The first is the narrative or storytelling mode, based upon testimonies or fictionalized stories of survivors, rescuers and other witnesses to maritime migration. Works such as Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa (Soho, London 2015), and Case Farmakonisi, or The Trial of Water (Athens Festival, 2015) depend on narrative imagination and the ability of audience members to envisage the invisible, to witness the unknowable.
The second is what we call the ‘synecdoche’ mode, which uses techniques of protest and site-responsive installation art across Europe, employing visual and embodied grammars to trigger affective engagement in public places. Works such as Die Toten Kommen [The Dead are Coming] (summer 2015) by activist collective Center for Political Beauty raise a key dilemma that our dialogue also begins to probe: amidst this most urgent of contemporary crises, what is that we look to performance and activism for (ethically, aesthetically and politically)? Why is it important that migrants’ deaths occur under the watch of a community of European nations whose maritime technologies have, over the last five centuries, directly enabled the extensive exploitation of lands and peoples outside Europe? What may be the structural and psychological explanations for a collective failure of empathy (not just mere concern or compassion) by those of us who do not know what it means to be abjectly ‘at sea’ in a neoliberal world? What does performance that sits at the border of our earth-bound existence and the infinite sea—‘mare nostrum’ with its many unknowns—invite us to perceive, and what does it permit us to ignore?
The paper asks what kind of production and, particularly, reception labour do such theatre examples demand from their makers and audiences? How do we watch or imagine the invisible subject rendered visible through such performances? If, as Joe Kelleher (2009: 10) has observed, theatre’s political possibilities lie in its ‘capacity to pretend’, what performance strategies bear the potential of a political intervention in the realm of representation and, subsequently, might trigger politics beyond the theatre frame?
By evaluating how the two theatre examples negotiated one of the most acute, current crises in Europe, particularly post-Dublin II Regulations, I will argue that the performance of the displaced Other in contemporary British theatre might suggest an attempt at representing Europe as a hitherto invisible Other. Thus, against the backdrop of the multiple European crises, such a reading proposes a shift in the politics of contemporary British theatre vis-à-vis Europe.
Fourteen months later, in a context shaped by the UN Refugee Agency’s condemnation of the Greek asylum system, the government’s announcements for the implementation of severe measures against illegal border-crossing and increasing violence against foreigners by far-Right nationalists, 287 political asylum-seekers from Morocco and Algeria, aided by Greek activists, sought refuge in the Athens Law School. Questions about the asylum-seekers’ right to protest and about the appropriate locations where this protest should take place were raised in a feverish public debate.
Drawing on Butler’s discussion of the frame and Derrida’s analysis of hospitality, I will attempt to evaluate the ethical and political implications of – metonymically or actually – ‘displacing’ the sans papiers from the border or detention centre and reframing them in locations that lie at the crux of definitions of Europeanness or citizenship.
Shortly after Derrida’s writings on Europe, a number of European theatres saw an avalanche of new British drama performed in translation and work by British theatre companies being circulated primarily through the international festivals network. This phenomenon that intensified in the late 90s and during the 00s led to feverish debates over the impact of the circulation of this work in Europe: could this continuous crossing of European borders by British dramatists and theatre-makers lead to a new version of the European theatre map, largely controlled by British production?
The argument presented here has been informed by this scholarly debate, which will be briefly presented at the start of the presentation. However, this paper aspires to move beyond existing approaches and propose a different reading of this complex relation between British theatre and Europe at the turn of the third millennium through an analysis of theatre examples that – conceptually, formally and materially – have crossed European borders. Particular emphasis will be placed on four examples: Complicité’s Streets of Crocodiles (1992), David Greig’s One Way Street (1994), Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) and Mark Ravenhill’s Over There (2009). I view these four examples as investigations of travel. Following the work of cultural anthropologist, James Clifford (1997: 39), travel here is employed as ‘a translation term […] a word of apparently general application used for comparison in a strategic and contingent way’; it encompasses several significations that correspond to movements across borders and ‘unveils possibilities of an increasingly connected but not homogeneous world’. Travel as ‘constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension’ (3) offers insight into the political and cultural significance of such ‘displaced’ plays and performances in the context of Europe. It also elucidates the displacement of audiences and/or practitioners in Europe in rich and meaningful ways.
The paper argues that these examples have responded to the tension between mobility and place as defining features of the contemporary world and in doing so, have negotiated what it might mean to be European, particularly through representations of identity and difference. In other words, border crossing is a defining element in recent British theatre and corresponds to important political and institutional developments in Europe after the end of the Cold War. By problematizing dominant narratives over the vexed relation between Britain and Europe – and British and European theatres – the paper resituates Britain in the European theatrical map, suggesting instead that in the examples that I will discuss, Europe appears as utopia. My thesis draws on the work of philosopher Luisa Passerini (2007), who has investigated the link between experiences of Europeanness and affect, as well as the performance scholar Jill Dolan’s conceptualization of the ‘utopian performative’ (2005). In these examples of British theatre, travel and displacement produce a space where the actual borders of Europe momentarily become intangible and disappear; in such brief moments in performance, the possibility for the emergence of the European – not as a Eurocentric concept but as a Derridean trace – appears.
Thus, by revisiting the relation between British theatre and Europe through an investigation of travel and border-crossing, this paper will seek to challenge binary conceptions of British identity as opposed to continental European while reconfiguring notions of Europeanness as transitional, open, performative and potentially utopian spaces. Such spaces may be traced in various locations in the world and in this way, might offer a new approach to how anti-globalisation can be articulated.