The Art of Weeping - Research Performance - Trailer

Описание: The Art of Weeping - The Necessity of Performing πόνος

Can we still publicly and noticeably mourn our beloved today? How is such pain expressed? What role plays the community in reaching emotional intensity and, eventually, catharsis?
These are some of the questions that guided the research led by Nadja Mattioli, who was inspired by the μοιρολόγια (lamentations) of Mani, a rural area in Greece.

The research is both theoretical and performative. The performative part, conducted over a period of four weeks, will be presented on Monday 16th July at the DEREE Blackbox Theatre, 7pm.

With the performers:
Eryfili Drakopoulou
Niobe Danezis
Iony Moschovakou
Claire Zervas


Over the course of time, it appears that in the Western world we have distanced ourselves from tradition and set ourselves loose from rigid cultural practices. With modernization and globalization, we seem to have liberated ourselves from the constraints of the past, and appear to embrace the possibilities of cultural fluidity and individualism. However, some practices, such as rituals, probably carry more of a universal than cultural quality, and in removing them from our contemporary lifestyle, without much of a transitional and adaptational period, we are depriving ourselves from an intrinsic human need.

One such ritual is the collective grieving and mourning of our deceased, our beloved. Today, death is not talked about anymore, sick people are put out of sight away in hospitals, and elderly people live in retirement or nursery homes, while the belief in the power of modern medicine and its life-saving abilities grows stronger. In the unfortunate event of having to face loss and bereavement, our current western practices do not leave us much time for mourning, with only a few days bereavement leave (which usually take up all our time battling bureaucracy), let alone mourning publicly and noticeably. Display of pain and suffering has to be kept at a minimum as it is considered improper, and, if absolutely necessary, needs to be addressed in private, in a separate room, isolated and mostly alone.

What makes the Maniat ritual so powerful then, to have survived almost uniformly over 2000 years of history, even after several institutions have tried to obliterate it? The survival of this lamentation practice does not lie in the individual, but in the collective participation of a community. When a Maniat woman is asked to perform the μοιρολόι within another setting, not only does she refuse because it is considered a bad omen, but because she cannot reach the emotional magnitude without the presence of the others. Her grief and pain, externalized through song and movements, are acknowledged and validated by everyone else present, and reach their peak only in a setting of solidarity. Thus, πόνος (pain) is transformed into a social power through which individual emotions can be expressed, released, and eventually even overcome.

During this research I hope to establish a set of exercises that combine performance theory and Greek ritual practice in order to guide the performers to reach a similar state of emotional intensity as the Maniat women reach during their lamentations. The performative research has been conducted over a period of one month with four Greek women, who each will had to unlock their own repressed emotions, individually and collectively, trying to reach beneath the social codes and access the universal self within, weakening the body and mind from the accultured pressures of the West to free their subconscious. Although limited in time, and by no means a universal methodology, the result of this research process, inspired by the songs and movements of the Maniat wake, will be revealed in a research performance at the end of this four-week period.