Crisis, Ruptures and the Rapture of an Imperceptible Aesthetics: A Recent History of the Hellenic Festival

The focus of this paper lies on the recent history of the Greek Festival, with special emphasis on the last two years (2010-2012). We shall discuss festival policies as well as aesthetic practices within the so-called new phase of the Greek Festival after 2006, when Giorgos Loukos took over as artistic
director. While the Festival claimed an international profile promoting collaborations with major European festivals and theatre groups, its policies had to go through restructuring due to the raging economic crisis. In this sense, the years from 2010 to the present marked a rupture with previous
discourses and politics, turning the Festival into a topos of transformation and fluidity which seems to elude certain conditions of production and reception pertaining to the Festival's history. The discussion will present an inquiry into the institutional choices as much as the artistic practices which constitute this topos, while also mapping out the emergent trends which produce its particular
dynamic. In order to do so, we shall scrutinise programmatic texts of the Festival as well as selected material from theatrical performances which took place in Athens and Epidaurus within the period under examination.
The proposed framework of analysis will draw on the concept of “imperceptible politics” coined by the social thinkers Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos (Escape Routes, 2008). Imperceptible politics refers to postliberal modes of being which are devised by the diffracted and thus non-representable social forces, labour and bodies within contemporary sociopolitical realms. Our discussion will set out to consider the concept of imperceptibility against the backdrop of postmodern cultural politics and performance aesthetics. We shall then go on to suggest that the new ways of doing aesthetics within the topos of the Greek Festival could be viewed as one such imperceptible mode; changes in institutional intent and the imponderability of the critical economic situation generate new discursive, artistic and performative responses which are often difficult to pin down. By analysing this entanglement, the paper aims to contemplate the imperceptible interplay with the Festival's context as a potential statement for a future aesthetics.