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Join us in the STUDIO on Sunday February 5th at Noon for a screening of Dimitris Papaiannou’s “The Great Tamer,” followed by a Live Q&A with Dimitris via zoom, moderated by Prof. Talijancic, along with a panel of MFA John Wells Directing Fellows and Professor Erika Latta (Assistant Professor of Theater Performance, School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.)

This work is brought to the STUDIO by Ivan Talijančić of Contemporary Performance Practices and Special Visiting Faculty in the School of Drama John Wells Directing Program, with support from the 2022-2023 Sylvia & David Steiner Speaker Series, and in collaboration with Simon Fraser University / School for the Contemporary Arts.

“The Great Tamer” is a 95-minute performance, created by Dimitris Papaioannou in 2017.

It was initiated as a commission by Théâtre de la Ville (Paris, France,) in collaboration with the Avignon Festival and of the Onassis Stegi, which stepped in as the main producer. This was the first international co-production of a Dimitris Papaioannou piece.

As DP has said in several discussions with the public, the emotion that caused this sequence of images was the one stored inside him as he followed the unfolding of events in the wake of 20-year-old Vangelis Yakoumakis’ bullying tragedy in Greece in the winter of 2015.

The title was given by Aggelos Mendis, who designed the costumes and collaborated in the work’s art direction, and who also came up with the titles for DP’s four most recent pieces. Homer’s concept of time as Chronos Pandamator, “Time Who Tames All Things”, is the reference.

“The Great Tamer” toured for two and half years, through 4 continents, 23 countries and 38 cities. It was presented a total of 112 times, before over 90.000 spectators.

Bios

Dimitris Papaioannou

Dimitris Papaioannou gained early recognition as a painter and a comic-book artist. He then turned to the performing arts as a director, choreographer, performer, and designer of sets, costumes and lighting. A fine arts graduate, he approaches the creative process through imagery and drawing. The first artistic cycle of his stage work revolved around Edafos Dance Theatre, the group he worked with for 17 years until 2002. Medea (1993), presented at the 1998 Dance Biennale, marked the company’s transition to big venues, and is considered the touchstone of his oeuvre. His work on creating the opening ceremony for the Athens Olympics in 2004 brought Dimitris Papaioannou international renown. Since 1986, his personal work has been a hybrid exploration of experimental dance: a blend of physical theatre, motion art and performance, in which he interrogates creation, identity and the legacy of our Western cultural memory. Read more…

Ivan Talijančić