Prometheus
art performance

At the Benaki Museum Atrium in Athens
June 2007

A multi-media performance inspired by the myth of Prometheus that comments on the evolution of human civilization, the domination of visual culture and the uses and limits of technological development. 
An allegoric reading of the archaic fire stolen by Prometheus―symbolizing the intellectual energy that helped mankind rise from animality and through the instrumentalization of nature initiated the beginning of artistic and scientific evolution―as a an equivalent of contemporary innovations and transgressions. But also a mnemonic space where Prometheus as the mythical maker of humanity out of clay appears in the light of modern genetic experimentation and bodily manipulation. 
At the same time the creation of a projected transitional space in which the suspended body of the performer struggles between limitation and stability, reversal of gravity, balance and destabilization raises questions concerning the disorientation caused by electronic media, man’s estrangement from the earth and the habitability in an inhospitable world.
A work in progress researching the transformation/codification of the human body by a technological environment and the implications of this intervention for artistic creation as well as for the ways of perceiving ourselves.

Ze Luiz Rinaldi on the original score for Prometheus:

To find a sound that would represent the myth, archaic and at the same time synthetic, referring us to a world subjected to technology ―that was the objective (aim) of the music in this work.
Harmony and disharmony ―organic and synthetic― beauty and destruction, not as a passage from one towards the other, not as time past or transformed but as a realization of the same principle, Prometheus.

Duration of the performance: 40 min.

Production/direction/performance:Filippos Mendes Lazaris
Research and text adaptation:Katerina Kokkinidou 
Lighting design: Alekos Anastasiou
Spatial design: Manolis Iliákis
Costume designer: Pedro Sayad
Assist. Costume designer: Leonardo Braza
Original music and orchestration:Zé Luiz Rinaldi
Sound engineer and assistant orchestration:Bruno LT
3D Animation - compositing: Spiros Frígas