Still Life

Still Life is an appropriate closer of the Sydney Festival – part arts installation, part physical theatre, a wordless echo of Samuel Beckett.

Greek artist-performer Dimitris Papaioannou is best known for his opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics. Here his inspiration is the myth of Sisyphus, forever doomed to carry a boulder to the mountain top, watch it roll to the bottom and then repeat the action for eternity. 

Across the vast stage of an old industrial bay of Carriageworks, Papaioannnou drags his huge cracking masonry to an electrified soundscape of scrapes and tool banging.  The boulder even consumes him, his limbs artfully entangled on the surface with those of another, with the fine agility and wit of a circus act.

Dressed nattily in blacks like workers a century past, Papaioannnou and his

team of seven make the Sisyphus tale a homage to the dignity and futile drudgery of daily work.  Later they pull up endless gaffer tape from the stage floor, never arriving at any destination; they noisily drop and reclaim rocks; sit on chairs which disappear, try to step ladder to the heavens. Above then rolls a smoky sky enmeshed in giant tumbling rolls of parachute cloth.  

That and Papaioannou’s boulder rolling are the highlights but, for engagement, the rest rolls slowly downhill.  A final communal meal ignores us completely and abandons all communication of meaning.

Martin Portus