Landscapes and Backdrops

One of the things about theatre that I have always found intriguing, is the set changes. Whether happening behind drawn curtains or during the performance, they signify progress and development in both narrative and physical space. Specifically I love how, particularly in operas which tend to have more dramatic scenery, you can be in a frozen palace in the first part of the performance and in a desert during the next. As a set designer this is heaven. You get to create environments in a relatively confined space, around which the viewers are physically present and lure them into each unfolding situation. The sets on stage will never have the "realistic" power of those in cinema, but then their main purpose is not to convince you that what is taking place is real. The sets on stage are rather the means to help tell a story and as such they can and have to work very closely with the essence in the heart of the story they try to support.
Because the expectation of the audience is to be told a story and because a theatre/opera/ballet set is allowed to be "artificial" by definition, set design is let free to create environments specifically made for the stage and purposely designed for a live audience. And because these are live experiences, when everything comes together well, a single performance in the theatre, opera or ballet, can remain unforgettable and (unlike cinema) unrepeatable.
From an artistic point of view for myself, set designs have always been something like three dimensional landscapes, combining colour and form with the addition of a narrative.

When I was little I used to horrify my mother by spinning the globe, closing my eyes and stopping it with a pointed finger. I use to say to her "If someone picked me up just now and dropped me in (wherever my finger had landed) I would be happy to live there! I can live anywhere in the world!". My mother had never travelled abroad at that point and had no intention to. She used to read Kazantzakis' Travel Journals and you would have thought by the way she spoke that she had been around the world. But she was absolutely horrified to learn that her daughter would willingly go and live in a strange place. When my finger fell in an ocean I used to say "Even better, I will work as a sailor on a boat and spend all the time abroad!"
Of course what goes around comes around and I have been living abroad for about fifteen years without having visited half of the exotic places my finger stopped on the globe. Unlike set designs and globe pointing, moving from place to place is not as seemingly effortless as all that. Of course when you live abroad you are never completely your genuine self, I find, but a version of it, probably subconsciously created to help you survive or organically re-invented as a second nature. Ironically some years before I left home I found a place where I was more or less my genuine self or in plain words felt completely at ease, as if I was always meant to be there. I suspect everyone has a place like this. Because I was so young then and because of some turn of events I promised myself not to go back. Of course promises against your very nature are at best silly and I have been returning to the island as often as I can. From a visual point of view I have been always seeing landscapes from the island everywhere I have lived and below is an arrangement of photographs from Queensway tube station in London just before it closed for refurbishment some years ago. The images are of  billboards with layers of posters repeatedly torn off of them, reminding me of the landscapes of the island.

Of course an island or any other place does not exist by itself and in any case does not exist without people. Which makes what intrigues me the most about it (the landscape and the sea) part of a more complicated situation. The father of a friend of mine there was a sailor, more or less all his life, and spent months on end away from the island. He was no more than two months a year with his family. He always said how he missed the island and his family and how tired he was of the sea. He could not wait to retire. When he did retire he stayed at home with his wife for a year but after that he built a little kaiki (fishing boat) and started going all around the island with it. His wife started complaining that if you did not count the hours he was asleep he spend all of his waking hours on the little boat.  

Which brings me back to my island and not living there. Probably I am scared that the same will happen to me and I might start looking for the Globe to spin if I stayed there too long. But unfortunately I know that's not the case. Nevertheless one has to take the time they are given, however short and I am grateful for the time I have been able to spend there so far. Amazingly every time I visit, such a small place is capable of appearing to me so changed, in respect to the colours and shape of the land, all worked by the weather, the sea and wind in my absence.

Lipsi, 1996

Lipsi, 1998

Lipsi, 2007

Lipsi, 2012