Written by Eleni Mylona

Solo storytelling performance for a small audience and live online (writing) reading session, for one reader each time.

‘Three Orange Trees. In the Future.’ is a storytelling performance, that uses several methods in order to explore how one looks at, analyses, describes, memorizes and verbalizes an event/process and/or story in time and in space. At the same time, it explores ways to intervene in its dominant narrative in order to transform it, by using all the possibilities that language and imagination can offer. With the intention to move from the ‘personal’ to a more ‘collective understanding’, within this practice, I worked with the notion of the ‘care of oneself ‘ linked to the Stoic philosophers and their practices, as described by Michel Foucault at ‘The Hermeneutics of the Subject’[1].
The Stoics proposed several practices/askesis/exercises, which were meant ‘as a development of the culture of the self’ , and were described in different philosophical writings of the Hellenic and Roman period. These exercises, had to do with how one should look at (analytically and in its totality) an object , an event, and one’s own self and life, how important it is to describe what you see and verbalize it to one’s self and to others, and how to memorize what you see in time and in space. I used some of these exercises/practices like a choreographic score, and I applied them as transformative mechanisms within the self fictions.  Therefore, the basic questions that were formed where : How to move from the personal to the collective? And, what is political in the personal?

More on the performance as well as the research you may find here: www.mylonaeleni.com

 

[1] ‘The Hermeneutics of the subject‘,1981-82, Lectures at the college de france, Palgrave McMillan

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