Manousos, seen here looking into the distance, is the oldest of our performers, and clearly remembers growing up shoeless on this island and recalls how German soldiers were taken as prisoners of war from the bunker on which he stands. He sings old songs and we look at the setting sun with the certainty that this is a beginning, a reinterpretation of landscape through theatrical means.
Because landscape is not a backdrop, it cannot be ignored; it needs no mimes, no amplifiers, no wind machines, no light stands, and no sound engineers. It needs interventions. Interventions in that which has intervened in the landscape. Some, like Giorgios Petrarkis, an employee of the Imerys Group who has accompanied us for a long time, believe in man-made re-naturalization. He is paid by his company for this cultural achievement.
I, on the other hand, believe that the landscape always tells of what is happening to it, and that it requires a choreography of gazes to recognize how precisely we can describe this dilemma using artistic means out of fear, romantic longing, and the obsessive desire to assimilate a place. A landscape theater does not naively worship nature, because if it did, it would be an open-air theater. Landscape theater is the cultural form that serves to mirror our own culture.