THE SHOUT a musical (oratorio) performance based on Nikos Kazantzakis‘ The Saviors of God / Askitiki – Report to Greco. World tour starts in New York and for the period February 12 – March 15, the show will be staged at the Greek Cultural Center, with subsequent destinations as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago in the States and then in Montreal and Toronto in Canada and Sydney and Melbourne in Australia. Spring 2015 the show will be staged in Athens with subsequent destinations Crete and Cyprus. As Kazantzakis himself says, “You shall never be able to establish in words that you live in ecstasy. But struggle unceasingly to establish it in words. Battle with myths, with comparisons, with allegories, with rare and common words, with exclamations and rhymes, to embody it in flesh, to transfix it! God, the Great Ecstatic, works in the same way. He speaks and struggles to speak in every way He can, with seas and with fires, with colors, with wings, with horns, with claws, with constellations and butterflies, that he may establish His ecstasy”. SG takes the form of a prophet’s plea to change our conception of God so that we can live better. Kazantzakis assumes there’s a difference between the esoteric and the exoteric, between the unknowable mystical truth and the mere masks of God. And Kazantzakis’s vision of divinity is quite peculiar. It reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus. Whereas the mainstream monotheistic idea is that God is a flawless person, Kazantzakis says that God is imperfect, that he’s a vagabond who struggles between two eternally opposing forces, one pulling him down into entropy and lifelessness and the other raising him up to freedom My own body, and all the visible world, all heaven and earth, are the gravestone which God is struggling to heave upward… God struggles in every thing, his hands flung upward toward the light. What light? Beyond and above every thing!… God cries to my heart: “Save me!” God cries to men, to animals, to plants, to matter: “Save me!” Listen to your heart and follow him. Shatter your body and awake: We are all one… So may the enterprise of the Universe, for an ephemeral moment, for as long as you are alive, become your own enterprise. This, Comrades, is our new Decalogue. “He struggled, therefore, with the only tools he had, pen and paper, striving to purify his style, dreaming of a new theology, a new religion of political action in which the dogmatic, teleological God of the Christians would be dethroned to be replaced by dedication to the theory of an evolutionary and spiritual refinement of matter.” These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and of death, collide eternally. The visible signs of this collision are, for us, plants, animals, men. The antithetical powers collide eternally; they meet, fight, conquer and are conquered, become reconciled for a brief moment, and then begin to battle again throughout the Universe – from the invisible whirlpool in a drop of water to the endless cataclysm of stars in the Galaxy. Even the most humble insect and the most insignificant idea are the military encampments of God. Within them, all of God is arranged in fighting position for a critical battle. Even in the most meaningless particle of earth and sky I hear God crying out: “Help me!” Contributors DIRECTOR: Stratos Tzortzoglou DRAMATURGY: Stratos Tzortzoglou, Tsimaras Tzanatos VIDEO ART: Reina Eskenazy with Scenes from Angelos Spartalis‘ films: 37 Memories, Wishes, From the Earth to the Moon MUSIC COMPOSER: Kyriakos Papadopoulos, Vangelis Petsalis , Nikos Platyrachos CHOREOGRAPHY: Teti Nikolopoulou SCENOGRAPHY: Michael Sdougos SINGER: Natalia Soledad Petsalis, sings Nikos Platyrachos‘ song To Dakri tou Psiloriti (Psiloritis’ Tear). CRETAN MANTINADA: Kostas Stavroulidakis Η Ασκητική, ένα πρώιμο έργο του Καζατζάκη, ενώνεται με αποσπάσματα από την Αναφορά στον Γκρέκο, έργο της ωριμότητάς του. Μαζί αποτελούν μια κατάθεση ψυχής. Μια Κραυγή συνειδητότητας και αποκάλυψης ότι τίποτε δεν είναι όπως φαίνεται. Ρόλοι. ύλη, σχέσεις, συνθήκες , είναι όλα πλάσματα του νου. Η αλήθεια εδράζεται στο σώμα και είναι αυτό μόνο που μπορεί να σε φέρει στο εδώ και τώρα, στο Είμαι της ανθρώπινης ύπαρξης. Η ενοποιητική προοπτική που προσεγγίζει ο Καζατζάκης τη ζωή, δηλώνει ότι ο Θεός δεν είναι έξω από εμάς αλλά ζει μαζί μας και ο γιος του Ανθρώπου έχει οπωσδήποτε μια αποστολή. Να συνεχίσει τον αγώνα του συνειδητά και συνδεδεμένα με τα πάντα γύρω του. Ο ασκητής του Καζατζάκη είναι ανθρώπινος, σωματικός, αδύναμος, ατελής, απροσάρμοστος αλλά πάντα ζωντανός και αγωνιστής. Στην παράσταση το κείμενο προσεγγίζεται σωματικά. Χορογραφικά, καθώς …ο χορός σκοτώνει το Εγώ… Σε ένα άλλο επίπεδο “ζουν” οι μνήμες, οι οποίες σαν εικόνες – θραύσματα υπάρχουν μέσα στον ήρωα, όπως η νεότητα υπάρχει σε κάθε ηλικιωμένο. Ο ήρωας πρέπει να αποποιηθεί το Εγώ του να σπάσει το είδωλο και να κατανοήσει την ουσία της ύπαρξής του, να βάλει σε τάξη το χάος για να ξαναπάει πάλι σε αυτό, ώστε να μπορεί να κοιτάξει, στο μέλλον, πίσω του χωρίς αποστροφή, έχοντας εκπληρώσει το χρέος του. Να ζήσει συνειδητά. Χωρίς να περιμένει τίποτα από κανέναν. Και αυτή η αποστολή είναι τόσο αναγκαία που πρέπει οπωσδήποτε να τη δώσει σα σκυτάλη στον επόμενο αγωνιστή κι αυτός στον επόμενο κι αυτός στον επόμενο κ.ο.κ. Σαν ένα γράμμα κληρονομιάς στο ΓΙΟ. THE CRETAN GLANCE The Spirituality of Nikos Kazantzakis L. Michael Spath, D.Min., Ph.D. OPENING READING – From Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises A vehement Eros runs through the Universe. It is harder than steel, softer than air. It cuts through and passes beyond all things, it flees and escapes. It is a Militant Eros. Behind the shoulders of its beloved it perceives mankind surging and roaring like waves, it perceives animals and plants uniting and dying, it perceives the Universe imperiled and shouting to it: "Save me!" Eros? What other name may we give that impetus which becomes enchanted as soon as it casts its glance on matter and then longs to impress its features upon it? It longs to merge with the other erotic cry, to become one till both may become deathless. It approaches the soul and wishes to merge with it so that "you" and "I" may no longer exist. It smashes the duality of mind and body, to merge all breaths into one Divine Monad. In moments of crisis this Erotic Love swoops down on human beings and binds them together. It is a breath superior to all of them, independent of their desires and deeds. It is the Spirit, the breathing on the earth of what human beings call God. And it comes in whatever form it wishes - as dance, as Eros, as hunger, as religion, as art, and does not ask our permission. THE DIVINE EROTIC CRY “My entire Soul is a Cry, and all my work a commentary on that Cry,” he writes at the beginning of his spiritual autobiography. “That which interests me is not humanity, the earth, or heaven, but the Fire that consumes humanity, earth and sky.” He divides his life into four stages, each identified with one of “four great souls”: his life begins with a traditional embrace of the Orthodox Christ, but this was too constricting; so he turned to the Buddha’s inner peace, but this was too flesh- , too world-denying; third, Lenin’s Marxist revolutionary activism, but this was devoid of the transcendent; so finally, he embraced Odysseus (Ulysses in the Roman myths), but transcending Homer, a heroic Odysseus who “develops the courage and integrity to embrace the great contradictions of human existence, its joys and tears, without flying into an imaginary world.” (Zarathustra) Kazantzakis writes: We see the highest circle of spiraling powers, and have named it God. We might have given it other names: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence…. God is not a being, all-knowing, all-holy, almighty. Nor is God a predetermined goal toward which history proceeds, but an increasingly and progressively evolving Eros, an erotic Spirit in creation itself, an élan vital, a vital, animating energy at the heart of the universe and within the human heart. God is an erotic wind and shatters all bodies that he might drive on, a divine eros always working through blood and tears. ODYSSEUS You remember the story where Odysseus, anticipating the Sirens sweet seductive song that has plunged previous sailors to their rocky deaths, plugs the ears of his shipmates with beeswax, but instructs them to tie him to the ship’s mast; he leaves his ears unplugged so that he might experience, might taste the full seduction longing of longing for the dark Abyss, staring into the face of seductive death, and to live, with courage, live. Odysseus, for Kazantzakis, becomes the archetype of the spiritual struggler, his great spiritual hero. Odysseus holds the two great opposing forces in a dynamic tension, a creative synthesis, as Kazantzakis puts it, “like that round fruit which two lips make when they are kissing” – there is the luminous, rational, and civilizing impulse of Apollo, the solar god; and there is the dark, intoxicated, primal breaker-of taboos, Dionysius, the god of wine and ecstasy. For Kazantzakis, Apollo is the supreme ideal of Western religion, to save the ego from annihilation, salvation from death, a personal god, symbolic of spirit, and embodied in the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi. And Dionysius (who originated in India) is the supreme ideal of Eastern religion, the achieve-ment of union through the dissolution of the ego into the Ground of all being, an impersonal energy, symbolic of the flesh, and embodied in the figure of Zorba.