From that place,
as soon as my eyes open,
I can no longer escape.
The only thing is this:
I cannot move without it.
I cannot leave it there where it is,
so that I, myself, may go elsewhere.
I can go to the other end of the world;
I can hide in the morning under the covers.
I can even let myself melt under the sun at the beach –
It will always be there.
Where I am.
It is here, irreparably:
It is never elsewhere.
My body.

Michel Foucault


Michel: Exercises in Mortality unfolds as a work of original dramaturgy, weaving together fragments of everyday speech – as these are captured in the charged, ritualised space of the gym – with emblematic texts of Western thought. Drawing its conceptual backbone from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the performance centres on the body as a site of subjugation and control. Here, the body emerges as a system of signs, a field of operations – a machine to be analysed, regulated, and rendered productive through surveillance, training, therapy, prevention, aestheticisation, and, ultimately, punishment.

At the same time, the performance turns its gaze towards a wild canvas of present-day exercisers and patients, probing the forces that draw them into spaces of self-regulation: gyms, pharmacies, private clinics, nutritional centres, among others. With nuanced insistence, it asks: What “ritual” does one enact, day after day, to shield the body from pain and decay? How much time – and how much money – is invested in this pursuit? Why does contemporary culture treat death as a failure, even as it multiplies the techniques developed to defer it?

Within a dystopian and competitive stage environment, four exercising citizens are compelled to perform at the limits of their capacity, striving to secure their place within society, within production, within life itself. On this site of endurance and elimination, all implicated parties sweat to prove that they can still function as a viable unit within the machinery of productivity.

Powered both by humour and dramatic undercurrents, and shaped through interview-based material, the performance oscillates between realism, stark fiction, and the surreal, before returning to a lucid, unvarnished embrace of reality.

Direction – Conception: Thanasis Kritsakis
Dramaturgy: Thanasis Kritsakis, Marilena Katranidou
Set & costume design: Daphne Aidoni, Nikos Papadopoulos
Lighting design: Eleni Choumou
Movement: Alkistis Polychroni
Music composition & performance: Apostolis Koutsogiannis
Photography: Christos Simeonidis
Executive producer: Giorgos Papadakis
Camera operation: Giannis Vlachopoulos
Assistant to the director: Stergiana Tzegka
Internship: Ioanna Prosalenti
Non-profit Organisation: Unknown Structures of Complex

Cast
Giorgos Vourdamis, Lambros Grammatikos, Alkistis Polychroni, Maria Tsima, Dimitris Chatzimichailidis

Special thanks to the Gymnastics Club “Diaplasi – Spyros Bournazos” for the kind provision of their gym facilities for the photoshoot.