Reenacting the Tragedy of the Defeated

Katerina Arvaniti*

Abstract

This article reads Mystery 35: Aeschylus’ Persians—A Journey in the Array of Souls, directed by Nikita Milivojević, as a site-specific reenactment that shifts Persians from commemoration to immersion. Staged across the Saronic Gulf and Salamis within Eleusis 2023, it reframes Xerxes’ return as an embodied passage through guilt and mourning. Drawing on site-specific and memory studies, the essay argues that landscape acts as dramaturgical co-author, while Dimitris Kamarotos’s live, environmental sound design fosters an ethics of listening that resists allegory and spectacle. Rather than monumentalizing defeat, the work stages shared vulnerability in open terrain, collapsing historical distance without erasing difference. In dialogue with Mike Pearson’s Persians (National Theatre Wales), Mystery 35 shows how spatial traversal, multilingual lament, and acoustic resonance render interior states legible and activate cultural memory— modeling a site-responsive ethics grounded not in mastery, but in mourning.

Keywords: site-specific performance, cultural memory, sonic dramaturgy, ethics of witnessing, Eleusis 2023

Introduction: From Commemoration to Immersion

Aeschylus’ Persians (472 BCE) is the oldest surviving tragedy in Western drama and uniquely stands as the only extant Greek tragedy rooted in historical rather than mythological events. Composed just eight years after the Battle of Salamis, the play closely adheres to lived experience, reflecting a political inquiry into the causes and consequences of imperial conflict. At the time of its performance, Athens was immersed in a culture of public commemoration that celebrated the recent victories of the Graeco-Persian Wars—celebrations in which Aeschylus himself played a central role, having fought at Salamis in 480 BCE (Life of Aeschylus in TrGF 3 T I. 4, 11, 144.10-11). Many spectators of the original performance were likewise veterans of the same campaign. Against this backdrop of civic pride and triumph, Persians stands out for its empathetic depiction of the defeated enemy. Rather than glorifying Greek victory, the play laments the consequences of imperial hubris, offering a tragic reflection on loss and human vulnerability. This perspective is poignantly revived in Mystery 35: A Journey in the Array of Souls,^[1] a site-specific reimagining by Serbian director Nikita Milivojević. His production transforms Persians into an immersive physical and psychological journey, reactivating the emotional and memorial dimensions of defeat through contemporary performative means.

Rather than staging a linear dramatic narrative, Milivojević offers a performative palimpsest: a collective traversal of space in which actors, spectators, and landscape co-construct meaning. Set in motion on the Saronic Gulf and culminating on the shores of Salamis, the performance reframes Xerxes’ return as a descent into guilt and mourning. The site of the catastrophe becomes a dramaturgical partner, transforming memory into presence and theatre into testimony.

Before the crossing to Salamis: The Chorus -souls of dead- among the spectators. Photo: Aris Kamarotos

Eleusis 2023 and the Politics of Cultural Memory

The presentation of The Persians within the Eleusis 2023 European Capital of Culture programme situated the performance within a site of profound symbolic resonance. Eleusis, a locus of ancient rites of passage and esoteric initiation, served not merely as a venue but as a spatial metaphor for historical transition and cultural vulnerability. In this context, Mystery 35 established a powerful dialectic between Eleusis and Salamis, between ritual renewal and imperial collapse, amplifying the tragedy’s contemporary relevance as a meditation on collective defeat and the fragility of identity in times of rupture.

Site-Specificity and the Politics of Place

Site-specific performance has emerged as a powerful mode of spatial and cultural intervention. As Fiona Wilkie argues, such work operates “out of place,” in tension with the spatial codes and conventions of institutional theatre, and is shaped by the fluid interplay between performer, space and spectator. Wilkie insists that “site is both noun and verb” (2), meaning that it is not a static location but a relational nexus of cultural, historical and sensory meanings, necessarily imbued with human or conceptual “sitting”, activated through performance echoing de Certeau’s idea that place becomes space through movement and practice (117).

Nick Kaye develops the notion that site-specificity does not denote a fixed spatial or formal identity. Rather, it is shaped through a “transitive definition of site” (2), formed in the relational dynamics between performer, audience, and environment (2–3). In such work, place is at once real and constructed, haunted by history yet opened to imaginative transformation. Cathy Turner similarly conceptualizes site-specific space as a palimpsest, a layered construct in which new meanings accumulate without erasing the traces of the past. This spatial ambiguity, she argues, becomes generative when activated through performance, as the event negotiates between residual histories and present enactment (373–75). The psychogeographic methods of groups like Wrights & Sites (Turner 377-79) and the mobilization of “potential space” (379-30) in Turner’s analysis underscore how site-specific performance blurs the line between memory and presence, fiction and material trace (379–82).

In their collectively authored essay, Bowditch, Pace, Tobin, and Devine articulate a set of foundational principles for site-responsive performance, foregrounding the imperative to attend closely to the specificities of architecture, environment, and elemental conditions. Rather than imposing theatrical form onto a neutral backdrop, they advocate for an ethos of collaboration with the site itself, treating spatial and environmental features as co-authors in the dramaturgical process (E-5-E-19). In this view, site-specific performance enacts a spatial ethics of attention, one that neither dominates nor erases the place, but activates its latent meanings through embodied presence and responsive action. As Victoria Hunter observes, engaging with space through site-specific practice reveals its mutable and affective nature, its capacity to “shift, change and develop” (18) both when it is consciously attended to and when it escapes perception. For the site-dance practitioner in particular, this awareness is deepened through interdisciplinary dialogue, which fosters an understanding of space and place as fluid, permeable entities, always in motion and resisting fixed categorization. Such a perspective encourages a rethinking of site-specific performance not as a delimited genre, but as a mobile field of diverse methods and embodied spatial enquiry (18–19).

Together, these theoretical perspectives form a framework for understanding a performance like Mystery 35: Aeschylus’ Persians, which stages a return to the literal site of historical catastrophe—Salamis—not to monumentalize the past but to reanimate its affective traces through embodied witnessing. The ferry crossing, the watery grave, and the communal traversal of space by actors and spectators function as spatial dramaturgies that collapse historical time and foreground embodied memory, echoing what Carol Martin calls the “theatre of the real” which means the “overlap and interplay between ‘theatre’ and ‘reality’, the blurred boundary between the ‘stage’ and the ‘real’ world” (4). As Martin argues, such performances do not simply reflect history but “can even be understood as intervening in history” (5), staging memory as contested, affective, and spatially situated. By navigating both historical terrain and the ethics of reenactment, Mystery 35 enacts a potent negotiation between site, history, and presence.

Such concepts converge in Milivojević’s Mystery 35, where the performance unfolds as an act of embodied remembrance. The ferry crossing, the traversal of terrain, and the placement of scenes across sea and land render the performance a spatial rite, a negotiation between the physicality of history and the spectres of loss.

**Comparative Paradigm: Pearson’s The Persians and the Dramaturgy of Ruin**

Mike Pearson’s 2010 site-specific adaptation of The Persians by National Theatre Wales stands as a landmark in contemporary classical reception. Staged in Cilieni, a Cold War-era military training village in the Brecon Beacons, the production engaged with a site saturated by historical violence and imperial residue. Kate Bassett describes the setting as a “ghost village,” a “spooky” place where military architecture embodies both past conflict and the psychopolitics of surveillance.

Pearson’s staging did not simply transpose The Persians onto this terrain; it enabled the site to co-author the event. The production was anchored in a mobile scenography of ruins, neon, and live media relays. Audience members, wrapped in “waterproof, windproof” military ponchos, were “transported by coach on a 20-minute journey” to the empty village, passing wrecked, fire-blackened military vehicles and shuttered, unpainted houses (Pearson 74). Immersed in a spectral milieu where history met simulation, the audience confronted a collapse of linear time: CCTV relays, live camerawork, and ambient sound splintered perception, amplifying the sense of imperial disintegration. The ghost of Darius appeared as a projected image, and Xerxes’ collapse was mediated through screens. Within this framework, Kaite O’Reilly’s adaptation eschews modernization, retaining an archaic martial lexicon (spears, chariots, quivers) and resisting presentist allegory or one-to-one equivalences between classical figures and contemporary leaders. Instead, the site-specific dramaturgy activates anachronism as a critical resource, allowing past and present to interpenetrate without collapsing their differences. Rather than topical analogy, Pearson and O’Reilly foreground the destructive consequences of war, articulating a transhistorical critique.

Like Milivojević, Pearson locates tragedy not in grand declamation but in spatialized mourning. In both cases, the geography of loss becomes dramaturgy: history is not represented but relived, traversed, and mourned in situ.

Before the crossing. The dead Xerxes receives the Chorus. Photo: Aris Kamarotos

The Journey as Lament: Performing Mystery 35

The structure of Mystery 35 defies conventional theatrical segmentation; instead, it unfolds as a kinetic rite of passage, a spatial–temporal traversal that situates audience and performers within a shared experience of lamentation. The opening takes place at sunset on the waterfront of Perama Megaridos, facing Salamis. A Chorus comprising Giorgos Zygouris, Nikos Iatrou, Dimitris Karamanos, Emmanouil Kontos, Nikolas Makris, Nikolas Ntouros, and Thanasis Raftopoulos, subsequently joined by two women actors from the National Theatre of Serbia (Mia Simonović, Bojana Milanović) , keeps vigil for news of Xerxes’ campaign, with Myrto Alikaki serving as coryphaeus. As Karaoglou observes, “we are not in Susa, nor do we encounter a council of enfeebled elders. The Chorus is configured as a composite polity: men in their prime, young soldiers, revenants of the fallen, and, no less centrally, the mothers and wives whose mourning returns them to the scene of erasure.” The Chorus boards the ferry alongside the spectators to cross over to Salamis. At the gangway, they are greeted by Xerxes’ shade (Dimitris Imellos), appearing as a revenant. This passage across the Saronic Gulf is anything but incidental: it restages Xerxes’ mythic return to the site of defeat, casting the sea as a liminal threshold of remembrance and reckoning.

On board, the Chorus is reconfigured as phantasmatic embodiments rather than elders: figures that index both the dead of the army and the dispersed fragments of Xerxes’ consciousness. Their oscillatory movement, set yet permeable, stages the dialectic of presence/absence and life/afterlife. The maritime crossing functions as a durational threshold, redistributing spectatorship into participation.

Atossa and the Chorus on the swirling ferry crossing to Salamis. Photo: Aris Kamarotos

Sharing the ferry with the spectators is Atossa (Maria Zorba), introduced not in palatial grandeur but as a figure already engulfed by grief and foreboding, a spectral presence haunted by dreams. Unsettled by her nocturnal vision, she entrusts the Chorus with her anxiety over her son’s fate. As the exchange unfolds, the vessel wheels across the water, inscribing the turbulence of affect and the memory of catastrophe. In this configuration, the ferry itself becomes an active instrument within the movement score authored by Amalia Bennett.

Upon disembarkation, the audience follows the performers toward the coastal site on Salamis, reconfiguring the traditional theatrical procession into a funereal march. The landscape becomes scenography. In a clearing by the sea, the Messenger appears (played by Thodoris Antoniadis), delivering the central narrative pivot: the news of catastrophic loss. His opening line, “We are annihilated,” is uttered without dramatic flourish. The starkness of the message resonates with the bareness of the surroundings, no stage lights, no visual effects, only encroaching darkness and the horizon of the sea.

On Salamis, spectators attend to the Messenger’s report. Photo: Aris Kamarotos

Among the most arresting moments of this peripatetic traverse is the invocation of Darius (Giorgos Biniaris). His shade is revealed from above, atop a pine tree, his robe cascading like funereal drapery (costumes: Kenny MacLellan). This vertical emergence, situated in the natural topography, reinforces the spatial axis of memory: rooted in the earth, reaching toward transcendence. Darius is attended, in Serbian, by two performers (Mia Simonović, Bojana Milanović) who voice and echo his counsel.

Darius’ riveting epiphany in the Peripatetic site-specific performance. Photo: Aris Kamarotos

The performance culminates beside a makeshift tank filled with water and debris, evoking the wreckage of the Persian fleet. Here, Xerxes arrives in silence. No longer an emperor, he is a man undone by his choices, surrounded by the remnants of failure. He does not speak. His presence is defined by stillness, by the void of authority, by the irreversible weight of consequence. The sea before him becomes a final witness, its vastness mirroring the abyss of his loss.

Audience and Chorus in the Darius scene. Photo: Aris Kamarotos

This final scene refuses resolution. It offers no catharsis, no transformation, only immersion into mourning. Through its choreographed minimalism and geographical choreography, Mystery 35 articulates tragedy not as spectacle, but as a shared condition of vulnerability. The audience, now physically and emotionally traversed, becomes witness not to a story, but to its afterlife.

Xerxes and the Chorus beside a water tank stewn with fragments of the Persian fleet. Photo: Aris Kamarotos

Inside Xerxes’ Mind: Memory as Spatial Consciousness

Milivojević characterizes Mystery 35 as unfolding within the intrapsychic interior of Xerxes, a haunted mindscape in which grief, shame, and delusion intersect. The production’s spatial dramaturgy, rather than reenacting the historical sequence of events, delineates an emotional and mnemonic descent. As the director observes, “The performance is situated within Xerxes’ mind. It unfolds, as it were, as a trajectory of his consciousness. And that consciousness, more punishment than guilt, impels him toward the very place he is determined under no circumstances to go: Salamis” (Karaiskaki). The journey across land and sea becomes a topography of guilt: every spatial threshold crossed by the performers echoes an internal threshold traversed by the protagonist.

Xerxes emerges not as a command-issuing sovereign but as a solitary figure suspended in silence, navigating a reality that ceaselessly eludes comprehension. According to the director, “Xerxes’ unconscious is the focus, and it comprises all the constitutive elements of the tragedy, for it is the unconscious of a man who bears the unspeakable guilt for the deaths of so many—indeed, many of them of tender age,” a man who “lost everything in an instant, like a gambler” (Karaiskaki). Hence, in Milivojević’s version, the Chorus is composed of young men, the flower of the nation that was annihilated, whom Xerxes must confront. Accordingly, the director privileges gestural and atmospheric expression: the king’s consciousness is rendered through the surrounding landscape, through his physical disorientation, and, ultimately, through the silent chorus of the dead.

This conception of being inside Xerxes’ mind or head aligns with contemporary understandings of trauma as an embodied phenomenon. According to Cathy Caruth, “trauma is understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (3). Moreover, she argues that trauma is not fully grasped at the moment of its occurrence, but returns belatedly, fragmented and unresolved (91). Mystery 35 performs precisely this return: not the battle itself, but its aftershock, an echo reverberating across physical and psychic terrain.

Within this dramaturgical frame, the Chorus is not merely a narrative device; it functions as the living embodiment of Xerxes’ conscience. The figures that surround him, restless, accusative, mournful, are projections of the lives he failed to preserve. By compelling Xerxes to move among them, to meet their gaze, Milivojević stages a ritual of confrontation. This is not redemption but reckoning: the production does not seek to humanize the tyrant so much as to expose the hollowness left in the wake of ambition. It is worth noting, moreover, that, on his own account, the director was not interested in commenting on power as such. He maintains that even today young people are killed on battlefields across the globe “because some contemporary Xerxes has presumably made analogous decisions” (Bekos).

The interfusion of psychological space and physical location demonstrates how site-specific performance renders interior states legible. Xerxes’ perambulation along the coast of Salamis enacts “place memory” (Casey 181–215) and actively “aids remembering” (Casey 186), foregrounding the inseparability of memory from embodied geography. In this account, memory is not merely recalled, it is walked, inhabited, endured.

Music and Mourning: The Sonic Architecture

Integral to the dramaturgical structure of Mystery 35 is the sonic landscape designed by composer–dramaturg Dimitris Kamarotos. Rather than functioning as a supplementary layer, music in this production is woven into the emotional and architectural fabric of the performance. Kamarotos’s approach conceives of sound and speech as part of a unified score, one that respects the rhythm, tone, and semantic resonance of Aeschylean language while transposing it into a contemporary acoustic idiom. Notably, Kamarotos has also released a film, Persians—A Journey in the Array of Souls (2024), based on the eponymous stage production. As a fully autonomous work, the film pioneers a distinctive cinematic idiom that renders, directly and poetically, in the language of the screen, “the agony of defeat, the acceptance of total devastation, and the anguished traversal of the terrain where myriad souls were lost” (Karaiskaki).

Drawing upon Giorgos Blanas’s translation of Aeschylus’ The Persians, Kamarotos treated each vocal gesture as a melodic and emotional act. The music interacts with the text not illustratively, but dialogically, shaping and being shaped by its inflections. As the composer notes, “when working with poetic language and a translation, specifically Giorgos Blanas’s excellent version, one’s musical treatment is correspondingly affected. There is the music of speech, which I regard as a constitutive part of the music written in notes; the music of speech converses with the other” (Bekos). This interdependence results in a kind of sonic dramaturgy, where sound becomes a carrier of affective density and memory.

The musical elements are performed live, not from a fixed orchestra pit, but from within the landscape itself. The musicians—Stelios Katsatsidis, Vasilis Papavassiliou, and Kostas Siskos—positioned along the ferry deck, coastal ridges, and wooded clearings, merge with the natural environment. The instrumental palette, accordion, horn, contrabass, alongside idiophonic hand clappers (castanets) played by the Chorus, was chosen not merely for timbre but for spatial resonance, for its capacity to linger, echo, and reverberate in open air. This acoustic spatiality accords with the production’s broader ethos: the dissolution of boundaries between stage and world, performance and environment. According to the director, “dilations and contractions of rhythm and speech, pauses, chromatic shifts, visual rhythms; close, medium, and long shots; sounds, voices, and music, together form a single composition, an undulating field of meanings governed by form.” He apprehends the whole as music: “a tracking shot is no different from a musical note, a close-up from a solo; they cohere as parts of a unified score” (Karaiskaki).

Especially powerful is the moment when the two Serbian actors from the National Theatre of Serbia join the chorus in a lament sung in their native language. The polyphony that emerges from this gesture transcends historical specificity, evoking a transhistorical grief. The layering of languages, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, and Serbian, mirrors the layering of temporalities within the production. It is not only the past that is mourned, but also its recurrence, its inability to remain buried.

The process is a modulation of grief, a wave that rises and falls, vibrating through voice and string, echo and silence. This musical strategy eschews narrative commentary or melodrama, generating instead a field of rhythms and sounds that precedes articulation, where trauma, mourning, and memory coalesce. The music in Mystery 35 is not merely heard but experienced bodily, punctuating transitions, marking moments of rupture, and carrying the audience through landscapes of sorrow. Amid a deliberately austere visual register, sound becomes the medium through which tragedy resonates across space and within the self.

Site, Ethics, and Contemporary Resonance

The dramaturgical and spatial strategies of Mystery 35 pose ethical questions that reach beyond the representation of history. Site-specific performance, especially when grounded in spaces marked by trauma, must negotiate the line between commemoration and appropriation. As Milivojević puts it, “on principle, I do not like ‘directions’ or ‘instructions’ to the audience in a theatrical situation, how to feel and what to think. The challenge is to make a new proposal that will speak to the anxieties of today’s spectators” (Bekos). Rather than sensationalizing the Persian defeat or aestheticizing suffering, the production foregrounds a politics of listening: to place, to memory, to loss.

Mystery 35 refuses to impose a fixed narrative upon Salamis; instead, it allows the landscape to speak, through silence, atmosphere, and embodied traversal. The ferry crossing, the littoral walk, and the unadorned playing sites invite contemplation rather than consumption. In this vein, Milivojević notes that he is “not particularly interested, here, in commenting on ‘power’ as such,” adding a contemporary corollary: “even now, consider how many young people are dying on battlefields across the planet because of foolish ideas or grave mistakes, because some latter-day Xerxes made analogous decisions” (Bekos). With a minimalist material vocabulary and distributed action, the production invites spectators’ vigilance and a yielding to the cadence of the site.

These choices generate contemporary resonances without resorting to overt allegory. The shared vulnerability of bodies in open terrain refracts present crises, displacement, warfare, and the fragility of borders both national and psychic. As spectators move alongside performers, the threshold between historical witness and present participant blurs; the past here is neither distant nor inert, but an active interlocutor.

Within this frame, sound operates as a cognitive and ethical hinge. Kamarotos underscores the generative role of poetics: “ancient poetry activates and releases the mind’s associations and interconnections; it ushers us into a zone of indeterminacy, a field of thought where anything might occur. That is, after all, why we watch a performance or a film, why we read a book, the hope that it will take us beyond what its explicit content says” (Karaiskaki ). In Mystery 35, that “beyond” is achieved not by monumentality but by attunement.

Finally, staging the voice of the defeated within the geopolitical ambit of a European Capital of Culture is a pointed gesture. Eleusis 2023 becomes not merely a cultural platform but a forum for reflecting on the uses of history and the narratives we choose to monumentalize. By focusing on Xerxes’ failure and psychic fracture, the performance troubles triumphalist historiography and reorients attention toward the costs of empire, ambition, and militarism. In its restraint, humility, and porosity to place, Mystery 35 offers a model of site-specific ethics grounded not in mastery, but in mourning.

Conclusion

Mystery 35 reconceives Persians as a spatial rite in which place, sound, and movement displace the primacy of plot. By distributing action across sea and shore and by embedding musicians within the environment, the production insists that tragedy is not merely told but traversed. The ferry crossing, the littoral walk, and the unadorned sites do more than frame the action; they enact a dramaturgy of witnessing in which spectators’ bodies become the medium through which memory returns.

This reorientation is ethical as much as aesthetic. Milivojević explicitly refuses to instruct spectators what to think or feel, substituting didaxis with a politics of listening, to place, to loss, to the dead. Kamarotos’s sonic strategy extends this ethic: voice, instrument, echo, and silence assemble a field in which wounding, mourning, and memory converge without being instrumentalized. In this configuration, sound becomes the hinge between cognition and affect, between the historic event and its ongoing reverberations.

Situated within Eleusis 2023, the staging of the defeated speaks back to triumphalist historiography and to contemporary scenes of displacement and war. Yet it does so without topical allegory. Instead, Mystery 35 holds open a porous relation between past and present, allowing the landscape of Salamis to articulate the costs of imperial ambition while preserving historical specificity. In dialogue with Pearson’s Welsh Persians, the work confirms that site-specific performance can intervene in cultural memory not by adding monuments but by cultivating conditions of attention and care.

What emerges is a model of site-responsive practice in which dramaturgy is inseparable from geography and ethics from aesthetics. Mystery 35 asks audiences to exchange spectatorship for accompaniment, to move, listen, and bear witness. In doing so, it demonstrates how the theatre of the real can renew classical tragedy: not as celebration of victory, but as a sustained practice of mourning that rehumanizes the defeated and implicates the living.

Endnote

^[1] The term Mysteries – Aeschylus Project refers to a curated strand of performances developed under the artistic direction of Michael Marmarinos within the framework of the Eleusis 2023 European Capital of Culture. As part of this initiative, Mystery 35: AESCHYLUS, designated as a Legacy Project, returned in its second iteration to Elefsina, the birthplace of the tragedian. The first installment of the Aeschylus Project took place in 2022 and included two major theatrical productions: Clytemnestra by the Flemish collective tg STAN, directed by Jolente De Keersmaeker, a radical reinterpretation focused on gender and silenced voices; and Persians, directed by Dimitris Karantzas, a co-production with the Athens Epidaurus Festival and “To Theatro,” exploring the tragic dimension of contemporary global crises through Aeschylus’ enduring lens.

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*Katerina Arvaniti is Professor of Theatre in the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Patras. She holds a degree in Philology from the University of Ioannina, an M.A. in Classics from the University of London, an M.Phil. in Classics from the University of Reading, and a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies from the University of Kent. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled The Representation of Women in Contemporary Productions of Ancient Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to the Theme of Matricide, explores gender portrayals in modern stagings of classical drama. Her research and teaching interests focus on contemporary performance approaches to ancient Greek drama in modern times. She is the author of the two-volume work Ancient Greek Tragedy at the National Theatre, Vols. I and II (Papazisis Editions, 2020), as well as the forthcoming book Satyr Play on the Modern Stage (Papazisis Editions, 2025, ISBN: 978-960-02-4482-3).