“If I were better, I would only do comedies. Humor gets right into people’s hearts, it’s the perfect channel of communication.”

If there is an artist I would say that he can turn our dark fantasies into a living spectacle, set in motion the stone, coal, iron of the works of Yannis Kounellis, embody the creatures from the Garden of Earthly Pleasure by Hieronymus Bosch and wild mythological chimeras, it is Dimitris Papaioannou. Yet he sits across from me in his dark clothes—thin, pale, angular face, fixed eyes, dry body of a dancer—and talks about the golden age of tap dancing and the great American musicals. He shows the dancers of his troupe excerpts from Fred Astaire’s dance routines and scenes from farcical silent comedies. According to him, Buster Keaton is his whole world. He does not agree that his performances are black and gloomy. “Melancholy, probably, and their color is jet black. I learned to see like an artist, I was trained as a traditional artist,” he explains.

We keep talking about comedies and American artists, from Keaton to Forsythe and Wilson, who aren’t shy about making jokes in their work. “Ease was in my life, now it is included in my work. I don’t take myself too seriously, but I take my job very seriously. Now I know that the shalamara is the most desirable thing, I find that it creates poetry. If I can put a little stupidity into the sacred, that’s the best thing that can happen,” he says.

The interview takes place at a stop on his tour with the Transverse Orientation project we saw on the rooftop of the Onassis Foundation in December 2021. We are in the quiet hall of Megaros Musikis, where the performance “Ink” will take place. Greek premiere (Ink) 12 January. Dimitris Papaioannou’s group of 17 people revolving around the world’s biggest festivals is heading to New York soon and then to Stanford. They have just returned from Mexico, where they were deified.

“It’s very nice how the public treats us. What we have been through for the past five years is very touching,” he says. “Are you happy?” I’m asking. “I am on the path that I have chosen, I understand that I am floating in my destiny,” he replies. “And I was given the opportunity to enjoy it to the extent that I wanted to. Of course, I work a lot, but I can say that I am one of those people who found their nature early. Until the age of 50, I lived very happily in Athens, but I wondered why I did not play in the global communication network. Now he is generously given to me entirely.

I don’t take myself too seriously, but I take my job very seriously. Now I know that slag is the most desirable thing.

However, in Ink, he takes the stage himself, in a duet with the youngest member of the group, dancer Suka Horn. Papaioannou made his first choreography when he was 23 years old, now he is 58 years old. Every 10 years he creates something for himself, first “Forever”, then “Raw”. “From time to time I need to put my flesh and blood into my work to fertilize it. It’s very different when I’m sweating on stage myself than when I’m there fixing other people’s bodies. My “I” allows me to dramatically change the ways of expression. “Ink” plunges into an unconscious space in which there is almost psychological anxiety, it takes me to something primitive. Yes, the biological limit is inexorable for people who work with their bodies. Wear and tear must be accepted with love and tenderness.

“Why are the bodies always naked in your works?” I’m asking.

“Because at some point, I gradually realized that if someone wants to show the human body naked, it is better to take off the beige pants that the dancers usually wore. His time has passed. In my universe, where there are real materials—things that break, soil, water—where we don’t follow dance steps, the naked body fits the way it is depicted in painting or sculpture.”

“Ink”, born spontaneously during the period of the first lockdown, as a game of freedom from task restrictions, has all the elements of the world that Papaioanna creates: the octopus and the fantasy of a naked male body, the blackness of “sperm” that gives the animal ink for writing and painting, searching how to spiritualize the physical existence.

“I have always tried not to do gay art. To create art for the whole world, but through my inevitably homoerotic eye,” he says, referring to the intense sexuality of his work and connection to the rights movement and the visibility of LGBTI people in art. “I have no reason to spread my preferences or opinions, political or romantic. What I can do while still being useful is to express the world as I understand it through artistic means, so that perhaps my personal perspective will be expanded through art and refracted in the eyes of the public. That is, alchemically, like an artist, to turn the personal into the public. The existence of political art is legitimate, as is activism. But in my opinion, martial arts in any form is a problem.”

I ask which audience in the world he thinks he communicates most effectively with. He surprises me by replying that contact with the Japanese is explosive, which was confirmed at the “Lateral Orientation” presentation in Tokyo and Kyoto this summer. “There is a very important point in my work that they know very well,” he says. “This is the final fine-tuning. How to polish the surface to such an extent that it almost disappears and turns into a mirror that reflects everything. I’m obsessed with it. I am like a silversmith. Otherwise, life has no meaning, repetition only makes sense as an exercise to achieve the best. My boredom is unbearable. If I didn’t recognize that the realm of human art is an arena defined by hippos and not something to walk on for fun, I wouldn’t be competing.”