Several modern Greek dramatists staged plays about the various types of the Greek emigrant experience in the aftermath of the Second World War in which they debated issues of national origin, cultural identity, and assimilation or alienation. One of them, Petros Markaris, dealt with the Greek emigrant experience in West Germany in his play, The Guests. This play dramatizes the difficult living conditions of Greek emigrants who struggled for survival and integration in their host countries. Loula Anagnostaki took a different approach in three of her plays, Antonio, The Victory, and To My Listeners. In these plays she presents Greek emigrants who are political dissidents with serious psychological problems, haunted by their past experiences in Greece and by present difficulties in their host countries. My focus here covers only a fraction of the problematic status of the foreigner and his/her representation in modern Greek drama.

In this article, George P. Pefanis discusses two major aspects of the ‘event’, as formed and developed in late Derridean philosophy – namely, the ‘possibility of the impossible’ and the ‘experience of perhaps’. These aspects are examined in order to reveal the potential for precariousness and uncertainty engendered by performance art, as in the case of the animal-event. With its increased degree of indeterminacy and its projected singular, here-and-now character, performance art could leave open the way to the ‘other’, the unpredictable, and the unexpected that is the ‘animal-event’, since an animal can never be fully controlled or have its behaviour predicted by the theatre mechanism. Two performances are taken as case studies to demonstrate this: the emblematic I Like America and America Likes Me by Joseph Beuys (René Block Gallery, New York, 1974), and Dragon Heads by Marina Abramović (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990). It is argued that both cases pose certain moral issues around the presence of animals on the stage. George P. Pefanis is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistreian University of Athens, and also teaches theatre and cinema history at the Open University of Greece and Cyprus. His publications include Adventures of Representation: Scenes of Theory II, Spectres of Theatre: Scenes of Theory III (both 2013) and Theatre Adherents and Philosophers (Athens, 2016). In 2006, he received the award for best book in the study of theatre for The Kingdom of Eugena (2005).

This article discusses the relationship between drama and performance, using the Derridean concept of ‘supplement’ in theatre, which exceeds polarities and attempts a more dialectic approach. A review of Marvin Carlson’s theories of illustration, separation, translation, and fulfilment is a starting point for a comprehensive analysis of the views that encourage the binary drama-performance. This is examined in combination with Diane Taylor’s distinction between the ‘archive’, which preserves and bears all the written culture, and the ‘repertory’, which contains the world of performance. The ‘supplement’ holds two meanings: as a supplement, an external addition-to, and as a complement, a supplement-of, that comes in to fill a gap. One example is used to present the relationship between archive, repertory, and supplement: Brecht’s The Downfall of the Egotist Johann Fatzer. Theatre can be thought of in formations of heteropoietic sequence, through chains of supplements, including the texts, the performances, the rehearsal devices, the publication context, and the director’s notebooks. George P. Pefanis is a Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and also teaches theatre and cinema history at the Open University of Greece and Cyprus. His publications include Adventures of Representation: Scenes of Theory II, Spectres of Theatre: Scenes of Theory III (both 2013), and Theatre Adherents and Philosophers (2016). In 2006, he received the award for the best book in the study of theatre for The Kingdom of Eugena (2005).

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