One Single and Everlasting Greece –Rallou Manou and Pavlos Mylonas
“Δεν υπάρχει άρχαία και νεα Ελλάδα, αλλά μόνον Ελλάδα, αιώνια, ζωντανή και ωραία” (Ελληνικό Χορόδραμα 1950-1960 1961, p8)
“There isn’t any distinction between ‘historic’ Greece and ‘fashionable’ Greece – there is only one single and everlasting Greece, stunning and palpitating with life.”
The choreographer Rallou Manou was a pivotal determine within the thriving cultural scene of mid-century Greece. Starting as a scholar of dance with Koula Pratsika, she broadened her publicity to modern currents in dance with research in Paris (1934), then Munich (1935-37). After the struggle, she took a troupe to Paris to carry out people dances in conventional costume, accompanied by music on conventional devices. In 1947, she visited the varsity of Martha Graham in New York.
The cumulative energy of those experiences, united along with her imaginative and prescient of the unity of Greek tradition, would quickly discover its expression by the Helleniko Chordrama (Greek Dance Drama), which she based in 1951. Her all-encompassing response to the search for Greekness on the coronary heart of the creative motion referred to as the “Technology of the ‘30s” concerned a synthesis of varied elements of Greek identification – historic drama, people tradition, and Byzantine custom – expressed by the vocabulary of recent dance.
This “Gesamtkunstwerk” of Greekness concerned collaboration with probably the most dynamic artists and intellectuals of her technology, amongst them the composers Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis, the shadow puppet artist Eugenios Spatharis, the painters Yannis Tsarouchis, Yiannis Moralis, Spyros Vassiliou, and Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, the writers Odysseas Elytis and Nikos Kazantzakis, and the director Michael Cacoyiannis. She would additionally collaborate with worldwide artists, and represented Greek tradition overseas, touring along with her works within the Balkans, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, the US, and the Soviet Union.
Her husband, the architect Pavlos Mylonas, achieved by his work what Manou did by hers: giving modernist creative expression depth, identification, and cultural relevance. Becoming a member of different famous architects of his technology similar to Dimitris Pikionis and Aris Konstantinidis, Mylonas was a robust proponent of essential regionalism: giving modernist buildings a way of place in response to each their pure setting (panorama and lightweight) and their cultural context. This resulted in a particularly Greek modernism, a regional response to a global architectural model.
Mylonas, architect and professor on the Athens Faculty of Fantastic Arts, was actually a scholar. His examine in images and drawings of the neoclassical and eclectic buildings of Athens and of examples of its vernacular structure spanned 4 many years. He additionally compiled an unlimited archive detailing the structure and the topography of Mt Athos, the work of numerous visits over his lifetime.
This intimate familiarity with Greek vernacular structure added depth to his work, leading to an method to modernism that included cultural identification whereas additionally responding to the pure surroundings. His buildings of be aware embrace the Mt Parnes Lodge, a high-profile venture on Mt Parnitha for EOT, the Nationwide Tourism Group of Greece.
Mylonas was acquainted with lots of the period’s most attention-grabbing artists. He collaborated with them as Manou did by the Helliniko Chorodrama. For the Mt Parnes Lodge, he included a notable work by Yiannis Moralis, whereas the pool backyard, with unique rocks left in situ, was the work of Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika. He additionally designed the Officers’ Membership of Thessaloniki, one of many metropolis’s most distinguished buildings, situated throughout from the White Tower; its uncommon concave façade appears to speak instantly in kind with the spherical tower, whereas his playfully modernist dealing with of quantity and his cantilevered balcony function a modernist response to the fifteenth century monument. The sudden use of deep crimson and uncooked golden stone assist to additional emphasize the connection to the town’s Byzantine heritage.
One other attention-grabbing work is the one he did for himself: Rallou Home. The couple, shut with almost all the important thing figures of latest tradition, had collaborated quite a lot of instances with the painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika. When Ghika engaged Mylonas to design a studio for him at his house on Hydra, the architect turned enchanted with the island. He purchased quite a lot of small adjoining conventional homes above the port and, after restoring them, related them to create a single stunning house, named for his spouse. It’s there nonetheless, and typically out there for hire.
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