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Contact:Justin Harmon (609) 258-5732
Date: February 18, 1997
Paremvasi Arts Group to Dance "The Touch of Zeus"
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Paremvasi Arts Group will give a dance presentation, "The Touch of Zeus," at 8:00 p.m. on February 27 in the Acting Studio, 185 Nassau St., at Princeton University.
Choreographed by Ersie Pittas, with music by Iannis Xenakis, the piece was inspired by the myth of Prometheus and Io, who meet in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound . Zeus, who loves Io, changes her into a white heifer when his wife Hera finds them together. Still suspicious, Hera sets a gadfly to spy on Io and condemns her to wander the earth. In her wanderings, she comes upon Prometheus, who has been punished for disobedience to the gods by being bound to a rock, where his heart is eaten out by an eagle.
"As a dancer," says Pittas, "I am intrigued by the mutuality embedded in Prometheus's immobility and Io's frenzied and ceaseless movement. The major themes brought together in this material are those of exile and desire. The exiled Prometheus is distant from man and god, and Io's wanderings are as great as geography--the Bosphorus and the Ionian Sea bear her name. Desire has taken the form of a gadfly, the counterpart of the eagle that torments Prometheus. The material collapses the ideas of exile and desire into one principle, implying that desire too is fueled by a dream of return."
Pittas has studied dance and choreography with Jerome Andrews and Susan Buirge in Paris and with Alvin Nikolai and Jose Limon in New York. Paremvasi is a nonprofit cultural organization based in Athens and supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture. Their presentation is sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies, supported by the Stanley Seeger Hellenic Fund. Established in 1979 by Stanley Seeger, Princeton Class of 1952, the fund aims "to advance the understanding of the culture of ancient Greece and its influence and to stimulate creative expression and thought in and about modern Greece."