Saint-Denis is in a way the Eleusis of Paris. A few kilometers from the capital, it was once the country’s most important industrial center and was ruled for many years by communist mayors. Coincidentally, Saint Denis became somewhat famous in Greece decades ago, when one of the most brilliant names of Elefsina, the director Orestis Laskos, wrote an excellent poem entitled “Paris”. So there he was talking about “a very strange gentleman” who “from his student days had set, the only ideal in his life, to go to Paris”. However, the gentleman in question, “who some day in the chest manages to do it. And one morning in the train, a carriage for Paris, he starts drunk”, in the end he does not fulfill his ideal. “He made a huge decision that so far no one has been able to forgive him for. Before proceeding to Paris, he landed in a suburb, in Saint Denis.” And this because “he had a good feeling that when he would be in Paris for a short period of time, he would surely get bored of it. And then;”.

That’s it for then. Today, however, things are different. Eleusis is the one that has somehow become ideal for Saint-Denis, which, following in its footsteps, believes that in 2028 it could also become one of the cultural capitals of Europe. And why not; The two cities, as we said, have common characteristics.

To this end, the Municipality of Saint-Denis, in collaboration with the University of Sorbonne, organized on February 21 a study day on the topic “from Eleusis in 2023 to Saint-Denis in 2028, cultural heritage and urban planning”. The conference was hosted in the Greek house of the Paris campus and the main speakers were Greek and French intellectuals. From the Greek side, Maria Gravari-Barbas, architect and director of the Greek House, Dimitra Kanellopoulou, architect and university student, playwright Alexandros Mystriotis and artistic producer Eleftherios Kehagioglou took the floor. From the French side, stage designer and architect Patrick Boussin and the person responsible for the nomination of Saint Denis, Juliette Beauvoin, spoke. Kehagioglou and Boussin elaborated on “Acrobats in Eleusis”, a project of research and artistic creation that brings together artists from contemporary dance, contemporary circus and music of the Eastern and Western Mediterranean to create artistic events that explore the public and the private space, urban planning and the multi-cultural social fabric of suburban cities. As they explained, Eleusis is a symbol of the great rearrangements that European civilizations are going through today. They also pointed out that the emergence of Elefsina as the cultural capital of Europe is a key event, which provides the possibility for a laboratory of experimentation regarding the role of artists and culture in a world undergoing a major ecological, social, economic and cultural transition. Continuing, Kehagioglou and Bousen explained that “Dancing at Elefsina” has two goals:

  • to establish a long-term collaboration between artists and cultural groups and institutions of Greece and France with the aim of developing a modern Greek circus starting from Eleusis and opening to the Balkans,
  • to explore new links between urban planning, architecture and the performing arts and to place artists at the center of these processes of development and regeneration of degraded areas. In particular, three artists from the Greek group “Ki But It Moves” (contemporary dance and circus artists) collaborate with five French circus artists and three musicians to create an evolutionary work, inspired by the urban landscape of Elefsina and Saint Denis. The artistic direction and circus direction of the work will be done by Gaetan Leveque in collaboration with the Greek choreographer Christina Souyoultzis.

This collective project is “built on site”, with public rehearsals and the participation of amateurs and young local artists. The spirit of this project of research and artistic creation aims to seize the opportunity of a high-profile international event (Elefsina, European Capital of Culture) in order to create cooperation processes between Greece and France. The first research stage of the project took place the first fortnight of November 2020 and presented online. So a video was created with excerpts from the first rehearsals. The project continued to be built, in France (September 2021) and in Eleusis in October 2022 with the aim of being completed and presented in the context of the cultural capital of Eleusis, in June 2023.