It will have your eyes – Ilias Kounelas

Greece

An existential comedy by Ilias Kounelas

An actor who performs as a clown doctor visits a terminally ill patient and starts performing at her bedside on her demand. During one of the performances, the patient takes the lead to test her acting abilities.
The play magnifies the remaining stash of life that has yet to be lived when in confrontation with death, while at the same time it superbly relinquishes the instinct for survival, which so relentlessly has recently taken us in.
Ilias Kounelas, October 2023, Athens

Credits
Conception – Direction of concept: Ilias Kounelas
Assistant Stage Manager: Aleka Tomprou
Scenic and Costume Designer: Katerina-Christina Manolakou
Cast: Nantia Katsoura, Ilias Kounelas

Duration: 90 min.
Trailer: – 

Ilias Kounelas

He is teaching since 2012 at the Athens Conservatory Drama School the class „Clown / a class about failure“. It’s a self-exposure class that has as subject the things that actors do not love about themselves.
He is rapporteur of the Laskaridis Foundation. The title of his contribution is “The pleasant story of a failed man”.
An alumni of the National Theatre of Northern Greece Drama School, since 2006, he has collaborated with many distinguished directors and many important theatres.
In 2010, after working for commercial theatre, he starts dreaming of a chamber theatre where the audience and the actor will be sitting on the same level and will have “common skin in the theatre game”. He thus creates a theatre “of the person”, where he starts giving value to each spectator as a person. He believes that every person in herself constitutes a full theatre. He abandons the classical theatre stages and creates performances in natural surroundings that are addressed each time to a limited number of spectators. He plays in abandoned neoclassical houses, in church yards, in squares, rooftops, prisons and hospitals.
The performance “Garden – Ashes / from the velvet album of the 20th century” (2011 -2013) for example, was staged for two years in an abandoned neoclassical building at Kolonos for 22 spectators each time.
The performance “The 8th day” was staged in 220 homes in the whole of Athens. The performance hosted and was hosted. It could be played in anybody’s living room, but you could always visit it in any living room it was being played. It traveled to Cyprus, Salonica and Greek-speaking homes of Switzerland, and it constituted a distinct experience for those who attended each time.
In the summer of 2014 he conceives the action ”Hospital visit” and suggests it to the National Theatre, which embraces it to this day. In this action, theatre is performed in hospital rooms, always around a bed, for sick spectators, usually in their final stage. The action ”Hospital visit” counts 600 performances and keeps on.
On May 2018 he grounds the Cultural Consolational Care Organization “Person/face”, which has as its goal to make performative art accessible to spectators that on the current moment of their lives cannot come to the theatre.
He also directs performances that represent the “narrative of the good” in the era of the crisis and convey hope and braveness to the audience. Some of them are:
“Love / a trilogy about the narrative of the good”
“I am sea years old / a song about the generation gap”
On March 2018 he publishes the book “The handbook of a good clown” ( Kaleidoscope Publications ).