Ypokosmos

Ypokosmos, oratorio of the underworld: today’s Greece gives Alexandros Markeas the blues. An essentially Greek blues: the rebetiko, music of drag queens that smells of taverns, fuel oil and bad tobacco. Born in the twenties of the other century – years of misery, migrants and beggars who sang while starving – it serves as a starting point for this piece of our century, alas, the century of this ruined Greece that was once our city and whose entire sections are collapsing.

Around TM+ and the three solo singers, Ypokosmos gathers a hundred amateur singers from three choirs, as well as an amateur ensemble of plectrum instruments from Argenteuil. It is a labyrinth where one gets dizzy in the half-light of almost nothing and the rhythms of full sun. Because the man is miserable, the city a sewer, but it remains this poetry of nothing for people of little which makes raise the head in the consoling smoke and the alcohols of mercy. Accentuating the imbalance by their shifted chords, bouzoukis and saz sound like so many knells and broken glasses. With the choirs with their stale timbres, the songs broken by drunkenness or despair, it is the breath of suffering voices that we hear, at full power despite their impotence, in this breathtaking furious, lyrical and social requiem. Social and political disillusionment is drowned in the celebration and intoxication of the Hellenic sounds of the Vocalys Choir of the CRD of Bourg-la-Reine/Sceaux and the Choir workshop of Chœur en Scène.