As night fell on September 2, 1978, Iannis Xenakis stood, walkie-talkie in hand, by his console on the back row of a temporary seating stand. As he looked across Mount Elias in the northeastern Peloponnese from his vantage point in the foothills, he could survey a peculiar kind of avant-garde circus with hundreds of performers, both animal and human, all under his personal control like a conductor with his orchestra. For the next four days, some 10,000 spectators would pass through those bleachers to witness the “Polytope de Mycénes,” a spectacle of light and sound combining ancient myth and modernist aesthetics, high technology and rural tradition, quite unlike any other, before or since.
The Wanderer’s Return
Has Greece finally learned to love Iannis Xenakis?
