The Fire Has Reached the Sea (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Startling and sensual comics of queer desire, loneliness, and defiant struggle by a celebrated polymath of contemporary Greek dance.

Dimitris Papaioannou is one of the great polymaths of contemporary dance: a director, choreographer, visual artist, dancer, and the designer of his shows’ costumes, sets, and lighting. He created performances for DIY theaters in 1980s Athens and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Summer Olympics, and he continues to stage major works around the world. 

But before all of this, he drew comics. Trained as a painter, Papaioannou found in comics the means for personal storytelling that captured deep and difficult truths: “It’s about roughness, loneliness, the impossibility of achievement, and the journey leading up to the creative spark. It’s also about the profound struggle against the things you truly love.”

In The Fire Has Reached the Sea: Comics, 1986–1997, Papaioannou brings us stories that slide from dreamy and erotic to violent and raw: a man travels the world and finds lovers at every turn—in East Berlin, on the banks of the Nile, in a Bombay taxi—all while still haunted by his first love; two men flee the police down an alley and are transported into another world of sexual liberation and sudden brutality; ordinary human touch becomes potentially lethal in an apocalyptic realm of cold and darkness; and the loss of a first love forges a new will: “now that it is unbearable, I want to live.”

Collected and translated into English for the first time, The Fire Has Reached the Sea: Comics, 1986–1997 offers a portrait of Papaioannou at the beginning of his creative path, and a defiant vision of what it means to be queer and free in a world that is against you.