Almost four years ago, Constantine Koukias gave himself a nudge that sent him headlong into another hemisphere. Tired of running a small arts company in Hobart and fed up with the vicissitudes of arts funding, Koukias decided to quit the city that had been home for most of his life and take up the benefits of having a European passport.
He decided to travel light, and sold most of his collection of antique audio equipment — old radios, an Edison wax cylinder recorder — and two harmoniums. He settled in Amsterdam: a city steeped in music and culture, and an ideal base from which to launch his characteristically cosmopolitan, multimedia music projects. The 30-odd boxes of music and books would follow him later.
“We are 12 tram stops from the Concertgebouw,” he says of one of the world’s most famous concert halls, now virtually on his doorstep. “There’s a canal, we are near Erasmuspark. One hundred and eighty languages are spoken in our district.”
In Hobart, Koukias was the founder and creative spirit of IHOS Music Theatre and Opera, an original force in music, but also quite a lonely one in the island state.
Moving to The Netherlands has freed him of the responsibilities of running a company and also has put him at the heart of the European avant-garde. Everything seems easier there, from putting on performances in disused industrial sites to finding like-minded collaborators and exacting instrumentalists.
His next venture is a homecoming in more ways than one. First, his new multimedia concert piece, Before the Flame Goes Out, will be performed at Hobart Town Hall this month and Koukias is thrilled that it will have its premiere in his home town. Second, the piece is about a region of northwestern Greece that was the land of his forebears: a place of hard light and mountainous beauty, of religious and cultural diversity, and with a terrible episode in its history. Ioannina was home to the Romaniote community of Hellenic Jews: people with their own religious customs and a distinctive Greek-Hebrew dialect. They are said to have lived and worshipped in Ioannina since the 9th century, possibly earlier, and endured under a long sequence of Byzantine, Norman and Ottoman rulers, and then the Greek kingdom.
All that changed with the Axis occupation of World War II, when Ioannina’s Jews were rounded up and deported to the death camps.
Read more, The Australian, HERE
Before the Flame Goes Out is at Hobart Town Hall, January 18, at 7.30pm and 9.30pm. There is a waiting list for tickets. MONA FOMA runs at various locations in Hobart from January 18 to 22.
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Matthew Westwood, Arts Correspondent, The Australian
