In this stomping trilogy, possibly the highlight of the Grec, a near three hour visual and sonoric epic is driven home with poetic force by Phia Ménard, head of Nantes-based Compagnie Non Nova. The first of these performances, Maison Mère (Mother House) shows us a punk ‘goddess’ constructing a cardboard Parthenon with plenty of parcel tape and an attitude worth rooting for. This ‘humanity’s first house’ is reminiscent of one of the limp monstrosities tossed up in the UK (and elsewhere) in the 1980s. 

The second performance, Temple Père or (Father Temple) sees a phallic Tower of Babel mounted slab by slab on a setting from W.B. Yeats’ Second Coming by the scampering minions of a white-suited woman. It is really quite beautiful. The third gets into gender with La Rencontre Interdite (the forbidden encounter), in which Ménard swivels genders to symbolise construction, destruction, and reconstruction of a body, a building, an entire continent.

To create the trilogy, the artist travel to Kassel and to Athens to find the origins of a Europe as a monster and a myth. Non Nova draws on the language of ‘working-class’ cultures such as juggling, mime and vaudeville plus ‘higher’ ones, theatre and contemporary art, to produce a blended theatrical language as comprehensive as it is mysterious. The artist transitioned in 2008, and whether this influenced the work or not, Trilogie arguably makes its greatest impact in its own dramatic transitions from one performance to the next.