In the early 1970s Leda Papaconstantinou returned to Greece during the military junta, after studying and working in England, and settled on Spetses — where her parents had moved from Athens — with her then-husband, the British artist and teacher David Hughes.
She had already been working in performance. She wanted to continue. The first problem was finding people to do it with.
What the Spetses Players were
The group took shape around 1972, assembling artists, teachers, professors, students, musicians and people from literature and philosophy. Many were not Greek. Spetses at the time drew long-staying visitors from the US, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy and Denmark — people living there for stretches rather than taking the short holidays that replaced them.
Papaconstantinou is firm about what it was not. “It wasn’t theatre,” she tells designboom, because there was no fixed written story performed repeatedly. The collaborators had to decide together what they wanted to talk about, and then find a form that would carry it.
She describes two reference points, and both are illuminating. Dario Fo, the Italian playwright and performer, who she describes as someone who would read the local newspaper, identify an issue affecting a community, and build a performance around it. And Karagiozis, the Greek shadow-theatre character who changes according to the story and the circumstances around him.
A structural detail worth sitting with: Papaconstantinou was the only member who spoke Greek. The group making work about the specific grievances of a Greek island was, linguistically, mostly outside it.
Bouboulitsa
The recurring character was Bouboulitsa, a fictional little girl named after Laskarina Bouboulina, the naval commander and revolutionary who is the legendary figure of Spetses. Borrowing the island’s best-known story and shrinking it into a new character is an efficient piece of construction — instant local recognition, no obligation to the original narrative.
Bouboulitsa was born behind the screen of a Karagiozis shadow theatre, arriving as a gift to an old fisherman and his wife, surrounded by sea creatures: jellyfish, sea urchins, red mullet, sardines. Papaconstantinou appeared as an angel-mermaid. Other performers became marine creatures, or, in another scene, “motorcycle monsters.” Costumes were built around movement rather than added afterwards.
The subjects were the news
What makes this a case study rather than a curiosity is what the performances were about:
- Bouboulitsa’s Dream (1979) — tourism reshaping the island’s economy, houses sold to wealthy foreign buyers, local residents unable to afford homes. In one story a property agent sells houses at prices beyond local reach; Bouboulitsa and the other characters eventually make him change his mind, and they build a house out of milk cartons.
- Bouboulitsa and the Terrible Dragon (1977) — water: shortages, and the rising cost of the resource.
- Another dealt with waste and the lack of medical care.
Housing unaffordability driven by foreign purchase, water scarcity, waste, healthcare access. These were, as she puts it, “part of the reality the performers and their audience were living through.”
The audience was the point. Performances were often full, and the group was primarily interested in reaching the people who lived on Spetses rather than the summer visitors. Every performance ended with the same song, inviting people to return to Spetses and look after it, and by the end the audience would stand up, dance and sing along.
In 1977 the group organised the first and only international Spetses Festival, bringing the Players together with visiting artists including Timberlake Wertenbaker, Clement Biddle Wood and Simon Carr. Most of it happened around the old harbour, in the island’s existing spaces — including the chambers of the Figaro discotheque and a house designed by the architect Aris Konstantinidis.
The part that is actually about now
Almost fifty years on, the photographs have started circulating again. In 2026, colour images of the costumes and characters have been spreading on social media, reaching people who know little about the original stories.
Papaconstantinou’s analysis of this is the most interesting thing in the interview, and it is not nostalgic.
She reads the renewed attention partly through the work’s aesthetics, describing herself as “a component of the visual language” and suggesting the images can activate a viewer differently — prompting them to ask what they are looking at before knowing where it came from.
Then the reversal: originally, words, literature and stories generated the images. Today, she says, the process can run the other way. “The image can create the references to the words.”
That is a precise description of what social platforms do to archival art, and it is unusual to hear it from the artist without complaint attached. The photograph arrives first, decontextualised, and if it is strong enough the viewer goes looking for the story. For work whose original content was local politics, that is a strange afterlife — the costumes travel and the housing crisis they were about does not, until someone asks.
She also names the uncomfortable question underneath. The colours, fabrics and costumes can look surprisingly contemporary to people meeting them online. There is admiration in seeing what was made in the 1970s — and then: if these ideas were already present then, why do so many of the issues still feel familiar?
Her stated intention now is to go back to the stories behind each Bouboulitsa performance with the collaborators still alive who remember the work. Understanding how literature and language produced the images is, she says, still an unfinished part of the history.
On not reproducing performances
In 2013, for AGORA, the 4th Athens Biennale, she contacted surviving collaborators and gathered their memories and material from the period — creating an archive rather than restaging the work.
“I never reproduce performances,” she says.
What exists instead is a collection of photographs, memories, texts and stories approachable from different directions. That archive has since been transferred to EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens.
This is the model worth taking away, and it is a position on documentation rather than a shortage of it. A restaging claims to be the work and cannot be — the audience, the island, the junta and the housing market are all different. An archive makes no such claim, which is why it stays usable. The photographs now circulating online and the material held at EMST are two halves of the same strategy: one reaches people who have never heard of the Spetses Players, and the other is there when they want to know more.
For anyone making participatory or socially engaged work, the sequence is instructive. The work ran from 1972 to 1979. Its local credibility was durable enough that years later, when Papaconstantinou worked with filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos on a documentary about Bouboulina, women on the island who already knew her through the Bouboulitsa performances were readier to open their homes and tell their stories. That is what community-based practice buys, and it is only visible decades out.
Images from the performances are credited to Dimitris Papadimas, courtesy of the artist. The interview was conducted by Thomai Tsimpou.
Sources
- Leda Papaconstantinou’s Spetses Players turned the Greek island into a stage — designboom interview
- EMST — National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens
- Leda Papaconstantinou – Working on an exhibition — Fougaro Art Center on YouTube
- Athens Biennale