in the 70s, a performance group took shape on Spetses
In the early 1970s, Leda Papaconstantinou returned to Greece during the military junta after studying and working in England. She settled on Spetses, where her parents had moved from Athens, together with her then-husband, the British artist and teacher David Hughes. She had already been working with performance in England and wanted to continue. The first step was to find people with whom she could work.
The Spetses Players began to take shape around 1972, bringing together artists, teachers, professors, students, musicians and people connected to literature and philosophy. Many of them were from outside Greece. At the time, Spetses attracted people from the US, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, Denmark and elsewhere, many of whom travelled for long periods rather than the short holidays associated with tourism today.
‘It wasn’t theatre,’ Papaconstantinou recalls during our discussion, because there was no fixed written story that was performed repeatedly. Instead, the collaborators had to decide together what they wanted to talk about and how to turn it into a performance.
the making of the Spetses Players
The group’s approach had parallels with the work of Italian playwright and performer Dario Fo, who Leda Papaconstantinou describes as someone who would look at the local newspaper, identify an issue affecting a particular community, and develop a performance around it. The Greek artist also saw a connection with Karagiozis, the Greek shadow-theatre character who could change according to the story and circumstances around him. The Spetses Players began with subjects connected to the place and then had to find a form through which to tell them. Papaconstantinou was the only member who spoke Greek, while the others brought different languages and backgrounds to the group. Some were artists, while others were teachers, professors or students taking time away from their studies.
Among the recurring characters in Papaconstantinou’s performances was Bouboulitsa, a fictional little girl named after Laskarina Bouboulina, the legendary figure of Spetses. The choice connected the performances to one of the island’s best-known stories while giving the group a new character through which to explore its own ideas. Bouboulitsa was born behind the screen of a Karagiozis shadow theatre, appearing as a gift to an old fisherman and his wife. Around her were sea creatures including jellyfish, sea urchins, red mullet and sardines. Leda Papaconstantinou herself appeared as an angel-mermaid, while other performers became marine creatures or, in another scene, ‘motorcycle monsters.’ Costumes were closely tied to movement. In one performance, a performer dressed as a chicken wore feathers that changed the way the body moved, making the character’s actions resemble those of a chicken. The visual language developed alongside the stories rather than being added afterwards.
stories about life on the island
The Bouboulitsa performances addressed the changes taking place around them. Tourism was becoming increasingly important to the economy of Spetses, while houses were being sold to wealthy foreign buyers and local residents struggled to find homes they could afford. In one story, a property agent sells houses at prices beyond the reach of local people. Bouboulitsa and the other characters eventually make him change his mind, building a house from milk cartons. Bouboulitsa and the Terrible Dragon, performed in 1977, dealt with water, including shortages and the rising cost of the resource. Another performance addressed waste and the lack of medical care.
These subjects were part of the reality the performers and their audience were living through. The local community was an important part of the work. Performances were often full, and the group was primarily interested in reaching the people who lived on Spetses rather than the visitors who arrived during the summer. The connection continued beyond the performances. Years later, Papaconstantinou found that people on the island still associated her with Bouboulitsa. That recognition became important when she later worked with filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos on a documentary about Bouboulina. Because local women already knew the Greek artist through the Bouboulitsa performances, they were more willing to open their homes, share their stories and participate in the project.
performing across Spetses
In 1977, the group organized the first and only international Spetses Festival. The program brought together the Spetses Players and visiting artists, with works by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Clement Biddle Wood and Simon Carr. Most of the festival took place around the old harbor, using the island’s existing spaces for the performances, including the chambers of the iconic Figaro discotheque and a house designed by the Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis. The series continued until Bouboulitsa’s Dream in 1979. Each performance dealt with different aspects of life on the island, but they all ended with the same song, inviting people to return to Spetses and take care of it. By the end, the audience would get up, dance and sing along.
when the images began circulating again
Almost fifty years later, photographs from the performances have started circulating again. In 2026, color photographs of the costumes and characters have appeared on social media, often reaching people who know little about the original stories. Leda Papaconstantinou sees this renewed attention partly through the work’s aesthetics. She describes herself as ‘a component of the visual language’ and suggests that the images can activate the viewer in a different way, prompting them to ask what they are looking at before they know where it came from.
There is also a reversal in the way the work can now be encountered. Originally, words, literature and stories were what generated the images. Today, the artist suggests, the process can work in the opposite direction. ‘The image can create the references to the words.’ She wants to return to the stories behind each Bouboulitsa performance with the collaborators who are still alive and remember the work. For her, understanding how literature and language produced the images is still an unfinished part of the history.
The photographs also create an unexpected distance between the time when the work was made and the way it is seen now. Papaconstantinou points to the colors, fabrics and costumes, which can appear surprisingly contemporary to viewers encountering them online today. There is a certain admiration in seeing what was being made in the 1970s, but also a more difficult question: if these ideas were already present then, why do many of the issues still feel familiar?
preserving the work
In 2013, on the occasion of AGORA, the 4th Athens Biennale, she contacted surviving collaborators and gathered their memories and material from the period, creating an archive rather than reproducing the performances. ‘I never reproduce performances,’ she comments. What remains instead is a collection of photographs, memories, texts and stories that can be revisited from different directions. Leda Papaconstantinou has since transferred her archive to EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens.
The archive now sits alongside the photographs circulating online, giving the Spetses Players another life through images. For those discovering the work today, the photograph may come before the story. The costumes and characters catch the eye first, with the words, literature and ideas behind them emerging afterwards.
project info:
name: The Spetses Players
artist: Leda Papaconstantinou
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