Olga Ntenta’s Greek Precarious Body: The Body in the Costume of Conflict
Olga Ntenta’s Greek Precarious Body: The Body in the Costume of Conflict

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the tension between freedom and constraint in contemporary political and social contexts through Olga Ntenta’s performance project, Greek Precarious Body. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s critique of the depoliticization inherent in deliberative democracy and the naturalization of precarity, the article examines how performance and scenography stage the embodied experiences of vulnerability and agency. Through the Classical figures of Oedipus and Jocasta, Ntenta’s work enacts the restrictive language of costume as a metaphor for externally imposed limitations that simultaneously evoke states of precarity and enable new forms of engagement. The performance’s dialogue with the Classical Greek concept of fate reveals that vulnerability might be not only a passive condition but also a generative force. This reframing has broader implications for political theory and performance studies. For the former, it suggests new ways to understand political pluralism and social agency; for the latter, Ntenta’s work positions performance as a vital space for imagining and enacting social and political transformation beyond conventional oppositions, offering possible lines of flight from entrenched binaries and fostering richer modes of collective engagement. Ultimately, the essay positions Ntenta’s work as a critical intervention that resonates with agonistic pluralism and imagining social and political transformation beyond oppositional frameworks.

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