P A N T E L I S M A K K A S
Black Leg, 2017
Audio Video Dance Performance
This performance is a re-enactment of the medieval painting A Verger’s Dream, translated into movement, voice, and image by visual and video artist Pantelis Makkas. On stage, the miraculous scene unfolds: two saints approach a sleeping verger whose diseased leg is wasting away. In the stillness of night, they amputate the afflicted limb and replace it with that of a recently buried African man. When the verger awakens, he discovers that the vision has become reality—his body now bears a healthy black leg, while the corpse in the nearby churchyard is found mutilated.
This story, first described in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea (The Golden Legend, 1275), has haunted Western imagination for centuries. It reappears in fifteenth-century religious painting, where Saints Cosmas and Damian—early Christian martyrs who practiced medicine without payment—are depicted in the finery of learned physicians, assisted by angels as they perform the miraculous transplantation. In these images, surgery is less an act of science than of faith: healing as miracle, transformation as divine intervention.
Makkas’ Black Leg situates itself within this long tradition of fascination with transplantation, but he redirects the miracle toward the present, asking what it means to transplant not only flesh but also memory, identity, and selfhood. His collaborators—mezzo-soprano Anna Pangalou, dancer-choreographer Mariela Nestora, and actor-performer Nestor Kopsidas—join him in re-animating the painting on stage, embodying its strange tensions: the merging of bodies across race and death, the oscillation between vision and reality, the unsettling gift of survival through another’s loss.
The performance resonates powerfully with contemporary debates in medicine, particularly the controversial notion of cellular memory. Some transplant recipients have claimed to experience unfamiliar memories, preferences, or habits after surgery—echoes they believe to have come from their donors. Cases like these have been studied by Gary Schwartz, professor of medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona, who has documented more than seventy examples. “When the organ is placed in the recipient,” Schwartz suggests, “the information and energy stored in the organ is passed on to the recipient.” In this theory, memory is not confined to the brain but distributed across the body’s tissues—whether in the heart, liver, kidneys, or even muscles.
By weaving together medieval vision, religious iconography, and modern science, Makkas reframes transplantation as more than a clinical intervention. Black Leg stages it as metaphor, mystery, and provocation: a reflection on how bodies remember, how identities are exchanged, and how the very boundaries of the self remain open, fragile, and perpetually in question.
Concept, research, live video, performance: Pantelis Makkas | Singing, voice and singing composition, performance: Anna Pangalou | Dance, choreography, performance: Mariela Nestora | Voice, music supervision, performance: Nestor Kopsidas | Costumes, costume supervision: Eleutheria Arapoglou
