Delenda est | PREMIERE
«Don’t forget to say to the gun:
nice to meet you, but I think
I’ve seen you before.»
—André Breton
Borrowing the title of the well-known science fiction short story by Poul Anderson and indirectly hinting at the Latin oratorical phrase “Carthago delenda est” (Cartage must be destroyed) from the history of wars between the Phoenicians and the Romans, the choreographer Margarita Trikka is exploring the process of conflict and the roles it involves. As noted by the choreographer, “the fight of the weak against the strong entails something inherently ridiculous; and, at the same time, it is the most decent act in the world.” Drawing from the history of guns and its impact on wars over the centuries, as well as from research on human defeat in movements and in love, the choreographer employs the stereotypical dipole weak–strong to create a battling duet.
Will the stereotype be upheld? Does victory belong to the powerful?
If history is written by the victors, what (hi)story is written by the defeated?
Delenda est places two people on stage; from the moment they are introduced, they enter battle mode. They both share the same objective: the Other must be destroyed. Their end-in-itself turns into a one-way street, as none of the two can exist without the other. Inextricably entangled in an ever-present fight, they are confronted with the ludicrous and the futile; still, they are realistic: they are seeking the impossible and they know it. They are heading towards the moment of their defeat, that crack in time raucously or noiselessly leaving its scar on every human. And then comes the silence, the stillness.
Concept / choreography: Margarita Trikka
Dramaturgy: Dimitra Mitropoulou
Music: Sancho 003
Set/Costumes: Artemis Flessa
Lighting design: Nikos Vlasopoulos
Promo trailer/photos: Manos Arvanitakis
Performers: Candy Karra, Katerina Spyropoulou
Duration: 20'
(T)here and After
Dancing on the edge – at the end – of the world is to reside at the precarious borderline between dystopia and utopia. (T)here and After deals with the agony of this habitation at the time of the Anthropocene, i.e. the geological epoch in which humankind has been inflicting disastrous, inexorable changes upon the planet Earth.
Choreographer Alexandra Waierstall, in collaboration with visual artist Marianna Christofides, composer HAUSCHKA (Volker Bertelmann) and seven dancers, is visualizing the universe ‘(t)here and after’ the point of no return, creating alternative forms of life and movement in a flowing system of changes and transformations. Calling upon the viewer to assume the role of an explorer, the work is constructing an interminable future, conducive to discovery and understanding. The poetics of this invitation calls for invitees that are daring and willing to respond to her optimism, in spite of the ominous projections of the present.
If humans are but subject to a cosmic algorithm, doomed to follow predetermined routes in a state of panic, then who and what are the beings who shall comprehend the dynamics of a boundless and lawless universe? How do they connect and communicate? What, if anything, of their human nature has survived within them?
100,000,000 years from now, a curious explorer randomly lands on the planet… And thus the future (re)starts…
Choreography, concept: Alexandra Waierstall
Music: HAUSCHKA
Visual collaboration: Marianna Christofides
Created with and performed by: Eldad Ben-Sasson, Dani Brown, Damien Fournier, Georgios Kotsifakis, Harry Koushos, Martyna Lorenc, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Anna Pehrsson, Evangelia Randou, Emmi Väisänen
Currently performed by: Eldad Ben-Sasson, Georgios Kotsifakis, Harry Koushos, Martyna Lorenc, Anna Pehrsson, Evangelia Randou, Emmi Väisänen
Light design: Alexandra Waierstall, Ansgar Kluge
Costumes, stage: Alexandra Waierstall, Horst Weierstall
Management: Judith Jaeger
Production: Alexandra Waierstall
Co-production: tanzhaus nrw, Dance Ireland, Dance Gate Lefkosia Cyprus
Supported by the Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN) Coproduction Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media on the basis of a decision by the German Bundestag, Kunststiftung NRW
With support of: Garage Performing Arts Center
Supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ International Guest Performance Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media
Duration: 55'
Hugin/Munin
In Norse mythology, Hugin and Munin are two ravens, messengers and advisors to the god Odin, who fly over Midgard, the land of humans, and report back to the god. Their names meaning “thought” and “memory” respectively, the two beasts may be perceived as symbolizing the ‘gaze’, the overview of what is and the power of the human Logos to capture the world in terms of a symbiotic understanding.
Taiwanese choreographer Po-Cheng Tsai’s Hugin/Munin, which has been distinguished with numerous international awards and draws from the genre of ‘dance theatre’, invokes this animalistic metaphor and the traditional fiction associated with it to explore, both conceptually and kinesiologically, the realms of thought and memory and the ways in which they define our life and shape our history.
Choreography: Po-Cheng Tsai
Dancers: Sheng-Ho Chang, Chien-Chih Chang
Lighting design: Otto Chang
Duration: 10'
Half the Truth | PREMIERE
It is
their brilliance,
their virtuosity
and belief that the human body has the power to express emotion.
They are not afraid to feel, perform, sweat and risk.
The substance of this performance is the Body we do not know.
It is not about knowing at all.
This Performance is a mapping device for the landscape of the Unknown.
It is not what we premeditate, what we conceptualize.
It remains rather a mystery.
It is about their body on the edge of the Impossible.
Where too much is not enough for being on stage.
It is about daring to disagree with the agreement to entertain.
— Jozef Frucek
Created and performed by: Linda Kapetanea, Edivaldo Ernesto
Dramaturgy & set design: Jozef Frucek
Original music: Vassilis Mantzoukis
Lighting design: Periklis Mathielis
Sound engineer: Christos Parapagidis
Costumes design: Beate Borrmann
Photos & video: Mike Rafail
Production design: Konstantinos Sakkas
Production management: Delta Pi
Produced by: ROOTLESSROOT
Distribution by: LIARTEM s.r.o.
Supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture & Sports
Duration: 60'
Body Monologue | PREMIERE
This new work places the body in a position of priority, durability and power. Focusing on the possibilities of movement, Body Monologue ventures to imagine alternative spaces and means of activating the body. From how many aspects can this body be seen and in how many forms can it be regenerated? This kind of considerations are fueling the kinesiological exploration of the human body’s physical limits and proposing an imaginary reading that may exceed them.
Inspired by the dynamic role of the monologue in theatre, as well as in real life, the work assigns the task of delivering the unobstructed narrative to the body, thus inviting the viewer to experience the possibility of communication that is generated in this way.
Concept & Choreography: Anastasia Valsamaki
Co-Creation & Performance: Gavriela Antonopoulou
Music: Konstantinos Bakogiannis
Duration: 20'
Floating Flowers
Floating Flowers is a tribute to the deceased father of the Taiwanese choreographer Po-Cheng Tsai. It draws from the religious traditions of his country of origin and revisits childhood memories of family participation in the ritual that opens the Ghost Festival held during the seventh month of the lunar calendar in Southeast Asia. The custom of Water Lanterns is an age-old and on-going practice that celebrates the connection between the worlds of the living and the dead and serves as a means of preserving the unique craftsmanship of paper-lantern making, the delicate construction of fragile floating flowers.
Losing his father to cancer and thus burdened by the realization of the power of fate and the existence of a predetermined reality Po-Cheng Tsai stopped attending the ritual of Water Lanterns for many years. After having recently seen the graffiti of a water lantern, Tsai was enveloped by memories of the times when, under his father’s encouragement, he used to write his wishes on the floating lanterns convinced that this act of faith and its apotropaic power could ward off evil and affect the future for the best.
Floating flowers is a work born from the artist’s anger, sorrow and sense of weakness vis-à-vis his confrontation with the frailty of life. It serves as a final offering to the past and an act of liberation from it. By recalling and acknowledging this past, by developing a poetics of loss, the choreographer reflects on the common human fate and the fight for self-awareness and happiness:
Do we create our life, or is life sweeping us along in its flow?
Choreography: Po-Cheng Tsai
Dancers: Sheng-Ho Chang, I-Han Huang
Lighting design: Otto Chang
Duration: 10'
Meetings (Athens) | PREMIERE
With the desire to create a collective experience that values diversity and redefines the notion of power and beauty, choreographer Ermira Goro is setting up “meetings” between very different people – of different sex, ethnicity, body type, age, skill – in an attempt to invalidate the stereotypical identification of the dancer with a youthful, muscular, fit, “perfect” body. At the same time, the work poses a series of questions:
How do the particular characteristics of each body affect or enrich the performance of a movement?
How is an “untrained” body transformed by a movement or a rhythm that lies beyond its everyday vocabulary?
What emotions may be generated by this almost voyeuristic identification between dancer and viewer?
Through the exploration of individuality and personal kinesiological expression, as well as through the variety and diversity of the bodies of the performers, some of whom are amateurs, Meetings leads the viewer to intuitively discern on stage elements of him- or herself and to rethink what "right" or "appropriate" even mean.
Arguably the greatest significance of this work lies in that it is seeking to abolish the rift that is torn between public and performers when physical skill, expressiveness and labor are confused with bodily youthfulness and vigor. Ultimately, Meetings was created to argue that dance is precisely an experience to be shared in community, provided that the latter’s cohesion rests on the desire of its members to be other, together.
Concept, Choreography: Ermira Goro
Dramaturgy: Anastasios Koukoutas
Original Music: Underwater Chess
Lighting Design: ΤΒΑ
Assistants to the choreographer: Alexandros Stavropoulos, Ioannis Karounis
Production management: Maria Vasariotou
Production supervision: Konstantinos Sakkas
Produced by: Delta Pi
Performed by: Polyxeni Alexiou, Georgia Aliferi, Nefeli Ananiadi, Yannis Angelidakis, Νatassa Aretha, Μarina Bampali, Vasiliki Beka, Spyros Bekiaris, Zoe Bogea, Lia Chamilothori, Dionysia Chasapi, Faye Chatzi, Vivi Christodoulopoulou, Mersianna Eleftheriadou, Mary Georgiopoulou, Katerina Gevetzi, Lena Giaka, Nikoletta Gialelaki, Anastasia Gkza, Martina Gomez, Katia Gouloni, Isidora Isidoridi, Zinon Kalfas, Soti Kallia, Eleftheria Kazana, Efi Karagiannopoulou, Lia Aglaia Karampela, Sotiris Karayiannis, Ioannis Karounis, Eleftheria Kontogiorgi, Thanos Kotsis, Niki Koufonikou, Anastasios Linardopoulos, Aulona Lupa, Marianna Makri, Isabella Margara, Vasso Morfiadaki, Mabel Mosana, Magda Mosxou, Abdul Nazari, Flavio Neagu, Maria-Christina Papachronopoulou, Stratos Papadelis, Areti Petropoulou, Panagiotis Politis, Fredalyn Resurreccion, Giannis Siabalias, Margarita Simopoulou, Eleftheria Sotirchou, Maria Sotiropoulou, Yiannis Spanos, Olga Spyraki, Antonios Stamopoulos, Nefeli Stamouli, Alexandros Stavropoulos, Avgoustina Stylianou, Evy Thanella, Ioanna Toliou, Pindaros Topouzis, Lida Touloumakou, Angeliki Tsoupra, Rinos Tzanis, Τassos Ziakkas, Vassia Zorbali
Duration: 40'
Now, before we get too old
This solo by Spanish choreographer Jesús Rubio Gamo is an existential ode to time and to the absurd desire of humans to harness its rapid passing by planning their life as a way of measuring it. Dance is the protected/recontemplative space where feelings may dominate without waning, pleasure may acquire leisurely attributes, the body may be celebrated forevermore, and the fear of death may ease.
As he reaches his mid thirties, the artist chooses to share his personal experience while also examining its extrapolation to the wider world (his country, Europe, the planet), which is aging due to its inability to come up with ways to help those who feel lost within it. In his own words, Gamo is proposing the paradox of a pause in motion:
"I am 35. These past few years have been difficult for me. Europe is a crazy place. I feel lost. My friends feel lost. We are getting old, a bit too old to keep on dancing. But we dance. We sleep during the day and go out at night in an effort to not contemplate on the state of things. Everything is going so fast…"
Choreography, Performance: Jesús Rubio Gamo
Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto
External eye: Marta Alonso, Elena Córdoba
Lighting design: Carmen Martínez
Costume: Naldi Fernandes
Photos: Gaby Maciel
Duration: 40'
Polittes [Citizens Defeated] | PREMIERE
Α tragedy that can only be danced, not narrated.
We did not lose because we deserved it,
but because we managed to hearken
to the silence of our times.
And we were left “standing and alone amidst the terrible wilderness of the crowd”*
to gaze upon the feats of our history.
* M. Anagnostakis
This new work by Patricia Apergi explores, as her previous ones, the emergence of the historical subject within specific socio-political processes. Although its content is shaped by Apergi’s Greek origins and experience it also draws from, and responds to, every kind of societal crisis. As the artist herself asks:
How does it feel to be a citizen of a country that is ‘losing’?
Which is the most difficult to face: anger, fear or defeat?
What is of most value: the fight or its outcome?
Can one emerge as a hero from a failure?
Who are the citizens to be praised today?
Apergi and her team researched the meaning and ways of mourning, as expressed by the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy in order to develop the specific choreography and achieve a transfer of the mournful dance-performance / state / representation to the contemporary reality of citizens being confronted with fear and defeat. Mourning together is in fact a radical confrontation of the phenomenon of loss. By occupying the space of loss we master the art of consolation and gain the wisdom of collective recovery and change.
Titled Polittes, with a twisted spelling that playfully alludes to ‘citizens defeated’, Apergi’s work has been inspired by the thought of contemporary writers and historians (such as Edouard Said, Dimitris Dimitriadis, Edouard Glissant, Kostis Karpozilos) and wishes to address the profound changes that have occurred in social and political living, the violation of rights of citizenship under the stress of the refugee crisis, and the rise of conservative and anti-minority politics.
The various lessons inherited through Greek myth and drama are being reconfigured through contemporary political poetics; the kind that wishes to recognize the needs and woes of emerging societies, where class systems are dislocated, gender-based identities shift, and singularities budge under heavy psychological and body strains.
In those, yet-to-be-identified, societies, world citizens hear the last sounds of things familiar and learn how to accept the organic, fertilizing presence of chaos. They are confronted with an urgent demand: to invent new sounds, new images and other languages in order to describe the reality that is coming.
Concept - Choreography: Patricia Apergi
Dramaturgy consultant: Georgina Kakoudaki
Music: Giwrgos Poulios
Set design: Dimitris Nasiakos
Costumes design: Vasiliki Syrma
Lighting: Nikos Vlasopoulos
Assistant Choreographer: Dimitris Oikonomidis
Promo material design: Kallina Kyratsouli
Photography: Tassos Vrettos
Performance – creative processing: Elias Hadjigeorgiou, Eva Georgitsopoulou, Alex Gotch, Lamprini Gkolia, Raphael Boumpoucheropoulos
The work has been subsidized by the Greek Ministry of Culture & Sports
Duration: 60'
Curtain time 9:30 pm
KIVOTOS Theatre
Pireos 115, Gazi
Τel. +30 210 3427426
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