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©  Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Onassis Stegi, Athens On a late February Saturday afternoon, an early harbinger of spring in Athens, I spent five hours in the sterile foyer of the Onassis Stegi building, shuttling between floors -1 and +5, experiencing five performances from the 2024 edition of ODD - Onassis Dance Days, which was organized by the Onassis Foundation for the 11th time. This contemporary dance festival, which usually lasts for about 10 days, but focuses on a three-day period from the first Friday to Sunday, includes new pieces by Greek choreographers and at least one piece by a choreographer from outside Greece. Last year, Marina Otero, an up-and-coming Argentinian choreographer, was a guest at the festival. She presented her pieces, FUCK ME and LOVE ME . This year, the Belgian visual artist Miet Warlop, who gained much attention with her new piece One Song since its premiere at the Avignon Festival two years ago, performed in front of the Greek audience and left...

Waiting for Invisibili , Les Abbesses - Paris  ©  Mehmet Kerem Özel, 15.01.2024 At the beginning of the piece, the thick black frame with three sides, which was lying on the floor of the stage, gradually rose backwards, lifted the cloth lying on the floor attached to it and gradually revealed the image printed on the cloth to us, the audience. When the frame was erected, the Triumph of Death stood before us in all its splendour, measuring 6 metres by 6.5 metres.  Originally exhibited in a museum in Palermo, the Triumph of Death , whose painter is unknown, dates from the 1440s and is one of the most impressive works of medieval art in terms of content, colour and composition. In the centre of the fresco, which probably depicts the plague known as the Black Death, which entered the ports of Sicily and ravaged the entire European continent about 100 years before it was painted, there is a gigantic Death in the form of a skeleton.  Death rides a galloping horse, also in...

Waiting for Les Émigrants , 13.01.2024 T héâtre l’Odeon, Paris Mehmet Kerem Özel The 80-year-old famous Polish theatre master Krystian Lupa's last play for the time being, Les Émigrants (The Emigrants), was finally premiered on 13 January 2024 at the Théâtre l'Odeon in Paris, after a painful process that has been reflected in public opinion since the second half of 2023. I would like to talk about the painful process of its creation, but first I would like to share my impressions of the play, which I had the chance to see at its world premiere. Lupa has adapted The Émigrants from the book of the same name by the Austrian writer W. G. Sebald. The book consists of four long narratives, which are biographical essays about the lives of four people whose paths are crossed by the narrator in the first person, somewhere between reality and fiction. The narrator has based the lives of these four people on his own encounters with them, their diaries, photo albums, conversations wit...