Dance days in Athens
© Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Onassis Stegi, Athens
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 a lasting impression. The festival's climax was One Song. But before that, let me share my impressions of this year's local pieces.
For about 35 minutes, Kosiari walked on a treadmill in the middle of an installation of small boxes and hangers containing the materials she would use during the show, placed on different levels around her at a distance she could reach. Kosiari never stopped on the treadmill, which has become synonymous with beauty and healthy living, but which can also become an instrument of self-torture in today's world, obsessed with achieving standards set by the market. She portrayed a figure determinedly progressing towards the ideal form she wanted to achieve, intervening with gestures in various parts of the female body and face that are predicted to change, sag and expand with age, applying face masks and cheek bags, drawing these parts with a pencil and marking them with tape. The fact that this figure, while walking on the treadmill, tried hard, though sometimes stumbled, to accomplish relatively simple tasks, such as taking the necessary objects from the boxes around her and applying them to her body, as well as difficult tasks, such as putting on tights and shoes, was an indication that all kinds of difficulties had to be endured on the way to the goal of beauty that is sought today.
Waiting for MOS © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, one of the rising stars of the Greek dance scene, performed two pieces at different times on the Upper Stage on the fifth floor of the Onassis Stegi. Paraskevopoulou restaged her award-winning piece MOS from 2022 and presented her new piece All of my love for the first time. In both pieces, Paraskevopoulou used asymmetrical and non-linear narratives to reveal the tension between the movement of bodies and objects, and the sounds that emerge from this process. In both pieces, the stage was arranged with objects like an installation. Paraskevopoulou used these objects to create soundscapes, the first with her performer partner Georgios Kotsifakis, the second alone. In both cases, video footage was an important element.
MOS begins by showing us exactly the logic of foley, the dubbing of movements in the moving images using objects that are completely irrelevant, and then takes a sharp turn in the following scenes, projecting the films onto a surface that is visible to the performers but behind the audience. The audience is thus focused on the movements of the performers and the relationship between the movements and the resulting sounds, just as Paraskevopoulou intended.
Another foley vein in which the show progressed from the first moment was the relationship of the two performers to each other through sound. In one of the first sequences, Kotsifakis dubbed Paraskevopoulou's movements in women's high heels, and then she performed the exact opposite. This was the first trace of the playful tension between the two performers, which reached its climax at the end of the piece, when the two of them ran side by side, with their arms wrapped around each other's bodies, in countless circles around the entire stage, and then placed the microphones on each other's hearts, letting us listen to the sounds of their heartbeats.
Waiting for All of my love © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
In All of my love, Paraskevopoulou weaves a landscape of memory and remembrance by mixing the sounds she produces live with household objects such as a vacuum cleaner, a giant braid, a coffee pot, pieces of wooden parquet, a glass bowl full of water, with the recorded sounds of children, dogs barking, a piano, a burning fire, while the 8mm home video footage of a girl who is not herself, but who she says could easily be, plays in the background.
The manipulation of the sounds, most of which have a slight echo, some of which are distorted, some of which sound as if they come from the depths, helped to create an effective auditory atmosphere. In this respect, it should be emphasised that the sound designer Aliki Leftherioti did a unique job.
All of my love was not a linear or fragmented piece, has no narrative, but focused on creating an atmosphere, which was achieved through sound. In the production of this sonic atmosphere, Paraskevopoulou's movements and the way she used the stage space seemed secondary, and therefore weak and ineffective.
Applause for MOS © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
At the festival, where five or six different pieces were scheduled each day, the show times were arranged so that they were added one after the other. However, the late start of the first show had a domino effect on the rest of the programme. While the audience who had come for just one show were already waiting in the hall, those who had tickets for more than one show, like me, were rushing to the hall without having a chance to breathe or have a snack, as we were leaving the previous show late.
As soon as MOS was over, I rushed to a small black box room at the back of the building, fortunately on the same floor, to see Christiana Kosiari's new solo piece RUNWAY.
Waiting for RUNWAY © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
For about 35 minutes, Kosiari walked on a treadmill in the middle of an installation of small boxes and hangers containing the materials she would use during the show, placed on different levels around her at a distance she could reach. Kosiari never stopped on the treadmill, which has become synonymous with beauty and healthy living, but which can also become an instrument of self-torture in today's world, obsessed with achieving standards set by the market. She portrayed a figure determinedly progressing towards the ideal form she wanted to achieve, intervening with gestures in various parts of the female body and face that are predicted to change, sag and expand with age, applying face masks and cheek bags, drawing these parts with a pencil and marking them with tape. The fact that this figure, while walking on the treadmill, tried hard, though sometimes stumbled, to accomplish relatively simple tasks, such as taking the necessary objects from the boxes around her and applying them to her body, as well as difficult tasks, such as putting on tights and shoes, was an indication that all kinds of difficulties had to be endured on the way to the goal of beauty that is sought today.
RUNWAY, in which Kosiari's choreography of sharp, hard and rhythmic movements, gestures and facial expressions, combined with the electro-acoustic soundscape composed by Jan Van Angelopoulos and the visual world created by the shiny metallic minimalist dress, shoes and accessories by 2WO+1NE=2 that the figure wore towards the end of the piece, emphasised that beauty and health standards are gradually transforming the person into a robotic and anonymous image. Christiana Kosiari's powerful and effective performance played a major role in the success of this impressive piece.
Applause for RUNWAY © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
When I left RUNWAY and reached the -1 stage in the basement of the building, Panos Malactos' new piece We all need therapy was waiting for me.
Malactos is a regular performer with the Belgian dance theatre company Peeping Tom in their pieces Diptych and Triptych. The Istanbul audience had the opportunity to see him as part of the 2022 Fringe Festival Istanbul with SADBOI, a work he created with Elias Adam. This time, in his solo piece We all need therapy, Malactos has created a work that combines dance, performance, rave party and group therapy in an immersive atmosphere. The starting point of the piece and the main idea of the staging is Malactos' confession that he did not believe in psychotherapy and that panic attacks existed until they happened to him.
Waiting for We all need therapy © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
In the spacious hall, where we were gradually admitted in groups of about 20 people, a rave with an intense techno experience was taking place, accompanied by the live performance of the musician Die Arkitekt and the lighting design of Vasilis Petinaris, and Malactos invited us to dance with his dance and gestures on the raised platform in the shape of a large white circle. Some of us accept this invitation, others prefer to watch from the sidelines, but even those watching from the sidelines cannot help but respond to the techno rhythms with their bodies.
The first half of the 40-minute performance began with the audience warming up, continued with Malactos talking about his experience of panic attacks while dancing, and ended with Malactos dancing, mainly on the floor, accompanied by Debussy's Clair de lune in the version by Die Arkitekt. In the second half of the performance, the musician and singer ody icons, who was also the dramaturg of the piece, came on stage himself and joined Malactos in singing serotonine, also arranged by Die Arkitekt, creating a sense of collective healing; many of the Greek audience members joined in.
Malactos invited everyone to dance again with his gestures; so, the planned process of We all need therapy ended with a collective dance in which we felt more liberated than before. Those who, like me, had tickets for the last show of the evening quickly left the party, while the dancing continued on the stage.
Waiting for One Song © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
As I wrote above, the highlight of both the evening I was there and the festival was Miet Warlop's One Song. The Flemish visual artist Miet Warlop was the next guest, after Faustin Linyekula and Angélica Liddell and before Tim Etchells, in the series Histoire(s) du Théâtre, initiated by Milo Rau during his artistic directorship at NTGent, the National Theatre of Ghent. Istanbul audiences had the opportunity to see the first of this series, created by Rau himself, in Istanbul last September as part of the IO International Istanbul Theatre Festival organised by Dasdas. For this series, Rau was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's documentary Histoire(s) du Cinéma, in which Godard uses important examples from the history of world cinema to comment on the history of the 20th century. Rau expects the artists invited to the series to answer the question "What is your story as a creator in the theatre?
One Song, in which the rhythm was set by a metronome placed at the front of the stage (the rhythm was changed by the performers during the show: fast, very fast, sometimes extremely slow), an announcer constantly commented with a megaphone in such a way that it was impossible to understand what she was saying, the five musicians were expected to use their instruments in unusual and challenging ways associated with sport (e.g. the violinist by walking back and forth on a balance beam, the pianist by jumping to press each key of a keyboard placed high up, the drummer by running between the parts of a drum set placed at a distance, the double bass player, lying on his back on the floor, by lifting himself off the floor as if doing sit-ups for each note, the singer by running on a treadmill while eliminating the ping-pong balls flying towards him from the automatic machine), a male cheerleader was hanging alone, five spectators in the stands at the back chanted different choreographies non-stop, and a huge flag fluttered in the wind, not representing any existing country, consisted of the same song being performed over and over again for 60 minutes in a hybrid of sporting event and stadium concert (scenography by Warlop).
Towards the last quarter of the performance, drops of water began to fall from above, increasing the difficulty of the musicians' performance; they slipped and fell. Towards the end, the cheerleader placed large white boards with words such as "be", "will", "never", "do", "if" on the slats he had set up on either side of the stand, unconnected to each other. At the end, all the performers, including the cheering five spectators and the cheerleader, collapsed one after the other, except for one person, the announcer.
Applause for One Song © Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Athens
The lyrics of this single song, with music by Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, which we read in the programme (and which are also used as surtitles in some performances), even if we do not fully understand them during the performance, reveal to us the main impulse behind this exuberant, extraordinary and high piece; that single feeling, the feeling of grief, which we always want to forget, to file away, to pretend does not exist in our minds and bodies by exhausting ourselves to the point of destruction. We will continue to strive for life with this feeling, which we can never get rid of, no matter what we do, until we die...
It is impossible not to marvel at the "superhuman" performance of the twelve performers on stage; the musicians and the cheering audience collectively, and the announcer and the cheerleader individually for 60 minutes. There was nothing more natural than the majority of the audience in the auditorium enjoying the humour of the situations the performers found themselves in. But I'm not sure if the show achieves its goal, if it makes us forget our feelings of sadness, or if it leaves us with a sense of relief that fades before we leave the theatre.
© Mehmet Kerem Özel, 24.02.2024 - Onassis Stegi, Athens
Meanwhile, in the foyer on the ground floor of the Onassis Stegi, the party had already started for those who wanted to continue the night, ready to party, dopamine pumped by the energy of a song...
[The original version of this article in Turkish was published in unlimited.]
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