Athens Epidaurus Festival is the longest running performing arts festival in Greece, an undeniably prestigious cultural institution, with a duration of almost two months (early June till the end of July), taking place in several venues (some are historical landmarks of the Greco-Roman era), and showcasing a broad spectrum of artists, from emerging locals to artists of galactic stardom. It is also, among the few remaining production houses for Greek dance companies, which could help explain why many so many dance artists rely on it to upscale their work, in terms of both budget and visibility. Recent artistic directorships have, more or less successfully, tried to make its elephantine structure more pliable, redesigning its predominantly hierarchical model into supposedly more horizontal formats of curation. Still, the Festival’s programming accommodates more an ‘all sizes fit one’ logic, trying to match disparate audience tastes and criteria. Below I present 5+1 dance performances by Greek choreographers that premiered in the 2024 Festival or made an entry as newcomers in the local context.
review
Athens Epidaurus Festival: a selection of styles by Greek dance artists
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9 min
The Festival kick-started with Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company under its newly appointed artistic director, Ioannis Mandafounis. The piece – his first for the company – is titled À la carte, but certainly doesn’t stick to the menu. Mandafounis has managed to imbue in the company his eccentrically virtuosic style, one that fuses ballet technique with a subtle bodily awareness, most common in improvisation jams and live art performances. The result is pure fun to watch, at times even breathtaking, as the dancers make instant compositional decisions and negotiate their presence within the group. Other fun elements include the breaching of the proscenium arch and the interaction with the audience, as an in-built competition to win the attention of the people watching the performance. Regardless of the music elements, choir or violin accompaniment, the dancers do what they have to do: they dance like rocketed stars, leaving some of us begging for more. If a good menu is judged upon the fine fusion of tastes, there’s still some room for improvement: the elements are there, it’s just a matter of dosage.
Anastasia Valsamaki’s The Verso draws on the painting style of ‘Rückenfigur’, but as the title implies, her investigation is also directed to the back or underside of the paintings, which in theatrical terms translates into a show with four dancers having their backs turned to the audience. The stage design resembles a stretched skating ramp, but the dancers – in the first half of the performance – are not so involved in this urban-style setting. Their gaze seems fixed upon something spectral, non-existent, heightened by their hieratical way of moving and morphing into sculpted-like postures or cocooning under a landscape decorated tapestry. There are, mercifully, more lively moments, especially a few solos trying to choreographically break the monotony of this otherwise zombified dormancy, which reaches an apogee when the dancers turn to look at the audience. Whatever stuff they’re on, it’s obviously not working for us. Wait, there’s more to it: a mountain hiker moon-walking on stage! Right, now I got it…
MINTATI by Tzeni Argyriou is a staged contemplation about collective feasting and an attempt to reanimate part of the ritual ecstasy once witnessed in those festivities. How could this be achieved, if not by teamwork, if not by getting your hands dirty and by building anew the desired world? A pile of debris is slowly turned into a grid of crossings, the dancers literally stamping and making their way through, as if they are creating some sort of dance manual with their steps. At the beginning, this weird parading might remind you of genuine cosiness and small-town sociability – and why not, since submitting yourself bodily into a community is also a matter of rhythm, found often in handiwork as well as in dancing. And though this view might sound utterly nostalgic, praising group effort and some ‘Edenic fantasy’ of communitas, soon the musical tempo shifts, the group of dancers starts jumping into more unruly formations, into something one might call the ‘gratuitous waste of energy’ found in raving. The music, by Giorgos Giorgalas and Nikos Tsolis, does wonders transitioning from more traditional instrumental elements to contemporary upbeat techno, with beatboxing and live mixing. This communal feasting could not be thought of as such without the participation of the audience, and although the crowd gathered on stage at the end of the performance roars and jumps in joy, this might also seem a bit too naïve or redundant. One wonders: is collective joy still possible? Would future instances of resistance and communal desire take the form of a dance?
Scared: A kinetic allegory about fear by Elias Hadjigeorgiou seems like a parody of the deeply instinctual but also culturally significant concept of fear. Using a mélange of street style movement and pantomime, the choreographer constructs mini episodes in which rage and fear are mirrored as cause and effect. Manly manners, a sort of gang playfulness, syncopated movement and cartoonish monologues all abortively point to our contemporary moodiness and the social media-fed swings of anger and mirth. And though we are deeply accustomed to snapshot seriality in the digital realm, the piece comes across as a blow-up of teenage angst or some sort of Jackass prank (giving birth to balloons and farting, really?). There are abbreviated phrases of choreography responding to the otherwise catchy rhythmic tempos, but the showcased shuffling of legs and the popping-vibrating of torsos and arms look way too generic to even make a statement, let alone become a kinetic allegory. It may be hard to keep up with the urban style, but it takes more than popped balloons and puffed attitude to choreographically transform steps from something too abstract to something affectively relatable. Unless allegory, here, is meant as a nonsensical blabbing-on about the emotional contours of social life.
TELOS is a tetraptych by four different choreographers – Maria Hassabi, Hannes Langolf, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou and Ermira Goro – with the last in the role of the performer. Though the four distinct styles may have nothing in common, Goro manages to navigate through this staged itinerary brilliantly, exhibiting a versatile and rigorous approach to the required variety of performative skills. The first part is choreographed by Maria Hassabi, a sort of prelude or the kind of meditative entrance that heightens your attention and quietens the buzz from the outside world. Goro is standing amidst the audience, then she sits on a bench and starts to fall. Hassabi demands a sort of ‘engaged withdrawal’ in her movement vocabulary, one that renders effort palpable but doesn’t encourage any emotional investment in the performed action. Rather, her style makes more noticeable the sculptural and plastic details of the body as it holds a position for a while, with a dilated sense of time, reinforced by the fluctuating sounds, in this case by Jeph Vanger. Hassabi has a unique way to hack your brain so that ordinary and minor movement looks extraordinary and spectacular.
The following section is by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou. Different endings from films – Daisies, Under the Skin, The Passion of Joan of Arc, etc – create a sort of hypertext in which the input is either produced by Goro to match the sound of a scene (as in foley), or is used to guide her through an emotional state in the re-enactment of a scene – vividly showcased in the excerpt from Joan of Arc. This section is aurally dense (music by Aliki Leftherioti), the dictated actions quite disparate and disorientating, but at times they shake you to the core, just like the performer when she repeatedly hits the mic on her chest to create the sound of a heartbeat.
The third part by Ermira Goro herself, is visually stunning and a bit otherworldly: time dilates again, and the stage is bathed in an aquatic, shimmering light. Goro undresses, lies on her back, her head now floats in a basin filled with water. She looks peaceful, sleeping, but as if awakening in her sleep, she stands on her feet, her body hunched now, reluctantly carrying its own weight as she tries to cross the stage. Her torso ascends momentarily as if seeking air, to surrender again in a motionless limbo. The recurring chant-like theme enhances this Ulyssean trip, but we can’t tell if there’s an end or an escape, as the picture freezes, leaving you wondering what was this dream about.
The last part is by Hannes Langolf. Goro, now dressed in a pink strapless gown, walks centre stage following instructions, supposedly by someone offstage. She carries the withered grandeur of a Hollywood diva, displaying once again her old tricks that used to fascinate the audience. She can be mildly bitter and demurely sweet in displaying her insecurities, her swaying moods at times resulting in goddess-like poses or amateurish embarrassment. ‘Should we start again?’ she asks, as if to please a ghostly Master. She goes centre stage, again, claiming her spotlit space, but soon her voice cracks and bares her own doubt: ‘How can I start again?’ This could be a last curtain call; but it surely is a heart-felt witnessing of the emotional roller-coaster of an aging performer who has given her life entertaining the audience.
‘What is this shit?’ you’ll be asked repeatedly in Chara Kotsali’s performance borborygmi. A noise strike, a calling for a dance till you burn, a minute of noise in a century of silence? On a sonic playground covered with mud, the two performers (Kotsali along with Christina Skoutela) respond with noise to our deafening reality. They’ll grab a mic and scream their lungs out, they’ll plough it into the ground and make sounds with it as if we heard the earth’s roaring guts, they’ll dance to 144bpm but they’ll combine dances of all sorts, while scanning through a history of steps. They’ll hold hands all the way to manifest their girl-power, they’ll have moments of boredom only to strike back in some sort of furious slam-poetry. The performance is ‘outrageously poetic’, an antidote to white noise, a powerful lament emerging from a storm of inaudible voices. The two performers aim for a playful yet highly energetic approach, a way to resist the sonic warfare of today’s blasting and numbing reality (there will bits of it on a wide screen, if you manage to catch a glimpse). But if we breathe with and in chaos, then there might be unimaginable ways to reactivate our bodies, to think of limits not as mere boundaries but, on the contrary, as signs to explore things outside the space of limitation, just like the two as they hold hands and for a while exit the stage, galloping in unity – empowered and outrageously bold. ●
