Ioanna Paraskevopoulou in All of my love. Photo © Ceccon

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Three choreographers from Onassis Stegi at B.Motion 2024

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Ioanna Paraskevopoulou in All of my love. Photo © Ceccon
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Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Chara Kotsali and Elena Antoniou charge artistic creation with personal and feminist resonances

The 44th edition of Opera Estate festival in Bassano del Grappa, Italy, concluded a three-year focus on “relations” and signalled the merging of its previous B.Motion subfestivals (dance, theatre and music) into a blended interdisciplinary programme uniting the performing arts, acknowledging the liquid borders between disciplines, and maintaining its long-running focus on emerging contemporary artists. In his second mandate as programme curator, Michele Mele, expanded the ‘relations’ idea to include various performance outcomes from exchanges between Opera Estate and Centro per la Scena Contemporanea with other partners from Italy and abroad – including Onassis Stegi, one of the biggest art institutions in Athens, Greece, supporting contemporary production and international circulation of artists. Thanks to the Onassis Stegi Outward Turn programme, All of my love by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou (Aerowaves 2023 artist), To Be Possessed by Chara Kotsali (Aerowaves 2024 artist) and Landscape by Elena Antoniou (from Cyprus) are among the works that are currently on tour abroad and were also presented in this year’s B.Motion festival.

Mele, who has been closely following the dance scene in Greece and Onassis Dance Days (ODD, previously Onassis New Choreographers Festival), the platform for the promotion of artists living and working in Greece, comments that ‘the aesthetics and poetics of artists operating in Greece resonate strongly, especially for the audience in Italy.’ Referring to choreographers such as Christos Papadopoulos, Euripides Laskaridis, Patricia Apergi and the three female artists invited to B.Motion 2024, he continues by saying that ‘their works are political and are characterised by the ability and sensitivity to put social and cultural demands at the centre of creation, eluding all rhetoric and convention, remaining always exquisitely artistic elements.’ Paraskevopoulou, Kotsali and Antoniou entangle artistic creation with trauma, possession and sexuality through works that resonate politically with the personal, the way rationality and religion seek to rein in female power and choreography strives to interrogate the gaze on the female body.


Trailer for All of my love by Ioanna Paraskevopolou

If MOS, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou’s previous work, featured muted film extracts paired with corporeally produced foley sounds, All of my love’s primary material uses found moving images – in this case home videos of a girl that could have been Paraskevopoulou as a child. With a dynamically crafted physicality, Paraskevopoulou knits a white cord into a long braid to eventually connect it with a homemade screen that displays the found family footage. On this screen appears the word ‘Dear…’, as if a letter to an unknown recipient is about to begin, followed by moving images of a blonde little girl celebrating happy family moments. Wrapping this cord into a ball and then unwrapping it, she seems to try to find her way in and out of the labyrinth of memory and imagination, to hold and release a lost childhood through the family archive of a stranger. Stepping and jumping on scattered wooden surfaces, lassoing the rope and plunging her hands into a transparent bowl of water compose a movement vocabulary that produces sound in relation to props and accumulates intensity through repetition, in an attempt to explore the sound of a borrowed memory. The persistent echo of a hammer evokes a vain attempt to reconstruct memory in the void.

All of my love is an intimate solo evoking solitude, a cathartic process to establish an umbilical connection with family – and affirms Paraskevopoulou as a must-see body-sound artist in the field of performing arts.


Chara Kotsali in To Be Possessed. Photo © A. Bosio
Chara Kotsali in To Be Possessed. Photo © A. Bosio

As its title suggests, Chara Kotsali‘s To Be Possessed explores a physical condition of being possessed by ‘demons’, or as she phrases it: of being under psychological stress. With hair tied up in a long braid and shirt buttoned up, Kotsali’s first entrance has the appearance of a well-mannered girl, who slowly becomes undone. As if glueing posters on a street wall, she sticks fragments of black and white photos that gradually compose different scenes of women under possession. With an alienating manner and an impeccable physical attitude, she lip-syncs a multilingual aural archive – in Greek, Spanish and English among other languages – of how it feels to be a possessed woman, when asked repeatedly by male voices about the nature of possession. Kotsali’s body gradually transitions from a mediator of testimony into a body that surrenders to the demonic, as she attempts to experience herself what it is to be possessed. Fragmented movements, muscular contractions, headbanging and repetitive actions compose her movement repertoire of possession.


Trailer for To Be Possessed by Chara Kotsali

Yet, it does not seem accidental when the aural archive refers to the protest of 8 March 1972, when women claiming to be witches flooded the streets of Rome, turning this date a milestone for women’s rights in Italy. Kotsali arrives to act as a maenad, a contemporary bacchante, a feminist protester seen as a witch, entering into the ecstatic zone of physicality and commenting on exorcism as a corrective process of normalisation. Exploring gender dynamics in the relationship between female possession and male exorcism, To Be Possessed exposes with subtle humour and irony the ways male power may rule female emancipation, confining it into labels such as madness, ecstasy, disorder and possession in need of a cure. In this way, Kotsali approaches exorcism as a process to contain the female body and discipline it into easily controlled social norms.


Elena Antoniou in Landscape. Photo © A. Bosio
Elena Antoniou in Landscape. Photo © A. Bosio

As the doors of Teatro Remondini open for Landscape, they reveal a dark shadow placed on a raised platform, surrounded by artificial smoke. It is Elena Antoniou moving in the distant echo of a slow and sensual oriental dance, dressed in full-body black leotard, high heels and long silver nails. At first sight, she looks to be provoking pleasure to others and the self, turning her over-sexualised body into a fleshy landscape to be devoured by the gaze of the promenading audience, from any angle and distance. Walking on all-fours, self-touching and standing in long sensual pauses challenge our gaze; they make stillness intense and torturous to watch, and the amplified heartbeat hard to listen to. But soon these are abandoned with exhaustion, to reveal a body under strain. A simple movement score embodying charged femininity and abandoning sensuality exposes the violence of our gaze (as the sound seems to beat against the body). Knocking her foot on the floor with sound, the female body as a victim demands to exit from gender clichés and mythologies imposed by the gaze and our visual culture. ‘What and who gives meaning to a gesture and a posture?’ Antoniou seems to be wondering, placing our socially informed gaze at the centre of the question, the all-around audience format and the sensual movement quality suggesting crossovers between high and low art, elitism and consumerist culture.


Trailer for Landscape by Elena Antoniou

As many artists and curators observe, works produced in Greece and by Greek choreographers living abroad – for instance Katerina Andreou, Lenio Kaklea, Kat Válastur – have a vitality and urgency that has been receiving increased attention internationally. All of my love, To Be Possessed and Landscape are just a small sample of the choreographic landscape in Greece that includes contemporary choreographers as diverse as arisandmartha, Ilias Hatzigeorgiou, Dimitris Mytilinaios and RootlessRoot company. This vitality is not a recent phenomenon. The Greek contemporary dance scene began to flourish in the 90s, approximately 10 years after the introduction of public funding for independent dance companies to produce new works, following a cultural policy that treated contemporary art as integral to national prestige. Back then, those choreographers who scaffolded the Greek contemporary dance scene and influenced new generations were hardly known abroad. Today, after a period of flourishing hindered by the recent economic crisis and the pandemic, programmes such as Onassis Stegi Outward Turn and platforms such as Onassis Dance Days, Greek Agora of Performance (GRAPE) at Athens and Epidaurus Festival, as well as international platforms such as Moving Balkans and Aerowaves, choreographers living in Greece have more opportunities to show their works to international curators and professionals, and so to travel abroad. The works by Paraskevopoulou, Kotsali and Antoniou testify to an active ferment that places the female body and thinking at the centre of (choreographic) discourse and reflects, even partially, the position of women in Greek and Cypriot society, while also transcending the local. Yet within this growing internationalisation in Greece, it is worth also considering who gets excluded by current structures of dance exportation, as well as the ongoing cultural asymmetries between Athens and the Greek ‘periphery’. ●


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B.Motion 2024, Bassano Del Grappa, Italy
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