Slamming, a work-in-progress by Xenia Koghilaki. Photo © Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi

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Onassis Dance Days 2024: The echo of bodies

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Slamming, a work-in-progress by Xenia Koghilaki. Photo © Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi

Betina Panagiotara

15 March 2024

Crashing, banging, balancing, fighting, remembering, existing – it’s a high-volume outing for Onassis Dance Days

The Onassis Dance Days Festival (ODD), now in its 11th year, is organised by the Onassis Cultural Center, a prominent private cultural institution in Athens. Initially named the New Choreographers Festival, it aimed to showcase emerging local and international choreographers through an annual open call selection process. The 10th edition was renamed Dance Days, raising the question of dance’s definition, while this year’s focus shifted to the relationship between music and dance. Amidst challenging times for Greece, with significant cuts in arts – as well as in education and public health – the festival stands as a vital platform for new choreographers but in a highly competitive environment.

The ‘Giving it all they got’ tagline encapsulates this year’s 11th edition, where bodies reach their limits on stage. Although international artists are part of the festival’s curation, it primarily supports and promotes the Greek dance scene, featuring overall six performances by five artists, and hosting four premieres during its two-day event.

What is the sound of our bodies?

Panos Malactos, We All Need Therapy. Photo © Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi

Panos Malactos’ solo performance We All Need Therapy presents a portrayal of a personal ‘panic attack confession’ set against a backdrop of club music performed live by musician Die Arkitekt. The venue, a blend of an arena and a club at the basement of Onassis Stegi, is engulfed in dark lighting and features a black corridor leading to a white dance floor. As the audience enters, they are greeted by the performer’s invitation to join the dance. Though some spectators hesitantly participate, many remain on the sidelines, wearing glow-in-the-dark earplugs to protect themselves from the deafening music.

At the beginning, Malactos shares the dance floor with others before eventually being left alone dancing to the rhythm, jumping up and down, embodying the struggle and exhaustion of his internal turmoil. His movements become more intense until he collapses into the floor, using a microphone to describe his status, but his voice is hardly heard. In the end, the music lowers and he asks the audience to close their eyes and raise their hands if the answer is yes, asking personal questions about the audience’s experiences with trauma. The piece concludes with a visual of raised hands and a resumption of the music, leaving the audience to reflect on the performer’s journey.

The performance accentuated a feeling of loneliness prevalent in traumatic situations and invited confession as sharing and a practice of liberating. Nonetheless, the overwhelming volume of the music worked against the performer while some elements, such as the insistent dance invitation upon entering and the personal questions posed at the end, felt uneasy given that the audience was asked to participate without first establishing a safe space.

RUNWAY by Christiana Kosiari. Photo © Pinelopi Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi

RUNWAY by Christiana Kosiari is a performance set in a small, black box reminiscent of an airplane cabin. The audience is given a leaflet with instructions, evoking the experience of air travel. The central figure is a performer running on a treadmill, surrounded by hanging objects such as silver heels and towels, symbolising the pressures and expectations placed on women in today’s society. Throughout the performance, Kosiari – while running, walking, stumbling on the treadmill – focuses on different parts of her body such as her inner thighs, chest and belly, critiquing their ageing and attempting to maintain youth and perfection through exercising, putting on straps and beauty masks, ending her agonising efforts with a monstrous, grotesque look.

The result is a detailed portrayal of a woman consumed by the very standards she is trying to resist, turning her into a Stepford wife confined in an endless pursuit of unattainable perfection. The performance successfully replicates a devastating reality for women, inviting us to rethink established mentalities and their effect in a heated moment in Greece, where we are experiencing a rise in femicides and domestic abuse. At the same time though, it feels entrapped in a Foucauldian discourse of power relations wherein women have no agency and no way out of this hellish truth.

Is there no way out of this One Song that sets the tune for our lives?

Slamming, a work-in-progress by choreographer and dancer Xenia Koghilaki, draws from the punk-rock scene and mosh pit dynamics, and features three female performers dressed casually in sports shoes, jeans and colourful t-shirts. Set in the dimly lit basement of Onassis Stegi with smoke filling the air, the performance space is adorned with two sets of drums in the corners.

The central movement motif is head banging, a signature element from Koghilaki’s previous work Bang Bang Bodies. The performers engage in a repetitive dance that transforms into a mystagogic ritual, unifying their bodies into a collective entity almost always moving in proximity. The performers’ fluid transitions in leadership create an authentic representation of a mosh pit’s collaborative spirit, where participants come together to create a shared space with its own set of rules. As their heads rotate in slow motion, their hair moving through the air, the scene becomes mesmerising and evokes the image of Medusa. This work explores the physicality found in punk rock concerts, where individuals merge into a united force, highlighting the ability of contemporary dance to look more carefully and in detail into social practices and habits, commenting and enabling practices of commoning that need further exploration in the work.

Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, All My Love. Photo © Andreas Simopoulos for Onassis Stegi

A dancer for many years and a new choreographer, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou showcased both of her works at the festival. A re-staging of the much travelled MOS, an Aerowaves selection for 2022 (read the Springback Academy reviews here), and her new production All of My Love, a clever, darkish journey down memory lane that effectively blends movement, sound, and film practices. Paraskevopoulou’s solo performance masterfully creates a hybrid language that characterises her works as a new choreographer. Her solo is inspired by a Led Zeppelin song that we never hear while she delves into her childhood memories, not to reconstruct reality but to craft a new cosmos here and now, inviting the audience to make its own associations.

The performance begins with her knitting with her hands a large white ball of yarn, intertwining the past with the present. Props are scattered throughout the stage while microphones hang from the ceiling. A voice from the speakers introduces us to Lucy Ann, a stranger resembling Paraskevopoulou as a child while her films are screened in the background, interrupted by real photos of Paraskevopolou as a toddler. This blurs the lines between reality and fiction, turning the spotlight to what is happening now rather than what has happened in a faraway past. What is the sound of our memories? she asks as she fills the stage with strange sounds that come from props and her own body stepping forcibly onto a piece of wood. As memories clash and sounds become more complex, Paraskevopoulou’s performance becomes a captivating exploration of how we select, recombine, and reshape our past experiences to draft a new present. All of My Love is an inventive, energetic, and creative choreographic work that invites us – the audience – to be present, alive, humane in a rapidly shifting world.

Miet Warlop, One Song. Photo © Andreas Simopoulos for Onassis Stegi

Invited to the Onassis Dance Days Festival after the work premiered in Festival d’Avignon in 2022, One Song by Belgian visual artist Miet Warlop is a Sisyphean experience, crafted with humour, repetition and inventiveness. Throughout the performance we listen to one song performed live repeatedly by musician-athletes. We see a frantic drummer, a violinist playing while balancing on a beam, a bassist doing sit-ups, a keyboard player and a singer on a treadmill, being cheered or booed by a crowd of fans whilst an announcer mumbles through a megaphone. Warlop creates an absurd world of contrasting images and increasing energy, concluding with a male performer dressed as cheerleader spinning continuously while holding a sign reading ‘if’.

Refreshing as it may be, the performance perpetuates a dominant reality where we – especially but not only cultural workers – live in frantic rhythms, always trying to balance our work and personal lives, be flexible and always productive, even when we are completely exhausted. These working and living conditions compose our precarious world, and watching them on stage can be both hilarious and depressing. Is there no way out of this One Song that sets the tune for our lives?

To acknowledge and embrace the materiality of our bodies, which is essentially what makes us vulnerable human beings

The Onassis Dance Days Festival, focusing thematically on the sound-movement relationship, has brought to light the materiality of bodies in dance. These bodies grapple with trauma, the relentless pursuit of youth and perfection, survival amidst a fast-paced, non-stop way of living, communicating the need for relating and restarting. The assaultive, ear-splitting volume of the music seemed to be part of the festival’s curation but left little or no space to actually hear the sound of these bodies that took over the stage. Moreover, most performances reinforced an existing reality, urging us to recognise our modus vivendi and our limitations within it. What finally resonates with me from the festival experience is the proposal stemming from contemporary dance – often perceived as an ephemeral art form, vanishing after each performance – to revisit past memories, rekindle collective instincts in the social sphere, and reshape the current reality in this fleeting moment where we can exert influence through our bodies, presence, thoughts, and art. To acknowledge and embrace the materiality of our bodies, which is essentially what makes us vulnerable human beings. ●

23.023.24–03.03.24, Onassis Stegi, Athens, Greece

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