Stumbles is a contemporary dance performance that explores the notion of stumbling as a physical, emotional, and historical process that reveals our fragility and vulnerability. Through movement and sound, two dancers and two musicians create a world, in which the loss of balance and the ongoing effort to regain it forms the central theme. Circular movements, spiral pathways, and weight shifts reflect the cyclical nature of time: the body remembers, the past returns, and the stage transforms into a space where today becomes tomorrow and yesterday. The performance encourages us to remain standing in a world that is constantly changing. It serves as a reminder that balance is not a solitary achievement but the result of solidarity and interaction with others. It is a journey from the little stumbles of movement to the great, existential falters that shape our memory, our identity, and our collective history.
The performance Friend with the Mountain converses with the historical identity of zeibekiko, a warlike, Dionysian, and improvisatory male solo dance. From the solitary figure of the fighting man to the ecstatic rhythm of personal struggle, zeibekiko has always represented a field of tension and honour. The piece does not negate this legacy; it retranslates it. Memory and identity are embodied in the figure of a dancing woman.
Choreographer Eva Georgitsopoulou, along with Elina Rizou’s onstage music supervision, creates a ritualistic space where solo dancing returns not to fight but to remember and transform through memory into a collective experience. Friend with the Mountain is a personal tribute, a quiet revolution, and an attempt to establish roots through the body.
The new work by Mariela Nestora / YELP danceco. explores the forms adorning red-figure and black-figure vases of ancient Greek pottery. It brings these forms to life, not as mere representations of the past but as a potential arena for questioning and creating narratives. The choreography – as a mechanism of appropriation, repetition, and reformulation – stirs and inscribes memories, rendering time fluid and porous. This excavation of movement takes place in the here and now in ongoing interaction with live music. Is movement form or energy, action or context, embodiment or transformation, positive or negative space, sensation or thought, source or echo, perception or transmission, reproduction or comment? In the dance performance Appropriations: Excavation of Movement, the past, present, and future are not distinct entities, but interrelated manifestations of the same experience. What do we choose to place in the background and what in the foreground of our attention?
The choreographic work Hounds of Madness focuses on the Chorus from Euripides’ Bacchae, highlighting its autonomous artistic entity. At the same time, it brings to the forefront the group of Theban women who have become autonomous in the mountains of Cithaeron, choosing the Bacchic cult as an act of opposition to patriarchal society, and reads it as the first historically surviving fictional record of self-determination of the female body. Hounds of Madness makes visible a group of femininities with sensory and motor disabilities, a group of women, that is, who remain invisible in modern Greece and are rarely given the space to exist both in society and on stage.
A multimedia work that bridges the historical trace with contemporary readings on the role of women as subjects of resistance and emancipation of the self-determination of their bodies, through a transcendent dance composed of a mixed group of performers, in a post-Bacchic universe.
*The performance will be accessible to individuals with visual and mobility disabilities. A tactile tour will be offered prior to the start of the performance for blind individuals and those with visual impairments.
A performance that uses space as a living observer of time’s flow. Three generations of performers symbolize the past, present, and future on both a real and an imaginary time horizon. They interact in a shared space, shaping and changing it, adding or destroying elements. Time is observed through the earth and the surrounding space. Music is added as a fundamental component of the performance to play the role of time and directly and substantially affect the events. The live music converses with the movements of the performers, both moulding and being moulded by their actions. The performance structure is based on philosophical Taoism, introducing an additional central axis, alongside the temporal one, into the stage space, choreography, and dramaturgy.
In a time filled with idols – created by humans for superhumans – the dance solo Hero Unplugged presents an ordinary individual who wants to follow a heroic path and reach the top. His journey seems predictable, until – willingly or unwillingly – he becomes “unplugged” and disconnected.
This piece is a choreographic attempt inspired by the allure of Plato’s Cave and its contemporary interpretations, drawing parallels between the shadows in the cave and the dubious modern demands that shape our lives. At the center of the story is a young boy who, through his physical imagination and the choreographer’s eyes, conveys the importance of disconnecting and heroism—concepts that continue to seek their place in both the present and the not-so-distant future.
Shattered Ground draws material and inspiration from the mythical figure of Persephone, reimagined to be reaching an uncertain present and heading towards a “shattered” future. Being a suspended soul in an Odyssean wander, she descends into the present moment tasked to rebuild it anew. Two selves, the light and the darkness, reflect Persephone’s division between the living realm and the underworld. A passing from one place and time to another that nurtures change and transformation.
Choreographer and Performer Athanasia Kanellopoulou choreographs a hybrid music performance in collaboration with Composer and Pianist Konstantina Polychronopoulou and Soprano Peny Deligianni. Three women compose a scenic universe where dance, live music, and various soundscapes, all converse on stage, floating between the mythical and the real, the earthy and the supernatural, and aspiring to – potentially – redefine the identity of modern humanity.
The past has a profound impact on Disability, Art, Culture, and their management, both through societal and cultural beliefs and through political and technological advancements.
Understanding this historical trajectory is crucial for creating a fairer and more inclusive future for individuals with disabilities. This theory can explain the importance of the past and memory, as well as how they can be redefined, reconstructed, and function anew under new conditions and conventions in culture, art, science, technology, education, and life itself…
When economies collapse, institutions face challenges, and moral values are questioned, revisiting the past becomes necessary. Sometimes people need to delve into their cultural heritage to be able to adjust their compass and orient themselves toward new directions for a better future.
The common elements that will compose the core of the project is the relationship between disability and asylum, through their current dimensions, regarding the oppression experienced by refugees, the freedom of action given to them by societies, and their integration into the social web.
Taking into account social, economic, class, ethnic, psychological parameters and influences, we explore the spectrum and processes of integration and acceptance of these populations, through authentic narratives, and their role in the evolution of culture.
A redefinition of art, of the “different other”, of the refugee, of the disabled, of life itself, of the self, of emotions, of the relationship with one’s own body, mind and soul.
A work that attempts to explore the question of collective memory, the way History stands not only on the experience of the past, but also of the present. In a historical path, that it is unclear whether it is linear or circular, bodies progressively learn how to handle the fragility of coming together and the search for new land.
Concepts such as uprooting, alienation, violent expatriation, rupture of the sense of “belonging” and identity, constantly recur and alternate with each other.
A thread from yesterday to today, where collective memory meets the personal, lived history, the locus of the body and its claims. Perhaps one should undergo many small, successive deaths, wander beyond the boundaries and the dividing lines that exist mostly inside them, to manage to seek a redemptive utopia, an “elsewhere”, a new place.