MIRfestival 2026 – in orbit around Athens

Named after the legendary Russian space station, MIR – a festival of performance/live media/image adventures, held in Athens (21–30/11/2025), serves as a hub for supporting and promoting experimental creation. Conceived from its outset by Christiana Galanopoulou and having just traversed its 17th orbit, MIR presents handpicked performances from the local and international scene, most of them world premieres. Connecting experimental performance spaces and various public locations between Athens and its outskirts, MIR is a festival in motion that in its latest edition wove works around the ideas that ‘the events that have recently unfolded so rapidly on the planet came as a blow’, and that ‘after the blow, silence; and all that fits in there’.

With a rare consonance between a strong curatorial vision and the 16 works featured for free during the 2025 edition, MIR presented a programme that offered reflections on different shades of silence – from mysterious and illusionary to redemptive. Yet first and foremost, MIR broke this silence with loud and deafening works that had something urgent to share, through themes such as a critique of the use of public space, the power dynamics and the politics of invisibility and solidarity.

Interruption of silence: the Greek independent performance scene at MIRfestival

POVerty Guide by George Daskalakis and Themis Theocharoglou offers a counter-narrative to the mainstream cultural image of Athens, and more broadly Greece, that often appeals to tourists for the glory of its architectural and historic past. The work is a theatre play dealing with the life of one of the most central squares in downtown Athens, Omonoia Square, which has been associated with migrants, refugees, illegal love, sex workers and drug users. As a site-specific work interwoven with the local history of Athens and its invisible citizens, POVerty Guide is structured as a promenade performance consisting of an audio-walk through the druggy and multicultural neighbourhoods around Omonoia Square leading to the underground spaces of Eight studio for a caustic revue by drag queen Lala Kolopi, impersonating Omonoia, and episodes drawn from stories of everyday people facing hardship. Walking in the streets of Athens and passing close to people in the limbo of addiction felt indiscreet yet necessary, and commenting on the contemporary memorabilia from Greece equally important. Strongly criticising Athenian public space and state power through vivid text and notable interpretations, the work sharply reflects how artists living and working in Athens experience a city in transformation, contrasting the eternal sublime with the tangible ephemerality of urban life.

Outliers, the latest work by Greek duo arisandmartha (Aris Papadopoulos and Martha Pasakopoulou), is a modular choreography of separate scenes revolving around the theme of the Other perceived as ‘monster’. Surrealistic and conceptually rich, it explores the potential of words to re-signify a situation in the manner of René Magritte’s iconic painting The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe). Impulsively, arisandmartha use a descriptive yet deceptive language to communicate what they see, observe, perceive or even presume to be the reality of the moment: the number of spectators and chairs in the performance space, balloons shaped like a butterfly, a fascist or a mother; even throwing a ball is considered as sex. Alongside them is sound designer Nikos Tsolis who both controls and produces sounds using stage objects: noisily folding chairs or pulling a red and white barrier tape. The dancers move through poses that loosely echo each other, discuss money versus visibility, or the violent exposure of female artists. They conjugate short phrases and verbs such as ‘I am privileged…’, ‘We hate…’, and their rendition of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer shifts into ‘I am a private worker’, reflecting the contemporary discourses that frame dance artists as cultural workers. Holding a cardboard sign reading ‘Hate each other’, they invite us to interpret it simultaneously as a command and a statement without a subject pronoun.

Outliers straddles performance and rehearsal as well as spoken and written language, often in sheer contradiction to the representation of the body. Deliberately fragmentary and at times hilarious, it plays with words while foregrounding the gap between personal perception, objective reality and its manipulation, in a game interrupted by abrupt violence that questions power relations and social acceptability.

In the all-white box of underground space Dot Wip, a female body is concealed beneath a long white covering, blending into the surrounding walls. This is Camouflage, a solo on the politics of appearance and disappearance of a female body created by Christina Karagianni with dramaturgical support by Elena Novakovits. Initially the ghost-like figure (Karagianni) jumps up and down to a strong, dynamic beat, now and then revealing her body parts from the white cover, while insisting on remaining genderless and largely unidentified. She wears a wig in front of covered genitals, then places a pipe and a horse whip with fluorescent strings in her mouth. Exploring the duality of visibility-invisibility in relation to the female body, Camouflage is enriched by playful variations on the word camouflage, displayed on bright monochromatic flags at the beginning of each section (camouf-lash, camou-flaw, camou-flush, camoufl-ass). Irony and humour intertwine as the choreographic variations progress with intense absurdity around the art of camouflage as a survival tactic for a female body that gradually discovers its self-agency through a liberating and frenetic freestyle dance.

Correction – The Director’s Cut by Konstantinos Papanikolaou captures a choreographer’s angst to create a truly contemporary choreography through a debate on the definitions of ‘high art’ and entertainment. After a short, fake Q&A between an ‘art critic’ (Stavroula Siamou) and a ‘choreographer’ (Aris Balis), who is trapped in his own world and word-making, the pieceunfolds as a sort of lecture-performance on dance aesthetics in search of the original spirit of contemporary art and ‘absolute perfection through knowledge’ (the performers paraphrase Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy). Interrupted by dance divertissements and clichés performed by Papanikolaou and his six stage companions – a beginner’s line dance set to country and western music finishing as a Renaissance tableau, a modern duet dramatically emphasising each gesture, some street and tap dance, and even the iconic trio dance scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders – the performanceconcludes with conceptual choreography as the genre epitomising the sublime in dance making. Conceived as a postmodern pastiche and a meta-dramatic dance performance, Papanikolaou approaches academic scholarship with light sarcasm and a fine dance dramaturgy, fused with a witty text both seeking and questioning the nature of high art and its friction with low art and pop culture.

Androniki Marathaki’s My Heart as an Antidote: Practices of Solidarity explores the heart as a sensitive organ able to build togetherness and activate connections with other bodies. Supported by live music – produced by Manoussos Klapakis with materials such as a metallic surface – the four performers physically investigate different body states and sensations, challenging their own endurance to perform, and ours to watch them. Bouncing collectively, jumping vertically, skipping, shaking and running prolongedly demands a vigour that only increases as their breath turns into voice, leading one performer, during a moment of calmness, to sing ‘Listen to your heart…’. The disciplined sound that reproduces the rhythm of a heartbeat urges the movers to keep on, in solidarity with one another, making it often difficult for them to stop moving. The piece feels like a process of healing and a test for resilience that turns the spectator into a sensitive and attentive witness.

Post-traumatic, cosmic and intimate silence

A red siren flashes silently on a table; the alarm is seen but not heard. A woman manipulates the buttons of an unplugged mixing board while another cries in front of the microphone, back turned towards us. This is the opening of When Adjusted to Darkness, a mourning concert-like performance by Lebanese female duo Deaf-Tones (Racha Baroud and Kinda Hassan), touching on the traumatic experiences of bombings, war-induced depression and exile. It confronts the unspeakable, bluntly exposing the collateral effects of sertraline (used to treat depression and suicide attempts) and rendering the exiled body a testimony to life and survival while vividly reenacting the sensation of a ruined home.

For Sur la Nature des Choses Invisibles#1 by Belgium-based Òmero studio (Monia Montali and François Bodeux), a neon light hangs from invisible strings, automatically going up and down in the same steady, repetitive rhythm: as soon as it touches the ground, it switches off, only to rise and switch on again. It is a point of reference, a compass that orients us in space or a clock that never ceases to remind us of the flow of time. The space – the white box of M54 deprived of any theatrical light – is inhabited by an unconventional yet strikingly complementary duo: an older performer (Jef Stevens) and a young woman (Alienor H.), whose trajectories of gestures, though seemingly disconnected, occasionally converge, echoing one another and the horizontality of the light source. His gaze is at once empty and full – as if attempting to remember the origin of his gestures – while her singing reveals a truly angelic melodic voice. He gestures as if washing his face gently, blowing his fingers and wiping invisible sweat; she embodies the strength of a warrior. They repeat their gestures quietly, as if for the first time: with reverence, gentleness and freshness. Sur la Nature des Choses Invisibles#1 is introspective and meditative, creating inner space for listening and contemplating while momentarily suspending our frenetic life through its cosmic vibration.

Equally cosmic, and at times uncanny, is Construire un Feu by French collective La Tierce, a work that questions the meaning of the invention of fire for our species and civilisation. Blowing into round



pigeon-like wind instruments, the five performers and co-creators produce a deep sound that aims to transport us thousands of years ago. Reciting their poem ‘I would like to see the garden when I am not inside’, they invite us to imagine in darkness how the theatre is when no audience is present and what was there long before this theatre was erected. They move as if trying to remember, recognise and trace a lost space. Construire un Feu is a poetry-based performance built on the premises that place has sensations and memories, and urges us to re-imagine the value of the first collective gathering of humanity, to sense its heat and speculate on the human need for togetherness.

Following his own experience of COVID-related anosmia, Odorama is a participatory performance installation by Brussels-based Antoine Neufmars that digs into olfactory memories and questions how life would be without smell. Dressed in a clinical white shirt, Neufmars sprays home-made perfumes, selected by the participants, onto testing strips and gives instructions on how to smell them, asking chosen participants to categorise them according to remembered associations, to rate their dramatic intensity, and to recall the smell of their first love encounter. He logs everything in an ‘encyclopedia of odours’ and a ‘cartography of memories’, thus drawing both a partial portrait of the selected audience members and a fragmented autobiography that exposes himself through intimate memories, such as the association of the smell of gasoline with the masculine archetype. Awakening memories through olfactory prompts, Odorama suggests a psychoanalytic session with performer as psychologist and participants as subjects. Interlaced with intimacy, lightness and an Elvis Presley-like seductiveness (linked to Neufmar’s singing Blue Moon), Odorama reveals that remembering means penetrating our interiority.

MIR’s focus on silence is a theme explored by the artists and characteristic of the works themselves – but also a response to works that need contemplation and reflection by the spectator, or that simply leave us speechless. At a moment when art and performing arts may be considered a luxury, MIR stands as a small MIRacle, a gift to artists and spectators alike that silently infiltrates Athenian life while supporting the unseen and the unheard. ●