Bathed in red light, dancers Chara Kotsali and Adonis Vais weave into each other like a DNA strand caught in a loop. The score by Jeph Vanger creates an intense, intriguing atmosphere, and it’s nearly impossible to look away from the synergy unfolding.
Ermira Goro’s Sirens draws us into a world where touch without touch feels entirely possible. At first, the performers avoid direct contact – their robotic movements intricately twisting around one another keeps them close, but never physically connected. Their tight red costumes and seductive bodily movements (fingers in their mouths, hands on their necks) make them irresistible.
As their desire builds, flirtation sharpens into something more tactile. They reach for sexual contact – or the closest version of it, for beings that are part-machine, part-human. But halfway through, the rhythm shifts, dancers speed up, mirroring the pace of today – the consumerism of bodies. In response, Kotsali sings to Vais, hypnotically casting a spell as Vais waacks and vogues for his partner.
By the end, as parts of their costumes fall and genders dissolve, they both get to sing their own siren song. Together, they offer something liberating, erotic, and impossible to ignore.
Dmitrijus Andrušanecas
Two bright red humanoid bodies interconnect in an isolated-almost-robot-like motion with clear-straight-to-the-point gestures that leave no space for wonder: yes, it’s sexual. Just a hint of a hip swirl juxtaposed with non-stop-fluttering eyelashes, creates an eerily flirty atmosphere amplified by the motives of screeching in the soundtrack. The tension initially established between dancers Chara Kotsali and Adonis Vais shifts as the light design travels towards us – showcasing the performers as shadows who try to find their next mate. Physical proposals become progressively more literal: flickering-tongue-between-two-fingers next to the side profile of a twerking figure. The bodies create a contemporary mating dance that leads, through alluring movement, to a conventional climax.
YET.
Three, two, one.
Suddenly all the staging is lost: we are now in a fragile rehearsal space, everything is still possible? With notes of Kotsali’s singing and Vais’s vogueing, Sirens by Ermira Goro finds its lingeringly puzzling end.
Kärt Koppel
Affected stares and sensual gestures set the tone for an ambiguous exploration of desire in Ermira Goro’s Sirens. Addressing themes of gender and transformation, the piece sees two red-clothed dancers perform exaggerated displays of pleasure, drawing on a stylised ritualistic language of wide mouth openings and self-caresses to provocatively allude to sex and masturbation.
There’s an artificial quality to their movements that, combined with a blaring techno score and flashy lighting, recalls digital age alienation. Over time, their movement vocabulary drifts away from its initial eroticism, and the piece’s intention becomes vague as a result. Attempted nods towards role reversal and queer codes (through voguing, voice layering, and exposed bodies) are undermined by binary casting and conventional dynamics, which reinforce familiar images of heteronormative desire rather than challenging them. Are we merely watching another aestheticised performance of sexuality, rather than confronting the complexities of our own?
Maria Chiara de Nobili
Ermira Goro’s Sirens invites us on a sensual and mysterious journey into the world of desire and its social expression. The initial slow, sensuous movements of the dancers, bathed in red light with red costumes, is promising. The pace steps up with insinuated orgasms, coupled with increasingly loud music, but the eroticism declines as the dancers begin to use clichés to make sure we understand what is happening: big O mouths, tongues licking through fingers – you get the picture.
Dancer Chara Kotsali is outstanding in her portrayal of a siren. In addition to her technical prowess, her facial expressions and interaction with the audience involve the public in a complicit game throughout. This is, after all, a being who lures men into temptation.
The momentum is lost, however, when Kotsali starts to sing a long ballad while co-dancer Adonis Vais prances around. The piece thus far, at least to a modern audience, has been a drama of mutual consent and enjoyment, so perhaps the metaphor no longer serves the final work in this iteration.
Greta Bourke
Two performers, Chara Kotsali and Adonis Vais, undulate to a distant rhythm, as if the party still rages elsewhere but they are no longer part of it. Dawn-like lighting washes over them as their bodies, dressed in identical intense red outfits, ripple from head to toe in unison.
Through subtle tension, they explore sexuality – being sexualised by each other, by the audience, and by themselves. Popping and ballroom influences (rooted in African-American and Latino 2ISLGBTQ+ cultures) animate expressions of rage, constriction, and fleeting hope.
As the music swells, it feels as if we’ve entered the party. But what should signal liberation instead turns unsettling: imprecise sequences break the earlier virtuosity, exposing the fragility of performing identity. When Vais dives into a ballroom-inspired solo and Kotsali belts a Greek song, we’re left to wonder: Can performing rebellion slip so easily into performing surrender?
Both eventually disappear into a blinding red horizon.