The Athens Epidaurus Festival turned 70 this year, which meant plenty of celebratory side-events, an extra open-air theatre at Lycabettus Hill added to their list of venues, and most importantly a robust programme which emphasised the Festival’s basic components: theatre and music. Indeed, the strategic vision of the Festival to present first and foremost music and theatre is highlighted with thematic cycles and specially curated platforms – while dance is sidelined and allocated to broader categories like ‘grape’ (the Greek agora of performance, promoting contemporary dance and theatre). In an undeniably pluralistic programme, dance accounted for only about 10% of the almost one hundred events. The problem is not numerical; at a moment that the Festival is advocating for international visibility of the local scene, giving dance its own platform would allow it to thrive and to be more efficiently represented.
Following his earlier Cinderella’s, Alexandros Stravropoulos’ Who’s gonna tell her? is a retake on another Disney classic, this time Snow White. In this ‘modernised’ version, you have plenty of symbolisms, a series of epic Hollywood kisses on screen, four dancing Snow White replicas, but no benevolent dwarves, no malicious witch and no charming prince. After all, this is an unabashed story about ‘girls who just wanna have fun’ – or so it suggests. But in his attempt to revisit the fairytale, Stavropoulos serves us some ‘bad’ apples and almost intoxicates us with his arid humour. The story begins in a black room– the dwarves’ spick and span house, adorned with a red phone which occasionally rings to propel the action. The four Snow Whites (Eva Georgitsopoulou, Mary Giannoula, Eleftheria Iliopoulou, Fotini Mouchtouri) have kept the Disney hair but updated the outfit, looking more like a girl gang on a Saturday night out. Hush – they run an index finger on their mouths – they are going to tell us a secret.
The first ‘act’ is compact, choreographically dense as if the four dancers were effortlessly ice-skating on the floor. On their toes, with accentuated torso and hand movements, especially ports de bras, they move in geometrical patterns, a well- wound corps de ballet. The following two acts focus on (the defiance of) domestic labour and (the display of) culinary choreographed skills – the cooking class with apples a wink to Kylián’s legendary Birthday, though in this case the metronomic music and syncopated movements stress the tempo rather than the ebullient comedy. These emancipated Snow Whites are after their right to laziness, might enjoy a foot spa and a stay-in movie night to see themselves on screen along with other Disney princesses, even dance like no one’s looking, as if they were female versions of Tom Cruise in Risky Business. But the proposal ultimately becomes more like a teenage sitcom, barely shedding light on the inception of its controversies: if modern patriarchal society demands all this ‘deadly’ exploitable girlishness, where is the ‘happily ever after’ taking place? Are the girls’ (unmet) desires a grave, a coffin to sleep in, with no awakening whatsoever?
In Panagiota Kallimani’s Somehow, if not, at all, together, two identical, tangent rooms (designed by Maria Panourgia) become a cinemascopic take on the lives of two hetero couples (Kallimani with Raffael Pardillo, Antigone Frida with Giorgos Symeonidis). Their parallel lives, similar but not the same, unfold on stage, with a touch of Hopper’s voyeuristic gaze, only possible in modern cityscapes where night windows give access to an inside view of intimacy and urban loneliness. This sensation is heightened by the jazzy soundtrack and the greyish pale tones of lights (by Sakis Birbilis) – it’s the nocturnal human activity that has inspired so many, after all. The couples enter in festive, after-party mood, a bit tipsy, their bodies wearing that confident yet floppy mode. They kiss, they move the furniture, they climb on the table with the kind of seductiveness and exaggeration that speaks volumes of their desire to come together. Once this copulating dance is over, that jiggly moment of sharing intimate stuff with the other, they lie on the floor, relaxed.
At breakfast, daylight reveals their true characters: the playful female, the more reticent male. They repeat the scene until the couple dynamics consolidate so that they are no longer about intimacy but more about repetitive, automatised actions. It’s the moment for a plot twist, things getting a bit dreary, the couples becoming less synchronised, life being (maybe) unbearably predictable. Here comes that old trick, couples trying role-playing, exposing fantasies that only make them look shallower: the fake boobs, the juicy ass, the pumped torso, the bulky crotch – just like stuffed animals in a fake jungle. Even if they try to escape their own trapped life, they will find themselves in another, similar setting. Eventually, couples mix, partners crossing with their next-door doubles, misguided by each other’s haunting desires, and getting lost in the nightwood. Kallimani tries to depict this poetically and visually by downsizing one room and suffocating it with dead branches – but unlike in cinema, the whole show lacks ‘close-ups’, or something that bears witness to the emotional depths of the characters, like a subtle portrait that solidifies more than the well-wound entrances and exits. Our dissociated, soporific voyeurism doesn’t allow emotional entanglement; but maybe the show stresses that very distance within ourselves.
Dafin Antoniadou’s Darkest White plunges into an unrecoverable past – fictitious or real, we can’t tell. The entrance to this otherworldly performance feels like a near-death experience, a beam of light paving the way to a cavernous, pitch-dark stage. Slowly our eyes adjust to the light, the immersive sounds heighten our senses. The beginning is impressive, an igneous white formation with flowers sprouting on both sides, resonating with Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. The performer (Antoniadou herself) is embedded waist deep in this pilose mound/costume (by Christina Lardikou), awakened by the sound of birds. She yawns, stretches her arms, only to lean her torso back to the woolly surface. She collects flowers, making herself a colourful bust, she looks happy, yet this might not be a happy day after all. Meanwhile, we hear an introspective dialogue between two entities, blending history and fiction, erasure and preservation around Slavo-Macedonian identity. The compelling story urges us to dive deep into the thresholds of memory, but the challenge for Antoniadou to reach a mighty peak remains unconvincing. Her muted, physically constructed persona doesn’t follow the narrative complexities of the voiceover, hence we struggle to speculate how she is positioned in the story. Are the voices in her head or simply giving us a frame for her actions? Is she the poetic subject of a forgotten tale or a historical figure of some sort speaking from the grounds of lived experience?
With music (by Constantine Skourlis) as the most loyal companion to this multi-layered staged fiction (at moments a woeful song unsettles the scenic action), we are left perplexed by, if not detached from, Antoniadou’s performance: an innocent girl, an enraged entity as if in some sort of Hexentanz, or a wretched mother carrying in her arms a hank of white hair. All three aspects require a scaffold of technical and emotional virtuosity, yet appear like volatile glimpses instead of haunting images. If this was a ritual, we would have needed to experience the full arc of her journey, but we feel more engaged with the narrative and auditory web. The inconsistency is overstressed by the finale, when in a biblical sonic downpour, Antoniadou totally removes her woolly costume to unveil a folding metallic scaffold. The costume now turns into a haystack, probably to reference the vicissitudes and harshness of rural life and displacement.
With his lecture performance Sufficiently Creative Kontantinos Papanikolaou critically dissects – with an injection of caustic wit – the concept of creativity in the dance world. Set as a TV show with him in the role of the presenter and with guests, a scholar (Stavroula Siamou), a lawyer (Dimitra Vlagopoulou) and a dancer (Dimitris Matsoukas), Papanikolaou draws on the clichés around geniuses and the typical hierarchisation of knowledge power. The conference kickstarts with the theme song ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ from the musical Kiss me Kate, all four guests lip-syncing and dancing – an unusual entrance for a conference, but only the first in a series of subversive turns. We learn that Hanya Holm, whose work was majorly invested in social criticism, was the first to copyright her choreography, in the aforementioned musical. Once seated, the lawyer takes the lead to give us a legal frame of how originality is protected by law, under which circumstances and with what criteria. Her manners and tone of voice connote a condescending yet rigid kindness towards those who might not be familiar with the given examples.
Those are many – some well-known in the dance-world for their controversy (Beyoncé is mentioned three times for her plagiaristic practices), some lesser known, but still noteworthy – and even touch on the limits of human-oriented perceptions of creativity. Papanikolaou navigates the talk with assurance and a bit of unquestioned (male) self-confidence. The dancer/moron is occasionally invited to read a passage or perform an impro, to do ‘his stuff’ as the others say – that stuff being nonetheless the matter under scrutiny. How do you protect the originality of something just performed, for which there are no records? What happens with dance, whose ephemeral nature is so often emphasised? The debate heats up as the notion of originality is put into transcultural perspective: East vs West, as the legal cases presented so far. The judge this time is Hegel, whose theory of spirit often provided the justification for colonial and cultural racism. Papanikolaou dares the improbable: he proposes a finale/tribute based on ‘shan zhai’, namely pirate products from China. The outro made of ‘branded’ gestures and moves (physically ‘quoting’ Nijinsky, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Twyla Tharp, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Daniel Nagrin and Michael Jackson, among others) that are revisited, shuffled and compressed, plays with the paradoxical feeling that the pirated outcome itself seems ‘sufficiently creative’ to advocate for its own originality.
Women in Patricia Apergi’s Hystory are multifaceted, wandering figures, at times switching from exaggerated fierceness to obstinate childishness. The story unfolds in a prairie or abandoned site – the greenery alternating with something like a freshly unearthed mosaic (by Evangelia Therianou). A maiden with her hair spread on the grass lies flat – perhaps from some popular fable, since Hystory draws on multiple traditions and cultures for examples of female/feminine resilience (the title referencing ambivalently hysteria and history). The all-female troupe (Evini Pantelaki, Caterina Politi, Myrto Stolidi, Mariana Tzouda and Eleanna Zoi) march on stage with an air of self-mockery and a kind of exaggerated swagger. Their fashionable, garden-fresh looks (by Alegia Papageorgiou) reference different styles, from boyish cargo shorts to girly tunic, all made of lightweight, see-through fabric that heightens the dancers’ movements and characters. Action will be occasionally interrupted by a remote mini-car, a faked panic attack or a stumble which will cause the bleeding of one dancer’s knee. The choreography has a touch of pop to it (supposedly K-pop, but without the jaw-dropping synced moves) with group formations built upon medleys of movements. Some aimed for allure, with smooth limbs and sharp pops interspersing with more sensual moments, some are more forcibly athletic, as in a soccer feint drill.
No matter the distraction or obstruction, the young women keep on walking, hopping sideways, running in circles, exiting and entering in solos or groups, at times carrying their home belongings as if in forced exodus or displacement. That last image is accompanied by a plaintive monologue touching on themes of female solidarity, but loses its immediacy and outwardness to attempt (wishfully yet unsuccessfully) a more poetic and lyrical take. The text names a list of things women hold (on to), and while aiming to evoke powerful feelings, it makes female emotional labour sound inescapable. In the epilogue, the quintet speeds up again and collectively embodies a joyful tableau, yet the earlier prosaic approach lingers and is voiced louder in what the choreographer calls ’a prayer’. The textual framing of the show is perhaps designed to remind us of the radicality of feminist movements (in the artist’s note, several postcolonial and black feminist thinkers are referenced). There are many brilliant examples in both feminist theory and performance that have debunked the pathologisation of women, but in quoting many different cultural forms of dance (from kathak and baladi to hula and k-pop) without engaging with their specificity and cultural significance Hystory risks becoming ‘Hysterile’. ●
Athens, Greece