For five days in October, Thessaloniki became a meeting point for stories, bodies and voices from around the world: Thessaloniki Fringe Festival, now in its third year, has grown into a space of creativity, expression and cultural dialogue – supporting Thessaloniki’s local artistic scene while connecting it to an expanding international network of independent festivals and theatres.
This year’s programme unfolded across eight unconventional venues – think bars, dance studios and even an apartment space – presenting nineteen performances: from theatre, dance and physical performance to music, comedy and family shows. Artists from nine countries brought their stories, humour and questions to the stage, offering work in Greek, English, and without words.
A small but committed audience carried the festival slogan on their totes around the city: ‘Please, stay weird.’ Watching a few of the performances in the Dance and Physical Theatre category, made clear a strong presence of bold female voices, exploring identity, memory and resilience through fresh, sometimes disarming artistic approaches.
GLORIA. An easy and funny work – La Quebrá (Spain)
GLORIA. An easy and funny work unfolds as an ironic and visually striking exploration of ambition – a cycle of aspiration and collapse, of trying, failing and posing for one last applause. Three young dancers in pinup shorts, blond wigs and bright red lipstick, smile obsessively as they follow spoken instructions of a dictated, almost commanded choreography, a mix of cabaret-like kicks, jazz dance and flowy movement that synchronises with the audio text. Their laughter soon turns into delirium, and the strikingly technical dancers unravel into broken dolls – beautiful, unhinged and human.
Blending dance and physical theatre, La Quebrá turns the pursuit of success into something funny and a little heartbreaking at the same time. The performers swing between confidence and fragility, chasing validation with an intensity that slowly betrays them. Their repeated bows, exaggerated and theatrical, uncover the hierarchies and absurdities of the performance arts industry. It is both playful and painfully revealing: somewhere between comedy and confession, GLORIA asks what a ‘dance body’ is, and how the industry moulds, markets and distorts it.
To Be Enough – Evropi Kessidou (Greece)
On a similar note, Evropi Kessidou’s To Be Enough is – as she states – an autobiographical solo on the struggles of a young dancer. The performance begins before it ‘officially’ begins: Kessidou is already ‘on stage’ in an actual dance studio space, stretching in sweatpants and a grey tank top as the audience enters – a glimpse into the ordinary before the ‘performance’ starts. What unfolds is part performance-lecture, part self-interrogation. She talks to us directly as she braids her hair, reflecting on what it means to be ‘enough’ – as a dancer, a creator, a person. The casual tone gradually sharpens with urgency, questioning the very idea of performance as construction, as work and as an alternative to therapy.
When a sterile AI voice begins to give commands, she complies – demonstrating high technical skills, executing tasks, repeating phrases – mirroring the exhaustive nature of the auditioning process, the bureaucratic absurdity and institutional expectations. Light-heartedly, Kessidou conveys an anatomy of the profession: from the requested headshots and full-body photos to the four-minute improvisation videos and inevitable rejection letters. Between the falls and twisted chases of her own braid, irony meets exhaustion. Yet there is no self-pity here, only an empowered resilience. The final image of wandering in an ocean, lingers as both confession and defiance. Kessidou turns the performer’s exhaustion into its own kind of resistance, making To Be Enough a stark, tender reflection on artistic survival.
Where Even Flowers Can Grow – Caroline Blomqvist & Nadja Bounenni (Denmark)
Where Even Flowers Can Grow by Caroline Blomqvist & Nadja Bounenni is an artistic exploration of wellbeing and mental health through movement, light, sound and spatial intimacy. The performance invites subtle, collective transformations, in quiet moments where the boundary between dancer and audience gently dissolves. The performers’ duo move in an unusually small space, in close proximity to the audience seated around them in a circle, making the setting very intimate from the beginning. The soft yellow fabric of their pants echoes through the room, draped here and there like traces of sunlight. With eyes closed, they seem to grow directly from the floor, their curved gestures blooming into unison dancing and partnering lifts. They dance around one another in a form that recalls capoeira duets – part play, part defence – an exchange of energy that feels both tender and volatile.
Set in a busy bar, amid chatter and clinking glasses, the performance gets hardly noticed by passersby. Claiming a space for fragility in the everyday, it attempts to convey the quiet resilience of connection and the delicate balance between solitude and togetherness, bringing to mind an image of delicate flowers growing through concrete.
Binary Lives – Where Fate Takes Us – Dis Èquilibre (Italy)
Set in an abstract train station where two lost souls wait for a train that never arrives, Dis Èquilibre’s Binary Lives – Where Fate Takes Us unfolds like a sepia-tinted daydream – all warm, earthy tones and vintage romance. Through delicate balances, acrobatics and pantomime, the performers narrate a wordless, tender story of longing, coincidence and connection.
Their world was part physical theatre, part cartoon: he shy but strong, she fiery and yearning – a mismatched pair teasing each other through misunderstanding and play. As the story unfolds, leggy lifts, air-splits and acrobatic bursts punctuate moments of awe. There is rain falling, calendar pages turned, and the passage of time becomes its own choreography. Guided by expressive, cinematic music, each shift in mood feels like a cut in an old film reel. Goofy, light-hearted and a touch sentimental, Binary Lives gripped its audience and spread laughter.
Talking Through Threads – Matilde Peneirol & Pilar Lopes (Portugal)
Talking Through Threads is an immersive performance addressed to a young audience that combines contemporary dance and pedagogical workshop, inviting children to create, touch and explore. The performance took place in a quiet neighbourhood café-style venue, with round tables and wooden chairs in front of a small stage. There were barely any spectators, just a few festival volunteers and a couple of children, which made the experience feel very intimate.
Peneirol and Lopes are seated on chairs onstage as we enter. Dressed in baggy jeans and black lace shoes, they give off clownish awkwardness. A red thread weaves loosely above them, looped across the space like a spider’s web. Their brief performance is a playful duet of floorwork and gestures hovering between boredom and curiosity, and the most captivating moments come when they begin to deconstruct the red web with their dancing.
The performance was followed by a simple workshop, where kids and adults were invited to draw what they had seen and rebuild their web using colourful threads. Two little brothers led the way – crawling, stretching, tripping, problem-solving. The space became a tangle of movement and imagination, a soft choreography of play. Like tiny spiders, they wove their own world from scratch – fragile, vibrant and full of wonder.
For Peneirol and Lopes, this was their first time presenting this work, so the smaller audience created a safe space for them to try out their idea, which they hope to develop further, as they told me later that day while watching another piece. Thessaloniki Fringe did indeed feel like that kind of space: a place for trying things out, for voices to be heard, where artists and audiences could show up as they are: honest, curious and sometimes a little weird. ●
8–12.10.2025 Thessaloniki, Greece