The Onassis Stegi productions travel around Europe: September–October 2023

How does a woman live inside a pink world? Self-conscious feminists and misunderstood Barbies, Disney princesses and Amazons, all seeking satisfaction and emancipation from anything and everything tying them down. The five femininities of the performance “On Wednesdays We Wear Pink” by Alexandros Stavropoulos whom we met during the Onassis New Choreographers Festival 9 — ONC 9, travel to Istanbul Fringe Festival on Wednesday, September 20, presenting a work that tests the limits of identity.

Pleasure, trauma, strip culture, and the body’s self-objectification. Elena Antoniou’s “LANDSCAPE,” which was first introduced at the Main Stage of the Onassis Stegi in March 2023 as part of the ODD – Onassis Dance Days festival, launches its first tour cycle with the support of the “Outward Turn” program. On Thursday, September 21, the performance will be presented at the festival Fabrica Europa in Florence, Italy, where the Cypriot choreographer and dancer will once again overexpose her most personal landscape – her body – by skillfully inviting and provoking the viewer’s gaze.

We first saw the piece on the Upper Stage of the Onassis Stegi in March 2022, as part of the Onassis New Choreographers Festival 9 — ONC 9. Since then, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou’s “MOS” has conquered the greatest stages of the most important Greek and European dance festivals, including: ONE Dance Week Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; Carlow Arts Festival in Carlow, Ireland; Atelier de Paris in Paris, France, Operaestate Festival in Veneto, Italy; Spring Forward by Aerowaves in Dublin, Ireland; as well as the Kalamata Dance Festival in Greece. The next stops of the artist’s tour include: Dansens Hus in Oslo from September 22 to 24, as well as London’s Dance Umbrella Festival (to be hosted by the famous Barbican), from October 11 to 14.

“MOS” is Ioanna Paraskevopoulou’s first ‘live’ choreography. Together with her co-dancer Giorgos Kotsifakis, they create an original stage game of image-sound-movement, a unique soundtrack that unfolds before our very eyes.

Cyprus’s biggest festival pulls the curtain with retsina wine, beer, plastic chairs, “klarina” and electronic music. Thanasis Deligiannis, an international Greek musician of the younger generation, travels to Nicosia International Festival with his work “ΕΝΑ ΕΝΑ,” on Tuesday, September 26. The show, which was first presented at the Exhibition Hall -1 of the Onassis Stegi in November 2021, reconstitutes a uncanny “panegyri” from the 1980s.

“ENA ENA” is the name of an imaginary Greek rural nightclub. Literally meaning ‘one by one,’ it reminds us of the phrases ‘step by step,’ ‘bit by bit,’ ‘piece by piece.’ In the words of the project’s creator: “In ‘ENA ENA,’ the deconstruction of elements comprising the event that is a feast day celebration creates the opportunity to reassemble these constituent parts in a new way.”

Possession and exorcism, inner voices and spectral presences. The performance “to be possessed”, the solo physical and sound work that we first experienced at the Upper Stage of the Onassis Stegi as part of ODD – Onassis Dance Days, will be presented at the Mill of Performing Arts Festival in Larissa, Greece, on Tuesday, September 26. By means of a disarticulated staged ritual, dancer and choreographer Chara Kotsali engages in a new attempt to investigate the phenomenon of spirit possession, of which women have historically – and in the main – been accused, in a performance alluding to a trial possession.

From Athens to Northern Spain: The Onassis Stegi exhibition “Weather Engines”, curated by Daphne Dragona and Jussi Parikka, travels to Gijon’s LABoral Centro de Arte carrying with it key questions about the poetics and politics of the environment. From October 6 onwards, the exhibition titled “Motores del Clima” will host works presented at the Onassis Stegi next to new commissions to Spanish artists with a common starting point: climate crisis, but also the need for climate justice. Installations, photographs, videos, sound works and sculptures expand from the ground to the sky, and from soil to atmosphere, asking critical questions of weather, the environment, and technological cultures.

The tours of the Onassis Stegi Productions are actualized with the support of the “Outward Turn” program.