The Travels of the Outward Turn Program: May – June 2024

Stage director Prodromos Tsinikoris, together with the protagonists of “Romáland” Angeliki Evangelopoulou and Giorgos Vilanakis, traveled to the Greek city of Volos for a two-day event, organized in collaboration with the support office and Sociomedical Centre for Roma in Aliveri, Department of Social Protection of the Municipality of Volos. On Thursday, May 16, 2024, a press conference was successfully held in the presence of Christina Liata, head of the “Outward Turn” program of the Onassis Stegi, the performance contributors, as well as several members of the program. On Friday, May 17, 2024, the team paid visits to Roma schools in the area, and in the evening of the same day a recording of the performance “Romáland” was screened at Ciné Achilleion, followed by a discussion with the director and the two protagonists.

The VR installation "Oedipus in search of Colonus" of Loukia Alavanou, the artist who represented Greece at the 59th Venice Biennale, is presented in a specially designed setting for the Ionian Parliament, as part of the 17th Audiovisual Arts Festival on the island of Corfu. The exhibition is curated by Daphne Dragona, with the support of the “Outward Turn” program of the Onassis Stegi.

With Sophocles’s tragedy “Oedipus at Colonus” as a starting point, the artist invites the public to immerse in a VR/360° environment and follow a story that tackles the issues of migration, displacement and human rights, as they are manifested predominantly in contemporary big cities. The artwork addresses issues of care, aging and death, human dignity and freedom, next to the need to combat marginalization and social exclusion.

The installation is open to the public from May 23 to June 2, 2024.

“Weather Engines” will be on view at LABoral Centro de Arte in Gijón, Spain, until May 25, 2024. The exhibition we navigated in Stegi and the National Observatory of Athens in 2022, closes its circle in Spain. Titled “Motores del Clima,” the exhibition includes works presented at Stegi alongside new commissions by Spanish artists: installations, photographs, videos, sound pieces, and sculptures – from the ground to the sky and from the soil to the atmosphere. Approaching the models and systems of art as techniques of knowledge, “Weather Engines” addresses the need for climate justice while exploring weather as a complex system, an object of observation and control, and a lived experience.

Following its official premiere at Stegi in April 2024, the new play by Euripides Laskaridis entitled “Lapis Lazuli” launches its tour to theaters around the globe. The tour’s first stops are Madrid’s Teatros del Canal on May 10 and 11, 2024, and Plovdiv’s One Dance Festival on May 25 and 26, 2024. Able to conjure magic from the most diverse and trifling materials, originator of a unique hybrid form of spectacle that spans the realms of performance, dance, and visual arts, seamlessly blending the sublime with the absurd, Euripides Laskaridis returns with the creation of another idiosyncratic performance, where elements of the grotesque, the comedic, and the terrifying, coexist.

Ioanna Paraskevopoulou travels once more around the greatest European festivals, this time with her latest piece of choreography, entitled “All of My Love.” Three months following its premiere at the Onassis Stegi as part of the Onassis Dance Days 2024, “All of My Love” was staged at Plovdiv’s One Dance Festival in Bulgaria, on May 19, 2024. Borrowing its title from Led Zeppelin’s homonymous track, “All of My Love” is a sound-choreographic construction that transpires through the recollection of experiences, texts, objects, craft practices, and manual operations. A shifting landscape in which nothing remains soundless. An invitation to an intense sensory experience that gropes the edges of loss. A choreographic composition of diverse memories and images. A letter of love, remembrance, and tribute to all those that are (not) with us anymore.

One year after its official premiere at Stegi as part of the Onassis Dance Days – ODD, Chara Kotsali’s work “to be possessed” continues its international tour, whose next stop is Castrovillari in Calabria, Italy. On May 25, 2024, the ritualistic, choreographed performance will be staged at Primavera dei Teatri Festival, featuring the choreographer unraveling a solo piece that evokes an exorcism. In the artist’s own words: “Compiling an archive of sounds, images, and materials, I endeavored to insert different voices in a conversation on the experience and concept of possession by powers that go beyond the individual body, on solitude as a gateway to the spectral presences of memory and thought, on the objects that bear their own lives and, finally, for the ‘unheard songs,’ the unseen music breathing within the documents on stage.”

Elena Antoniou is found by her side, presenting her deeply personal work “LANDSCAPE” at the Primavera dei Teatri Festival for a single show on May 26, 2024. The choreographer we met at the Onassis Stegi Main Stage in March 2023, during the Onassis Dance Days – ODD 2023, continues her international tour and, through her work as a female artist, she reflects on the interaction with the patriarchic culture of the 21st century. Flirting with strip culture, Elena Antoniou hypersexualizes, overexposes, and self-objectifies her body, keeping the viewer/observer’s gaze fixed on her body.

After their sold-out shows at the Onassis Stegi during the Onassis Dance Days – ODD 2024, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou and Georgios Kotsifakis travel to Prague for the Tanec Praha Festival on June 17, 2024, with their performance MOS. Having received rave reviews upon its presentation at the Barbican in London as part of the Dance Umbrella Festival, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou’s MOS continues to conquer the stages of Europe’s biggest dance festivals. MOS is a duet in which the choreographer and her co-dancer, Georgios Kotsifakis, interact with cinematic images seemingly unrelated to each other, while attempting to imbue the space with their own transcription.

Two months following its staging at Vilnius, Lithuania, Christos Papadopoulos travels with “Larsen C” at the Cyprus Contemporary Dance Festival, housed at Limassol’s Rialto Theatre. On June 23, 2024, the renowned Greek choreographer becomes again an observer of minimum movement that, in its interiority and repetition, produces life. “Larsen C” is a party-hommage to the silent transition of bodies. In the words of the choreographer, it is “a metaphor of life that, invincible, goes on.”

The tours of Onassis Stegi’s productions are realized with the support of the “Outward Turn” program.