Two works by Onassis ONX at Under Construction in New York

“A {room} of one’s own” is an XR performance and hysterical journey about making creative work within a confined space. Through voice loops, motion capture, and audio-visual fragments in projected scenes, the unnamed protagonist takes us through their adolescence as they navigate sickness, immigration, and a multilingual artistic career. Reality and fiction bleed together in this playful and raw exploration of the joys and horrors of being trapped in one’s own creative brain.

Viola He is a Shanghai-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, performer and cultural organizer. Their creative practices engage with DIY electronics, programming, dance/movements and various time-based media, exploring pathways towards alternative structures, systems and interfaces. They create immersive experiences, installations and improvisational performances using algorithmic approaches to enhance, alternate and obfuscate audio-visual assets, investigating the contradictions of analog aesthetics and digital tools. Viola often dreams about infiltrating digital spaces with physical bodies as tools for intervention, wielding their love/hate relationship with technology to challenge the rigid infrastructures around them. Viola is an Onassis ONX member and is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA) at NYU Shanghai. Viola holds a B.A. in Communication from University of Southern California, and a M.P.S. from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program.

A woman maniacally jogs in place, a practice as much for her health as for self-torture. Μusic monitors the metronome of her steps. Inspired by the runway of international fashion, RUNWAY explores the array of behaviors and transformations of a woman striving for her era’s dominant beauty standards. The glamor of the catwalk morphs into a mannered and absurd march, as the performer walks, runs, stumbles, applies make-up, fixes her hair, stumbles on her heels, and only barely recovers her balance in a race against the terrifying corrosion of time. In RUNWAY, the treadmill transcends its use as a beauty and wellness tool, evolving into an existential prison, a torture instrument, a conveyor belt for standardized products with predetermined expiration dates, a grotesque and absurd plank above the abyss.

Born in Athens, Christiana Kosiari is a professional dancer, dance teacher and choreographer. She graduated from the Greek State School of Dance in 2012 and from the Athens University of Economics and Business in 2008. From 2021 to 2022, she participated in the U(R)TOPIAS Academy of Choreography in the context of 2023 ELEVSIS European Capital of Culture, where she presented two works, Bouboulina and Bouboulina’s. In the 2022/23 season, she was selected to continue her studies at the Academy for a second year and present Bouboulines as site-specific work in July of 2023. As a choreographer, she premiered RUNWAY at the Onassis Dance Days 2024 at the Onassis Stegi in February 2024. In August 2024, RUNWAY was hosted in a Residency Program by the association Credixa/Anima Fluo in Bologna, Italy. Kosiari presented Chained at the Arc for Dance Festival 15, the Dance Laboratory Rhodes 7, the Patras Art Festival 3 and the Masdanza Dance Festival 28 in the Canary Islands, where she received the second prize from the jury. She has choreographed video versions of Sink and Bouboulina which have been presented at various festivals in Greece and abroad, including the Dance Days Chania, the Athens Video Dance Project, the Patras Art Festival, the Land Art Moving Biennial Video-dance Contest in Portugal, the Emergentia in Switzerland, the Lift-Off Global Network in England, and many others. As a dancer, she participated in MA by Romeo Castellucci and toured Lamenta with the Siamese Dance Co from 2021 to 2023. She has attended many workshops in Greece and abroad and has been teaching dance since 2007.

UNDER THE RADAR is New York City’s premier annual festival of experimental theater, featuring cutting-edge performances from around the world and across the U.S. The 20th edition of UTR will run from January 4-19, 2025 presenting over a dozen productions at various partner organizations across the city.

UNDER THE RADAR connects with the city, the nation, and the world through the voices of innovative multidisciplinary artists. The festival champions transparency, equity, and collaboration in creating new live works. It embodies global citizenship, fosters innovation, and provides a stage for new voices.