6th Young Choreographers Festival

Taking on the challenge of renewal through repetition, upping the ante yet again, the Onassis Stegi will host, around all its stages, the sixth annual Young Choreographers Festival on the 1st and 2nd of March — a showcase and incubator for young creators and artistic propositions that are put to the test onstage, while also testing the limits of our own understanding of dance in Greece. The Onassis Stegi also offers nontraditional performance spaces that reorient our view of choreography and its relationship with the audience. These encounters both on and off the stage comprise yet another direction recently adopted by the institution and similarly embraced by the public.

In its rich offerings to date, the Young Choreographers Festival has managed not only to highlight creators in their stage debuts, but also to establish new trends that expand or reevaluate our existing conception of dance. The presence of this festival every year, and the anticipation surrounding it, affirm the Onassis Stegi’s choice to support new work and invest in the future.

Curated by: Katia Arfara

Production Management: Dimitra Dernikou

PROGRAM

RopisCo: Dépaysement

Exhibition Hall -1 | 17:00, 19:00, 20:30, 22:00

A room – the proposed space of co-existence for the audience and performers. A simple enough idea when one realizes that the theater, as a physical space, has always functioned in reference to something outside ourselves that also resonates inside us at the same time. A note, a word, a movement, a shaft of light – all have the potential to provoke a shift in the audience, a shift that can lead into other worlds, worlds knocking at the other side of the door.

The newly-founded RopisCo is configured like a workshop where music, theater and dance can creatively co-exist. This work – Dépaysement (“displacement”) – brings in a narrator, two dancers and three musicians. But it also brings audiences in close too, since their inviolate spaces, both private and personal, are placed quite literally center stage. Words accompany the movement, and the stage action borders closely on the audience, both to dissolve boundaries between the here and there, and to plunge the audience into the transience of the now unfolding before them.

A work that toys with the safety that exists in the interpersonal distances between audiences and performers. A chamber piece. A microcosm of everyday life enlarged under the microscope that is the stage action.

Concept, research, texts, direction, movement and sound by: Anastasia Chintzoglou, Nikos Kalyvas, Eva Papadopoulou, Michalis Paraskakis (RopisCo)

Dancers: Dafni Douli, Yiannis Tsigkris

Narrator: Michalis Paraskakis

Musicians: Κostas Αrsenis, Κaterina Κonstantourou

Production Assistant: Myrsini Linou

Danae Dimitriadi & Dionysios Alamanos: ΑΤΜΑ

Upper Stage | 18:00

Is there anything more malleable than the human body? Dance is the art that concerns itself with the body’s transformations, that is interested in our ability both to view the body in poetic ways and to contemplate the human condition through it.

Danae Dimitriadi and Dionysios Alamanos experiment with that most familiar of tools: the body. They explore its fragility but also its endurance, using movement as a means of conveying transformations into and back out of whatever constitutes the natural origins of humankind, whatever has been effaced by culture.

In "ATMA", a series of themes selected for their power to move and sensitize audiences are made visual by the two artists. The bestial is contrasted with the human, the Apollonian with the Dionysian, not so as to create yet another unbridgeable dualistic divide, but rather to incorporate two conflicting aspects into one single nature – for it is the very complementarity of opposing elements that characterizes the totality of humankind.

Two young artists give their take on the primordial struggle between what we are and what we once were. A torrential flow of images on the complementarity of the human and the bestial. Endless transformations of the body

Performed and choreographed by: Danae Dimitriadi & Dionysios Alamanos

Costumes: Vaya Nikolakopoulou

Music composer: Constantine Skourlis

Light designer: Llorenç Parra

Production, Management and Booking: Big Story Performing Arts Services

External eye: Olga Alvarez, Jordi Ribot, Nadine Gerspacher

Co-produced by Big Story Performing Arts Services, The ONE DANCE WEEK festival and Centre Cívic de la Barceloneta

With the support of Centre Cívic de la Barceloneta, L’Estruch de l'Ajuntament de Sabadell

PROLET OCD / Margarita Trikka: a Punch of Losers

Main Stage | 19:30

In among the endless swells of history, how are the tales of the defeated recorded and told? What is it that sustains their tireless, almost childlike persistence on regrouping so as to be “defeated better”?

Lenin’s well-known phrase “one step forward, two steps back” captures the rhythm of this work perfectly – a personal and poetic rumination by the choreographer Margarita Trikka on the histories of the defeated. She brings a select group of dancers to the stage – yet another band of tireless fellow travelers who face the consequences of their desire not to abandon the fray head on. Their rhythmically steady footfalls really do have an oscillatory sort of urgency that at times explodes from their bodies and at others fades away like the echo of a glorious battle – like a sharp intake of breath let gently out.

With her a Punch of Losers, Margarita Trikka comes out “in favor of the defeated living amid the makings of history” and urges us to preserve the daring and the delight of childhood – a necessary condition if we are to tirelessly defend our vulnerable selves. And if everything seems inescapably to lead towards the melancholy of resistance, the choreographer overturns any and every form of defeatism by finding dignity in the fights of the defeated.

If history is written by the victors, how best to throw light on the battles of the weak against the strong? Six dancers on stage are defeated yet unrelenting, ridiculous yet dignified, tireless defenders of their own defeat, melancholy Don Quixotes – and the perfect antiheroes.

Choreographed by: Margarita Trikka

Dramaturg: Dimitra Mitropoulou

Original Music: Sancho 003

Set & Costume Design: Artemis Flessa

Lighting Design: Nikos Vlassopoulos

Choreography Assistant: Paraskevi Lipimenou

Line Production : Aris Laskos

Performers: Candy Carra, Chara Kotsali, Konstantinos Papanikolaou, Dimokritos Sifakis, Katerina Spiropoulou, Alexis Tsiamoglou

Myrto Grapsa: BRIGHTER

Upper Stage | 21:00

“What stays familiar and alive inside us?” wonders the choreographer Myrto Grapsa. In her new work, "Brighter", she reframes a series of questions concerning pain, pleasure and happiness.

Despite the light inherent in its title, the work invites audiences to dive deep into the darkness of desire, not in order to produce a simplified dualistic interpretation of reality – the interchange of darkness and light – but rather to direct our attention towards a reconciliation with what is core to humanity: the unknown.

Four gifted dancers – the choreographer herself among them – in an unusual stage environment attempt to reveal all that remains hidden, to articulate unexplored aspects of the body through movement. For the body is, in any case, a blank page whose contents have yet to be written.

Conceived and choreographed by: Myrto Grapsa

Created with and performed by: Ioanna Apostolou, Myrto Grapsa, Amalia Kosma and Dimitra Vlachou

Dramaturg: Kiriakos Hadjiioannou

Choreography Assistant: Maria Nikoloulea

Music: Alexis Grapsas

Lighting Design: Sakis Birbilis

Costume Design: Vassiliki Syrma

Costume Design Assistant: Irini Georgakila

Photography: Alekos Bourelias and Christos Bourelias

Produced by: Onassis Stegi

Line produced by: Ubuntu

Head of Production: Aris Laskos

Rehearsal spaces provided by: Onassis Stegi and Artiria Athens

Elena Antoniou: MAINSTAGE

Main Stage | 22:30

For her latest project, "MAINSTAGE", Elena Antoniou presents a performance that re-examines and deconstructs existing spatio-theatrical conventions, calling upon those present to form living connections with her art in spite of its intangible and ephemeral nature. Her aim is to overturn deep-seated hierarchies that order viewer/performer interaction, and to venture a shift in the ways staged experience is viewed more generally.

While dance has been trying to jump beyond both the staged environment and entrenched representations of the body since the 1970s, these approaches are being intensely reformulated in the present day. Artists such as Elena Antoniou are reinventing the very meaning of an experience that moves viewers – in both the physical and emotional sense – and encourages them to see beyond the obvious. This liberation of the gaze also signifies a shift towards experiences perceived by the body in its totality.

To expand the boundaries of staged experience. That seems to be the motto driving the work of Elena Antoniou, an artist active on the increasingly indistinguishable borderline between dance and performance.

Choreography and Performance: Elena Antoniou

Music/Sound Design: Stavros Gasparatos

Costumes/Artistic Collaborator: Maria Tavlariou

Lighting Design: Evina Vassilakopoulou

Production Management: Delta Pi

A group of "Stegi’s friends” between 16 and 65+ years old with or without previous performing experience will participate in the performance.