Anthemoessa

“Anthemoessa” is Eirini Papanikolaou’s first choreography. It is an allegorical take on the myth of the sirens, the bird-like creatures that lured unsuspecting sailors to their deaths with a song that banished their every thought of home. Just as the encounter with the Sirens takes place in the borderlands between the real and an imaginary Underworld, so the four characters on stage find themselves suspended directionless in an uncharted landscape or, put another way, trapped on a journey with no clear "temporal horizon". Papanikolaou’s choreographic style is anything but epic; focusing on the personal, her work initiates the viewer into an inner journey.

This idea of mental wandering and of homecoming, of the inextinguishable desire to return to a lost homeland, is subject to constant temporal shifts. There is no arrival here; the journey never ends. The four bodies on stage reflect the experience of internalizing the journey rather than depicting it in any kinesiologically and bodily obvious way. Eirini Papanikolaou’s gaze is essentially romantic, and her work is imbued with the "hopelessness" of a world in which Man is helpless and exposed; overwhelming and unknowable forces, fate or, ultimately, the shadows of an impenetrable mystery all help turn the virtual world of the artist’s creative imagination into a refuge for the soul.