The Crimson House

Following on from his impressive "Birds with Skymirrors", the Polynesian Lemi Ponifasio returns to the Onassis Stegi to lift us out of our reality once more... A choreographic activist, Ponifasio enlists the power of his production’s wonderful, hypnotic images to raise the audience’s awareness of the problems facing humanity.

In the "Crimson House", he poses questions about lives which omnipresent surveillance has transformed into a prison akin to Foucault’s “Panopticon”, and a society which, though shorn of every last vestige of privacy, since everything is observed and monitored, nonetheless neglects to turn its gaze on itself and its conscience.

Ponifasio links this phenomenon to the omnipresence of the divine in religious traditions and suggests that those who consider observation a route to absolute knowledge are guilty of hubris. Slow ritualistic movements, a minimalist aesthetic, song, distant music and echoes of the rites of a distant civilization create a poetic environment of rare beauty which entrances the viewer but also gives them space to think. A masterpiece from one of the planet’s most important artists.