Dancing Athens

"It was April 1970 when Trisha Brown tied a dancer to a length of climbing rope and sent him walking down the front of a seven-storey building at 80, Wooster Street, Manhattan. The American choreographer was looking for ways to unsettle the relationship between the human body, gravity and space and the way New Yorkers had learned to think of everyday movements like walking and running. And it was there in the early Seventies that the experiments and unconventional ideas of the Judson Church postmoderns -along with their irresistible desire for change- spilled out into the streets, squares, parks, terraces and museums of New York.The decision to open the Onassis Stegi’s 2016-17 dance and theater season with works by choreographers from round the world scattered round Athens has everything to do with art’s recent turn towards public space and the need to discover alternative ways of communicating with the public and interacting with the urban environment. “Dancing Athens” invites us to change the way we move and behave in the city, the way we perceive our everyday gestures, our reactions to the unexpected and the random, but also the way we perceive contemporary dance.

Over a whole weekend, the choreographies will spread out at different times of day to different parts of Athens’ historic center, mixing and matching Boris Charmatz’s raw nocturnal landscapes with Trisha Brown’s pared-down poetry and Yannis Mantafounis’ “one to one” choreographies with Willi Dorner’s catch-you-by-surprise urban interventions. With ever decreasing numbers of people enjoying access to art, a common good, and ever-increasing surveillance of our movements in public space, there may well be more need for a free, open festival than ever before."
— Katia Arfara, Artistic Director for Theater and Dance at the Onassis Stegi