FFF4 | Peregrinus
Zoi Dimitriou
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Tickets
Full price: 10 €
Friend & Small groups (5-9 people): 8 €
Large groups (10+ people): 7 €
Reduced, Unemployed, People with disabilities & Companions: 5 €
General
90 minutes
Starting point: Main entrance of the Onassis Stegi
The performance takes place in a non-theatrical venue which is not accessible to people with mobility impairments.
We recommend comfortable clothes and shoes.
Introduction
Five years on from "You May!", the recognised, London-based Greek choreographer returns to the Onassis Stegi with a site-specific performance-installation that starts out with a van heading into the unknown with us aboard.
"Peregrinus", whose world première this is, derives its title from a Latin word that has meant many things: a "pilgrim" and a "wanderer", a "foreigner/stranger" and a "traveller", and both "a person from somewhere else" and a "temporary resident". In its turn, peregrinatio describes the condition of "being or living far from home".
If Dimitriou explored risk margins in "You May!" through the strict structure of contemporary society, she now explores issues of flight and exile, willing wandering and imposed nomadism. Because it is stories/accounts like these, which the choreographer recorded in interviews and researched, that we hear in the darkened van on our way to its destination: an installation-labyrinth. There, audience and performers become fellow travellers traversing together the twisting routes and impasses of a peripatetic experience which has everything to do with the suspended progress of the individual in times of crisis and turmoil.
What happens when denial is the starting point for a journey? What can "take up your bed and walk" mean when there don't seem to be any miracles being performed when you get there? What happens when you ask your body to walk, but all it wants to do is stay put?
The British theatre and performance researcher, Joe Kelleher, worked on the dramaturgy for the show, for which three outstanding Greek artists were recruited: Eva Manidaki (set and costumes), Eleftheria Deko (lighting design) and CotiK (sound design).
Photo © Andy Ferreira
Zoi Dimitriou, a top graduate of the Greek National School of Dance, continued her studies at the Trisha Brown School in New York on an Onassis Foundation scholarship.
In "You May!", her previous work at the Onassis Stegi in 2012, Zoi Dimitriou explored risk margins and the limits of tolerance through the strict structure of contemporary society. She drew inspiration from Chris Marker's masterpiece of French film, "La Jetée" (1962) for the work.
In her work "In the Process of" (2010), a man and a woman negotiate the multiple versions of the end of their relationship. Sixty wooden hoops of the sort used by gymnasts intervene in the action, sometimes helping and sometimes hindering the couple's relationship, at other times rendering them the solitary protagonists of the action on stage.
One of her recent works, "The Chapter House" (2014), which is based on five earlier choreographies which have been digitally "interfered with" in accordance with a complex algorithm, was hailed as a contemporary ritual and a highly original take on what a retrospective could mean for an artist.
The first phase of "Peregrinus", which the Onassis Stegi is now presenting, was developed at the Blank Canvas Residency in Firkin Crane, Ireland, and at the Duncan Dance Centre in Athens.
The dramaturgy is the work of the British theatre researcher and University of Roehampton professor, Joe Kelleher, the author of numerous works including "The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images" (Routledge 2014) and, in collaboration with Nicholas Ridout, Claudia and Romeo Castellucci, and Chiara Giudi, "The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio" (Routledge 2007).
On the enigmatic title "Peregrinus": in the early years of the Roman empire (30 BC-AD 212), the term peregrinus-i (etymology: per [outside, from outside] + ager [field, country) was used to describe the inhabitants of Rome who were not Roman citizens. Due to their numbers, the office of the praetor peregrinus [the praetor of the foreigners] was created to settle differences between Roman and foreign inhabitants and between foreigners.
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