My Fierce Ignorant Step | Christos Papadopoulos

Ten years after his first choreography and one year after directing the Homeric “Nekyia” at the Onassis Stegi featuring Giannis Aggelakas—a production also staged at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall in February 2025—and just after receiving the prestigious new Rose International Dance Prize, established by the acclaimed performing arts center Sadler’s Wells in London, Christos Papadopoulos presents his most personal work yet, connecting for the first time the materiality of sound with the musicality of the body.

In his new work, a plural body pulsates on stage, marching with eyes wide open to what lies ahead. Its breath becomes a voice that guides the steps: sometimes big, other times small, but always firm and determined, almost carefree. The dancers’ bodies breathe; their breaths become sounds that turn into voices and movements, a galloping that constantly swells.

In “My Fierce Ignorant Step,” Papadopoulos seeks to consciously process the influence that the monumental musical work “Axion Esti” by Mikis Theodorakis, set to the poetry of Odysseas Elytis, has had on him, as a collective memory activated through listens. The subject is not the music itself but the shared landscape it evokes. A landscape that lives within us, travels with us, and allows us to instantly revisit a moment from the past that has never really passed. Everything is still here. Or at least, this is what the work explores: the truth of the youth, momentum, and courage; a truth that, if we consider it fleeting, quaint, or charming, will be forever lost—and along with it, the meaning of our world.

For the choreographer, the initial impulse for creating “My Fierce Ignorant Step” is rooted in the sonic memories of his childhood and youth that he shares with many other Greeks; these are collective memories tied to the fate of this country, even if that is not always visible. The work resists conformity with a cascade of forms, with an insatiable longing for the present, the future, and the past, with a desire for a life that is bold, laborious, and entirely humane, made of our fragile, insignificant flesh.

The work brings to the fore qualities that have always been present in Christos Papadopoulos’ oeuvre, but the emphasis shifts radically here. Specific themes and materials have concerned him from the beginning, but now they are clearly discernible and among them is the idea of “togetherness,” the simple initial point where both politics and love seem to appear. That is why the performers dance together in this work.

“The synchronization of multiplied movement occurs, but it is not the goal; we do not dance together because we are synchronized, but we synchronize because we are together. The system that emerges is not a priority, nor is beauty. These appear to be mechanisms that allow us to find one another, to exist, to meet, and to marvel at the energy that is born, multiplied, dispersed, and offered. There is a value that holds things together here. It is not faith in a system, a machine, or a trick, but a daring trust in the good,” notes Christos Papadopoulos.

How can there not be anger with everything going on around us? How can one bear this reality? The political situation, the rise of the far right, corruption, wars that we have now come to accept as a kind of political normalcy, environmental destruction—all the things we once believed we would never have to live through are here.

In this bleak reality, where the lines of dystopia have already been crossed, I’ve recently found myself reverting to my adolescent years. I remember that lust for life, the speed, the unwavering drive, the sense that anything was possible. That fearless confidence that the world was in front of us, open, and ours, and that we would live it the way we desired and deserved.

This work is my attempt to revisit that feeling. To find it again. And with it, to regain that strength, that optimism, and that sense of “together.” I have to remind myself that hoping is already an act of resistance and that such courage was neither naïve nor quaint at all. It was true. And it still is.

-Christos Papadopoulos’ research for the creation of this new work, in collaboration with composer Kornilios Selamsis, was supported by a fellowship from the Onassis Foundation (Onassis AiR Dramaturgy Fellowship).

-The work “Larsen C” was selected by the renowned London performing arts venue Sadler’s Wells as one of four finalists for the Rose International Dance Prize, a new international award for dance accompanied by a £40,000 cash prize. The four finalists presented their works in January and February 2025, and Christos Papadopoulos was announced the winner on February 8, 2025. “Larsen C,” an international co-production of Onassis Stegi, was embraced by the Athenian audience when it premiered in March 2022 with five sold-out performances on the Main Stage. Following its European tour, it returned to Onassis Stegi in October of the same year for a second series of sold-out shows.

-In 2023, Christos Papadopoulos directed “Nekyia” on Onassis Stegi’s Main Stage, offering a unique visual and sonic experience of the most evocative rhapsody (“12”) of the Homeric “Odyssey,” featuring Giannis Aggelakas and Olia Lazaridou.

-The minimal, the essence of movement, has always been at the core of Christos Papadopoulos’ choreographic work. In his first piece, “ELVEDON” (2015), it was the flow of time, as it runs through Virginia Woolf’s novel “The Waves.” In the next, “OPUS” (2016), it was the pulse of classical music. In his first international co-production, “ION” (2018), in collaboration with Onassis Stegi, he turned to the movement of swarms, the flight of birds, the synchrony of fireflies; and in the next, “Larsen C” (2022), he focused on the slowness of glacial melting and—by contrast—on the intensity of life.

-A Belgian critic wrote about Christos Papadopoulos in 2022: “A name circulates, praised for its boldness and minimalist but stunning virtuosity, for its performers. A revelation. He is Greek.”