My Fierce Ignorant Step (Working Title) | Christos Papadopoulos

Ten years after his first choreographic work and one year after directing Homer’s "Nekyia" with Giannis Aggelakas at Onassis Stegi, Christos Papadopoulos puts forward his most personal work and, for the first time, he conjoins the materiality of sound with the musicality of the human body.

In his new work, a plural body vibrates on stage and treads wide-eyed forward. Its breath becomes a voice that guides its steps, sometimes giant, sometimes small, always steady and determined, almost carefree. The dancers’ bodies breathe, their breaths becoming sounds that later transform into voices and movements, into an ever-expanding gallop.

With "My Fierce Ignorant Step (Working Title)", Papadopoulos seeks to consciously process the influence that "Axion Esti"—the monumental work by Mikis Theodorakis founded on the poetry of Odysseas Elytis—exerted on him, exploring the extent to which sound and speech can dilate and reach a state of abstraction that alludes to that of a movement: a lifted arm, an oscillating body, a trembling leg.

For the choreographer, the first impulse for the creation of "My Fierce Ignorant Step (Working Title)" is grounded in aural memories of his childhood and younger age, memories that he shares with many other Greeks: collective memories that are connected with the fate of this country, even if this is not immediately apparent. Is it possible to work on a text with the same composition principles applied to the choreography of a body? How close to words can a body come, and vice versa? Can this turn into a shared, transparent, and simple experience?