ODD - Onassis Dance Days 2023

What springs to mind when you think of contemporary dance? Over the last ten years, we’ve dreamed up various astounding things: performances set in boxing rings and on football pitches, cooking shows and electropop manifestos, roving performances, street dance pieces, and movement works that make use of VR and AI.

Some 40 emerging choreographers have featured so far, with the Onassis New Choreographers Festival (ONC) acting as a springboard launching them beyond Greek borders, giving them the chance to tour internationally and garner awards at international dance events. Looking to the future, this year’s festival – to be known, from now on, as Onassis Dance Days – will continue to support the creation of new works developed within the utterly hybrid and dynamic form that is the contemporary performing arts. Works by artists who, no matter their ethnicity, age, disability, or arts background (be it dance or other), love to answer the simplest question in the world – “What is dance?” – in thrillingly oblique ways.

Like Elena Antoniou (Cyprus) who unapologetically demonstrates herself in a striptease-like solo where nobody gets undressed, but the eye of the looker (“LANDSCAPE”). Or Chara Kotsali who is throwing herself on stage in a ritual on possession and exorcism from past and future demons, personal and collective (“tο be possessed”). Or even like Nefeli Asteriou who is turning herself into the kitty, the tigress, the cougar, and so on, in a solo scrutinizing the animal-like cliché attributes to female (“bestiaire”). Finally, there is Xenia Koghilaki with her duet on headbanging: two women violently shaking their heads to the beat – a practice mainly associated with men rather than women (“Bang Bang Bodies”).

Our guest star for 2023 is Marina Otero, the up-and-coming international performer, choreographer, and director from Argentina, who will be appearing in Greece for the first time with her diptych “FUCK ME” and “LOVE ME,” a pair of works in which she “romanticizes” her life story, setting out her own understanding of how things are when it comes to both “what is dance?” and “what is a life lived in love?”.

"Revealing; this is what the five women’s, both creators and performers behind this year’s Onassis Stegi choreographers’ festival, projects are. None of them undresses. If anything exposes itself, it is our own gaze over a contested body: the female one. For, by virtue of their dances, they shine a dazzling and unorthodox light of their own on an array of toxic patriarchal practices, on systematic attempts of social control over their bodies and desires: from the objectification of the female body as sexual fetish to striptease itself, and from the exorcism of demonized females to the rhetoric of hate and denigration through cliché verbal attributes, such as “gazelle,” “bitch,” and “whale.”

All of them are looking straight in the face of the current zeitgeist, where and when their bodies, lust, sexuality – male, female or any other – do not constitute simply a battlefield, but also the locus of a species that manifests its being unapologetically, however odd it wishes to be.

Odd as ODD itself."

Afroditi Panagiotakou, Director of Culture at Onassis Foundation
Iliana Dimadi, Dramaturg
Konstantinos Tzathas, Curator

FUCK ME / LOVE ME | Marina Otero

FUCK ME | Saturday, March 4 | 20:30 | Main Stage | Duration: 70 minutes
LOVE ME | Sunday, March 5 | 20:30 | Main Stage | Duration: 55 minutes

Age guidance: 18+

“FUCK ME / LOVE ME.” With these words, international emerging choreographer Marina Otero from Argentina introduces herself for her first ever appearance in Greece, where she “eroticizes” her biography in a two-fold performance for Onassis Dance Days.

LANDSCAPE | Elena Antoniou

Saturday, March 4 - Sunday, March 5 | 18:30 | Main Stage, Auditorium

Duration: 51 minutes | Age guidance: 16+

No one undresses, everybody is sighing. Pleasure and trauma intertwined. A striptease-like solo performance, with Elena Antoniou hypersexualizing, overexposing and self-objectifying her body.

bestiaire | Nefeli Asteriou

Saturday, March 4 | 16:00 | Upper Stage
Sunday, March 5 | 17:30 | Upper Stage

Duration: 35 minutes

The whale-woman, the gazelle-woman, the siren-woman, the bitch, the mermaid… A solo performance riddled with transformations, based on the clichés of animal metaphors attributed to the female sex.

Bang Bang Bodies | Xenia Koghilaki

Saturday, March 4 | 17:30 | Upper Stage
Sunday, March 5 | 16:00 | Upper Stage

Duration: 45 minutes

Headbanging – the fierce shaking of the head to the beat of music – becomes the source of inspiration for this female duet, which re-appropriates this predominantly male practice in a dance performance till they drop.

to be possessed | Chara Kotsali

Saturday, March 4 - Sunday, March 5 | 19:30 | Upper Stage

Duration: 40 minutes

Demons. Spirits. Exorcisms. At the intersection between performance and live concert, Chara Kotsali stages a solo performance around spirit possession, for which women were primarily prosecuted and then exorcized by men.