Onassis Dance Days 2025

For twelve years now at Onassis Dance Days, the internationally prestigious contemporary dance festival of Onassis Stegi, which presents and spotlights international and local choreographers, we have seen all kinds of amazing things: dance shows in boxing rings and football fields, cooking shows and electropop manifestos, “walking-tour” performances, works using VR and AI, performances as a tribute to sexuality and musicality.

This year, we turn our attention to the relationship between visual art and contemporary dance. A relationship as old as the landmark work "Parade" (1917). A hymn to anti-conformism in the midst of World War I, with music by Erik Satie, script by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. It was commissioned by the cunning impresario of Russian Ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, the man who essentially pioneered Modernism in classical dance by inviting the avant-garde of his time to his ballets: Igor Stravinsky, Vaslav Nijinski, Henri Matisse, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró.

A relationship so radical that it brought into galleries and museums performance artists who celebrated the ephemeral, the grotesque, and the dangerous of the body in movement—from Yvonne Rainer to Trisha Brown and from Oskar Schlemmer to Bruce Nauman. A relationship as transformative as that of fashion designer Iris van Herpen, who began with dance to eventually showcase the perpetuality of movement in her couture-artwork costumes. A relationship, finally, based on relationships: those of choreographers and visual artists/musicians, such as the duo of Merce Cunningham & John Cage, or fashion designers and choreographers, such as Gianni Versace & Maurice Bejart and Issey Miyake & William Forsythe.

Joined by our international guest, the iconoclastic choreographer Damien Jalet and his work "Planet [wanderer]", a choreographic confrontation with the untamed beauty of nature, ODD highlights creators of dance who, in collaboration with sculptors and visual artists, are exploring, in the context of the Onassis AiR fellowships granted following the 24/25 Open Call, the limits of visuality and movement, the politics of aesthetics and fashion, and spectacle as the most durable fetish.