NEAR MISSES | Fotini Stamatelopoulou

“NEAR MISSES” is a solo performance, as well as a visual installation, in collaboration with Dimitris Tampakis and Panos Alexiadis.

“NEAR MISSES” deals with the body as a site of conflict. It explores ‘near-to’ experiences of body illness, transformation, and failure. A series of acts unfolds gradually, blending spoken words, protective symbolic objects, and intense physical states. With deliberate yet brute gestures, gargoyle-like facial expressions and by activating self-defense physicalities, the piece reveals an incessant composition that shifts between silence and rage.

The performer is accompanied by a set of wearable metal objects that operate as both burdens and bodily extensions. It generates a sonic and vocal altar that gradually reveals an overexposed gesture of obtaining freedom and resilience in chaos.

Choreographer Fotini Stamatelopoulou reposes her own vows in a performance of concentration and deconstruction. By incorporating personal memories and in collaboration with the performer Despina Sanida Crezia, she evokes questions of impermanence, integrity, and lightness, while seeking a collective ‘armor of resilience.’

The work echoes the challenges of physicality, commenting on an urge for a collective deliberation against fear and failure. A set of liminal points of acceptance and reconstruction is brought to the surface through a sense of diving into sorrow when tackling ‘misses.’

“NEAR MISSES” includes archival material gathered over a year of research. Protective/apotropaic acts, medieval and byzantine symbols, gargoyle images, balkan traditions, hymns and vows for celebrating collective force, mechanisms of self-defense, and elements of historical fencing. An integral part of the process were writings as personal diaries.

The research phase was conducted by Fotini Stamatelopoulou, Dimitris Tampakis, and Panos Alexiadis. Dimitris Tampakis created a set of detachable elements as an ‘armor’ to enhance the body’s capabilities whilst maximizing and challenging the potential of every act. Panos Alexiadis, in collaboration with Dimitris, transformed the objects into uncanny musical instruments and, along with Fotini, they composed the spoken words. Despina Sanida-Crezia joined the team as a performer, working with Fotini on embedding personal experiences into a collective body.