New texts on dance: “Re-call"

The stage, barely lit, is reminiscent of a tunnel. At the back, placed like pieces of set, are a wheelchair and a pair of crutches, lit with strips of LED. There is a somewhat other-worldly feel to it all. Two female dancers stand in the space. The first thing they do is to move towards the audience and light the LED strips stuck to the floor that bound the linear limits of the stage. With great precision and highly specific movements, the two dancers start to journey through the space, each at her own pace and in her own way. Two bodies, quite different from one another, trace notional lines and construct independent narratives, challenging the audience to watch them.

Vivi Christodoulopoulou and Irini Kourouvani, both disabled dancers, constantly criss-cross the space at a specific pace, until the music gives the signal for them to break free from their stable courses. They literally bang their bodies to the beat, like they’re taking a break from their daily lives or their routines – a short, dramatic twist in the action. They soon return to their former pace and continue their journeys, only now the wheelchair and the pair of crutches no longer seem like elements of the set.

Set inside a space stripped of everything, these two bodies share their own experiences and stories without serving some specific narrative; while they do enthrall, there is some doubt as to whether the lighting and the music framed the dynamics of these two bodies on stage or dominated them. “Re-call” poses questions on the diversity of bodies, and on how they define but also inscribe space and time in a never-ending process.

What kinds of identities are borne by moving bodies? Can disability and beauty co-exist in such a way that one does not exclude the other? These are just a couple of the reasonable questions that arise from the duet “Re-call”, created by the up-and-coming choreographer Venetsiana Kalampaliki.

We find ourselves inside a black box. LED strips on the floor demarcate illuminated pathways, the full lengths of which are revealed gradually as the performers enter. Both move from the back of the stage to the front. The music starts at the same time, subsequently changing its dynamic only slightly during the course of the entire performance. Given how close the audience sit to the scenic action, they are gifted with the opportunity to study the details of the bodies’ movements. Vivi Christodoulopoulou and Irini Kourouvani, dressed in clothes that erase the lines of their bodies, each separately delineate linear trajectories. Two apparent solos that never cross paths co-exist, connecting solely in terms of shared space and time, and at times musically. It is a series of small stories that constantly tend towards meeting. To an extent, the repetition of their journeys with small variations in their movement, or even their increasing divergence as their only point of contact, bolsters both the dramaturgy and the emotion. At times, the performers make use of a wheelchair, crutches, or none of the above.

But how could the choreographer make best use of, and not merely highlight, the uncommon body? For the majority of the performance, the “dominant” aesthetic limited itself to “measured” movement, that is, to form placed within a spatio-temporal framework. The audience was left thirsting for yet more pathways into making use of the poetic natures of these figures. Could experimentation be married with the movement itself, breaking each time the limits of these different bodies? How can the fantasy surrounding the idealized limits of ability pass into lived experience? In the end, do the social and political realities of the body penetrate a sterile stage, or are they latent as a pre-existing part of it? Let’s recall!

As we enter, two people wait in the background of the dimly lit, empty oblong room. Lights (by Eliza Alexandropoulou) go off and then on and we see two disabled women (Eirini Kourouvani, Vivi Christodoulopoulou) lying, and a pair of crutches and a wheelchair, both illuminated with LED lights, as to emphasise the fact and kind of disability. Rather than use them, the two crawl towards the spectators and turn on lines of LED lights that seem to mark the starting lines of an imaginary stadium. Their sportive attire seem to suggest so.

Kourouvani uses her hands to make long walks or turn around herself by centrifugal movement of the arms. For some time everything happens on the ground, until Christodoulopoulou, with one amputated leg, suddenly rises on her intact one and starts an oscillation back and fro, like a perfectly balanced pendulum, as if dancing in a nightclub to the electronic music of Thalia Ioannidou.

Now, this was technically quite a hard task to perform and even harder was when she started shuffling sideways on her foot all over the room, very fast. This was really impressive. Can you actually do that? I doubted. I tried it, it's very hard.

While Christodoulopoulou did her standing solo, her partner carried on her counterpoint on the ground. Later on, the two used the wheelchair and crutches to make an impressive progression towards the audience with a well coordinated sound crescendo. Their dance had then some more interactive sections, before it recapitulated the initial pattern – hence the “Re-call”.

It was during this second half that I felt it might had been more welcome that choreographer Venetsiana Kalampaliki develop further the ideas and movements that had been so impressively exposed in the first part, than repeating them in this circular pattern.