Time & Date
Information
Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends & General Presale: from 14 JAN 2020, 12:00
Full price: 7 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 6 €
People with disabilities, Companions, Unemployed, Groups 10+ people: 5 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org
Introduction
Katerina Andreou brings us a duet situated on the fine line between the imaginatively activated body and the strictly disciplined body. This contradiction in terms frames both the freedom of the performers and the rules imposed on dance bodies through their training.
While her loneliness on stage in the works “A Kind of Fierce” and “BSTRD” brought Katerina Andreou the “promise of emancipation”, the (work-in-progress) duet “Zeppelin Bend” sees the choreographer turn to wellness practices and techniques through which the complicated relationship between body and self emerges. And what could be more familiar in the world of dance, where the body is constantly suspended between hardcore discipline and the punishing search for pleasure, the boundaries of which have become ever more difficult to discern.
In this duet, the performers manage truly to assemble movements, sounds and actions in their search for “survival mechanisms”, such as unfettered imaginations and activated bodies. Mechanisms that allow us to redefine the limits of freedom, returning perhaps to a undisciplined child-like nature that borders on the risky. “Players and played” on stage, the pair test and are tested by new expressive techniques and possibilities, seeking out moments of unadulterated bodily truth – a paradoxical mix of discipline and emancipatory power.
Photo: Clement Harpillard
The term “zeppelin bend” refers to the creation of a tied knot with numerous applications: a type of joining that can be understood both metaphorically, as a tie that binds us to someone or something, and literally, as a knot. Andreou situates her duet within the logic of this “choreographed co-existence”; the intention being not to praise duality exactly, but rather to concentrate on difference as the prerequisite for exploring the fine ties that bind us somehow to the other and keep us fettered.
Andreou situates two basic concepts at the core of her work: free will, and the techniques and technologies that hide behind various body practices and cultures, be they new physical fitness trends, or meditation and self-exploration exercises – all the symptoms of discipline or self-help mechanisms that help us to discover the limits of the self, at times through the logic of conformity and at others through an insistence on freedom.
Katerina Andreou appeared at the Young Choreographers Festival 5 with her work “BSTRD”, a solo that explored the limits of “authentic” expression on stage and the bodily “truth” of the performer. As indicated by the title “BSTRD” – a vowel-less abbreviation of the word “bastard” – this solo resulted from her research into various music cultures (a mix of house music tracks) and dance idioms (freestyle) with the aim of revealing the amalgamatory process of bastardization that exists in every creative endeavor.
