DEEP HORIZON

The transmedia installation “DEEP HORIZON”, presented here for the first time, constitutes the continuation of a collaboration between the three core creators of “Vanishing Point” (2020), a choreographic work commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi, and created to premiere as part of the seventh edition of the Onassis New Choreographers Festival (ONC7). “Vanishing Point” has been selected by the renowned Aerowaves network as one of the 20 most important choreographies created by emerging European artists for 2022, and is set to be presented at a special event organized by the network in Elefsina as part of its Spring Forward Festival, running from April 28 to May 1, 2022 and hosted by 2023 EΛEVSIS – European Capital of Culture and DAN.C.CE UNITIVA. The work has already been performed at such major European festivals as ONE DANCE WEEK (Plovdiv), RIDCC (Rotterdam), and Pays de Danses (Liège).

Dafin Antoniadou, Alexandros Vardaxoglou, and Constantine Skourlis have been working together since 2019. Their output revolves mainly around choreography, as well as sound and film practices. Their collaboration has led to the creation of the “Vanishing Point” concept, which to date has been further developed into three distinct works: “Vanishing Point” (choreography, 2020), “DEEP HORIZON” (multi-channel transmedia installation, 2022), and “Vanishing Point” (film, 2022).

According to the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, the body can be understood as a “receptive surface” through which we formulate relationships, links, and connections with other materials, images, and even words. “Deep Horizon” emphasizes this notion by showing how the body is a place of information, a place of ‘memory,’ a corporeal field of knowledge that never ceases, throughout all its representations and different narratives, to redefine the world.

“Deep Horizon,” a continuation of the collaboration between the creators of “Vanishing Point” (choreography) is a collective process, a communal effort of the team to discover and observe their own multidisciplinary creative role. Breaking the linear narrative of the eternal journey through time, they focus on the phenomenon of continuous transformation and evolution. The work’s structure constantly transforms through an illusionary experience of a transcendental meaning, while the visual narrative ceases to be a coherent format with fixed interpretation.

Defining existence beyond self-evident limits, the work presents us with a document of a connection with the body, an aesthetic that introduces us to a dystopian world of an unknown, dark past, as it enters into an archaeology of existence.

With the performers embodying surreal and archetypal human figures, the presented image gathers the past and the future around and inside it, not as a destination, but as a transitional point, through which temporality and transience strike like a bolt of lightning. Through a combination of mythological patterns and aesthetically erotic and violent conflicts, they construe a transcendental experience, while presenting an image of existence within an endless horizon of unexplored events.

The work is open to many interpretations. It challenges us to dive into a world that stimulates the imagination, sparks a willingness to explore our deepest inner truth, and to disengage from the expectation of what we watch, experience, and therefore feel.

—Zaira Konstantopoulou