Time & Date
Information
Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends presale: from 15 FEB 2022, 17:00
General presale: from18 FEB 2022, 17:00
Full price: 7 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 6 €
Groups 10+ people, Unemployed, People with disabilities, Companions: 5 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org
About “Optimal Soft”
Please note that there is no audience seating
Furthermore, due to high sound levels, earplugs will be made available at the entrance for those who want them
Duration
45 minutes
Introduction
Within a specially configured sound installation set inside Onassis Stegi’s basement Exhibition Hall (-1), two performers, two amplifiers, and 14 speakers each render – before onlookers – the superchaos that is the coming of age process.
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
optimal soft | Fotini Stamatelopoulou
Interpretive movements derived from present-day visual stimuli are intermingled to create a new movement vocabulary. Original pieces of music developed through collective composition practices and/or songwriting – created exclusively for this specific choreographic project by Aliki Leftherioti (Saber Rider), Dimitris Apostolakidis (Fred Afraid), Yannis Voulgaris (John Vulgaris), Christos Bekiris (bhukhurah), Complex Shadow, and the two performers – are heard here for the first time.
Inside a dark (scenic) environment possibly reminiscent of an underground club, a synthesis of the two performers’ independent yet connected soli co-exists with a multi-channel sound installation for 45 minutes. Felipe Vareschi’s specially configured sound design creates a captivating atmosphere. The performers negotiate the ways in which the soundscape’s intensities and rhythms, its pauses and words impress themselves upon and stimulate the body, proposing a practice for seeking out new connections and assimilating degrees of friction and conflict during the formulation and acceptance of our identities and body image.
As a piece, “optimal soft” explores the limits of expressing vulnerability during the course of coming of age processes that unfold as a collective act. The body of the two female performers and the music tracks form a “body” of their own that relates the collective and personal experiences and thoughts of seven individuals in the city of Athens. This sound permeates the bodies, pierces through the space, and beams us directly into what it feels like to be young, strong, and vulnerable.Image1/3
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Fotini Stamatelopoulou first starting working with Onassis Stegi as a choreographer a year ago, through her online choreographies for Movement Radio, and the dance film she oversaw for Onassis Stegi’s 2021–22 season restart.
Fotini Stamatelopoulou’s professional partnership with Despoina Sanida Crezia began in 2021. To date, they’ve collaborated on two online choreographies for Movement Radio, the work “Invisible Futures” by the DETACH collective for the Athens Biennale, the choreography “TOOMUCH” by Stamatelopoulou, and the exploratory performance “HOWEVER” by Sanida Crezia (all in 2021).
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
As a work, “optimal soft” explores the movement potentialities that arise out of information derived from a specific sound setting, and from their corresponding narrative offerings.
The piece could be seen as a broadened choreographic experience in which each person and/or non-human medium (space, sound, light) contributes equally to an overarching composition. The successive appearances of the two female performers inside the space, one following the other, each performing her own solo, strengthens the notion that sound stimuli can be rearticulated in multiple ways to reveal different dimensions. Maintaining a common starting point and the intent to create an expansive state for the choreographic composition of multiple versions, the performance seeks to negotiate how practice in and of itself can be shared, tested across different bodies, captured through the particularities of each performer, and adjusted in relation to reconfigured (scenic) spaces.
Audience members are encouraged to wander freely through the space, at times attending to the performers’ trajectories, at others to the multiple sound channels issuing from the speakers scattered through the space, thus shifting viewing and listening confines. The soundscape seems to tour us round a genealogy charting the physicality of the two performers, or round a multi-sensory rendering of impressions.
—Fotini Stamatelopoulou
