optimal soft

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.

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