Time & Date
Tickets
*Onassis Stegi Neighbors can purchase their tickets only at the Onassis Stegi Box Office from Wednesday to Friday, between 12:00 and 18:00. Access from the “Artists Entrance” on Galaxia Street.
Onassis Stegi Friends presale: from Saturday, 27 January, 17:00
General presale: from Friday, 2 February, 17:00
Information
Duration
1 hour
Introduction
Contemporary dance, sports marathon, or concert? 15 musicians-cum-athletes play the same song over and over in a choreographed concert, every time differently, always with undimmed passion and intensity. From the Belgian visual artist Miet Warlop, who is doing her debut in Greece. Don’t you already feel your body shaking to its rhythm?
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Photo: Michiel Devijver
“Ecstatic. Exhilarating. Hilarious. Most touching.” These are some of the comments that accompany “One Song,” the performance that stunned the audiences of the 2022 Festival d’Avignon and has since been touring internationally. It all began when the Flemish theater NTGent invited the Belgian visual artist and performance maker Miet Warlop to answer the following question: “What is your story as a creator in theater?” She then proceeded to choreograph a bizarre hymn to life, exorcizing personal and collective demons, paying tribute to the memory of her late brother, and glorifying “the human condition” in all its sweaty glory.
“Run. Run for your life till you die,” the lead singer of the “One Song” house band urges us to do over and over, while he is panting over a treadmill from where he is giving his recital. In this performance, the main ensemble of dancers is an off-the-wall band: musicians playing the violin while balancing on a beam; doing push-ups every time they need to strike a bass string; going back and forth to play the percussion or attempting small leaps to touch the keys on the keyboard. They play only one song. Over and over. In another tempo every time, but always with undimmed passion and intensity. An immaculately choreographed concert is taking place before us for the sake of a single song, which gradually acquires, by virtue of repetition, an anthemic status; it turns into our primal scream.
“What if Philip Glass led the Ramones?” an article rhetorically notes about “One Song.” Indeed, balancing between an avant-garde happening and a rock concert, “One Song” serves as a fascinating ritual for farewell, life and death, hope and rebirth. By way of singable texts, snapshots from a gym, oxygen and sweat, moments of exhaustion, and gestures of resilience, it invokes “our human condition.” Time and time again, someone among their cheerleaders and fans or the elderly coach steps up to push them once again to their limits. They, too, will defy time and exceed themselves, inviting us to endure the very same.
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
‘TILL YOU DIE
‘TILL I DIE
‘TILL WE ALL DIE
KNOCK KNOCK
WHO’S THERE?
IT’S YOUR GRIEF FROM THE PAST
NOT POSSIBLE
FOR ALL TIME SAKE
CAUSE
GRIEF IS LIKE A ROCK
IN YOUR HEAD
IT’S HARD IT’S ROUGH
IT’S JUST ALWAYS THERE
IT’S SALTY
I CAN TASTE IT ON THE DROP
ROLLING DOWN MY NOSE
GRIEF IS LIKE A BLOCK
IN YOUR HEAD
ALL SINCE THEN
I HEAT THE ROCK
I SAND THE ROCK
I MOVE THE BLOCK
I CAN TASTE IT ON THE DROP
ROLLING DOWN MY NOSE
GRIEF IS LIKE A BLOCK
IN YOUR HEAD
IT’S HARD
IT’S ROUGH
SHIFTING SHAPE
TURNING SWEET
GRIEF BECOMES A GRAPE
AT THIS VERY MOMENT
WHEN OTHERS ARE ON MUTE
THE GRAPE WILL BURST
YET GRIEF REMAINS A FRUIT
ALL WE NEED IS
THAT IT FINDS ITS WAY
STREAMING DOWN THE WALLS
GRIEF IS HERE TO STAY
ALL WE NEED IS
THAT IT FINDS ITS WAY
SNAP, BREAK, CRACK, FOLDS, RIPPLES
GRIEF IS HERE TO STAY
ALL WE NEED IS
THAT IT FINDS ITS WAY
GRIEF IS LIKE A LIQUID
AND IT NEVER GOES AWAY
ALL WE NEED IS
THAT IT FINDS ITS WAY
THE EARTH BENEATH YOUR FEET
DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY…
(OH, YOU THINK YOU ARE SILENT AND IN A BUBBLE,
BUT EVERYONE AROUND YOU SMELLS YOUR TROUBLE)
That was the question posed to the Flemish visual artist and performance maker Miet Warlop by NTGent (National Theatre of Gent) when they commissioned her to create a piece for the series “Histoire(s) du Théâtre,” following directors Milo Rau, Faustin Linyekula, and Angélica Liddell.
"One Song" was her response. A hymn glorifying “the human condition” in all its sweaty glory. An orchestrated expression of collective sadness. A personal requiem for her deceased brother, Yasper. Α race against time that compels us ceaselessly.
PS: We want to imprint this song in your head by repeating it, repeating it, and repeating it. The idea is to try again and again, to begin again differently each time. Just like in life.
– Miet Warlop and "One Song"’s team
"Ecstatic. Exhilarating. Hilarious. Most touching."
On Saturday, February 24, from 22:30 onward, ODD is having a party in the ground floor foyer with Miet Warlop and the cast of "One Song" spinning tunes. Free admission.
Using the metaphor of a live concert/sports match, which features a commentator and a cheerleader, Miet Warlop invites us in “One Song” to form a community and transcend beyond ourselves as in a celebration. The temporary thus becomes universal and the personal becomes a collective something. This is the subtext of “One Song”: how one song can give meaning to an entire society and suggest unity in diversity.
“One Song” conveys a story of artistic as well as personal significance for Warlop. Her reflection on theater as an artistic idiom leads to a corporeal perception in which we recognize elements of her previous creative forays.
She mentions: “The stage of ‘One Song’ is like a miniature society, where all the acts and desires that govern the principles of the collective can be exorcised, even ritualized. What I want is for the energy that explodes on stage to transcend the border between the stage and the room and for the exorcizing character of the repetition of a gesture or a feeling to be projected onto and shared among the spectators.”
Physical effort as a metaphor is another element of the research she first explored in “Sportband / Afgetrainde Klanken” (2005), which was then realized as a requiem and tribute to her late brother, Jasper. A ritualistic concert with a choreographic pattern laid the groundwork for the work “Ghost Writer and the Broken Hand Break” (2018). The invitation to all breathe together to exorcize our fears and demons recalls the work “Fruits of Labor” (2016), where the show was treated as “a painkiller for the world.”
“One Song” was featured in “The New York Times” list of the best performances of 2022. "Incredible virtuosity. A wild, exhilarating study of the absurd," writes the newspaper, while the reviews in “The Guardian,” “Le Monde,” “De Standaard,” and “Le Soir” were equally enthusiastic.Miet Warlop is the fourth artist to respond to NTGent's challenge to create a “History of Theater,” following Milo Rau, Faustin Linyekula, and Angélica Liddell, and before Tim Etchells, as a torch passed from artist to artist in order to tell their personal theater history. The title of the series “History of Theater” [“Histoire(s) du Théâtre”], commissioned by NTGent under the artistic direction of Milo Rau, is inspired by the documentary “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” by Jean-Luc Godard, in which the great director highlights significant instances of worldwide cinema history, thereby commenting at the same time on the history of the twentieth century. “One Song," the fourth in the series “Histoire(s) du Théâtre,” stole the limelight at the 2022 Festival d’Avignon in the vein of a spellbinding ritual of farewell, life and death, hope and resurrection.
