For Schools: "Ion"

If Europe's dance scene considers Christos Papadopoulos a new and rising star, it is because his minimalist, poetic artistic universe is, in the end, a place we can inhabit. Though reductive, this world constructed out of detailed choreographic design and exhausting physical dance, but also out of musicality and a sense of group solidarity, does smell human. It is courteous and refined in the way it carries its audiences away. And if it also reflects, at some deeper level, on serious issues, its transubstantiation into art comes about through its achieving the ratio between distance and emotional charge that is the mark of all real poetry.

“Ion” is based on a metaphor: if ions are electrically-charged atoms or groups of atoms moving together in one direction, then this image may reflect reality as it is shaped by people moving and interacting in space. Papadopoulos and his company have set out to explore the condition of coordination, the mystic link which makes people in a group communicate even when they out of each other’s sight, even when they are unaware of the connection. And also the impact this condition can have on how we view and experience dance: the moment dance draws on images of unexpected coordination in crowds from physical reality and, in highlighting these, reveals those secret rules of life which have always eluded us.