"Stones & Bones" | Online premiere at Onassis Channel, available for 24 hours

New Year’s Day with a world-class dance company: RootlessRoot on the Onassis Foundation YouTube Channel.

For 24 hours only, this incredible company – regularly seen on the world’s major stages, with performances that smash through dance conventions to forge new boundaries – is coming to our screens to premiere a new performance worldwide for the first time online. "Stones & Bones" is a work that takes your breath away with its visual sense, paying tribute to human existence and to memory, and exploring the boundaries between dance and performance concert in the form of a film that has the strength to stand alone.

In its efforts to respond to the closure of indoor performance venues, Onassis Stegi is making use of everything modern technology has to offer in order to present works to audiences, creating a hybrid form that flirts both with the performing arts and with cinema. Stones & Bones has been recorded as a film to be presented digitally, one that seeks to give audiences a cinematic experience.

In this new work by RootlessRoot, five female performers on stage, accompanied by live music, pit themselves against marble to carve out a poem on the fragile nature of human existence and the eternal nature of rock.

Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea have been working with the English sculptor Peter Randall, a master of the form, to drill down into the mysteries of this unique natural material, which presents major difficulties in its use on stage. Inspired by Pythagorean geometric forms of cosmic creation, and by human physicality, they explore the unequal dynamics that exist between the ephemeral human body and the inexhaustible power of marble. These two realities meet in the movement, representing different timescales.

Marble has no place within theater convention: too heavy, too difficult to handle, and all too real to be on stage. Its place is inside magnificent mountains that rise and fall like waves of rock, shaped over millions of years.

Its extraordinary nature, coupled with an acceptance of our own mortality, means we humans are able to contemplate, to inscribe it with marks, to chisel at it in the most unusual of ways – and, in this way, bring ourselves closer to immortality.

The work’s world premiere, programmed for April 2020, was postponed due to precautionary health measures put in place by the government. Rehearsals began again in September 2020 but the work once again missed its chance to be presented before a live audience.

This film version is an attempt to create a hybrid form, but also to highlight and stress the importance of the performing arts, preparing the ground for the return of artists and audiences to live situations in physical spaces – a different and valuable experience in and of itself.

The performance will be available to view on the Onassis Foundation YouTube Channel until 21:00 on January 2.

The performance includes the song “How Should I Your True Love Know”.
Lyrics: the first of Ophelia’s “mad songs” from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (Act IV, Scene 5).
Traditional song by an unknown composer.