The House of Trouble | Patricia Apergi // Aerites Dance Company

"I don't know where to start. I have to share it with you. You have come this far. We will do everything to please you. We depend on you. We need you. Use us. We can do anything. The world is on our shoulders. You need us. There are no more of us. We are already facing extinction."

The new work of the dance company Aerites aspires to converse with the concept of identity through the violence each one of us may undergo or inflict in order to define ourselves, the world, and our freedom. It is a paean to individuals and their choices, to diversity and self-determination. It is the beginning of a show that is staged to present us everything that deviates from what we are used to, a show made in order to admire the different, that dares to put in the spotlight everything that is not counted as “average” and that exists to remind us the majesty and the beauty of each body, of each existence. Just like it happens in a circus.

That luminous world we conjure at any age to define our ideal, special, and unique society, our tender and fair microcosm; where courage and boldness were applauded, provided that we were sure that all safety measures were followed; where violence was glorified as we were assured by the fact that it derives from faith, discipline, and obedience. But what happens when we are no more able to tame all these? When our visit to this world touches upon the darkest areas of our fears? When the dwarf we have been applauding all this time stops dancing cutely and decides to pull the trigger on us?

When violence erupts from the people who have fought not to accept violence?
Circus or life? Truth or spectacle?
That’s how we arrive at our glorious present time.

“The House of Trouble” is a party that incorporates all these reactions. It adopts the “outbursts” of the era to reveal to us that we can still have a good time despite our lack of harmony and disagreements. It is a love letter to the absurdity of the dipoles presented to us constantly by societies. A feast for the joy of transformation and multidimensionality of our bodies.

The category is: The struggle of diversity

• Determining ourselves together
  We shall fight anyone who thinks that their history is written in brighter letters than ours.

The category is: Trouble

• The dance from within
  Trouble does not bring peace.
  Our trouble dances.
  It breaks the flow of breath we needed in order to exist.
  Trouble makes promises. Because when it does come, we shall know then that we can at last calm down.
  We awake in trouble and we shall go forward beside it.

The category is: War

• Civil and gender war/ a vertical accented line makes the difference in our boundaries
  What happens though when the self-evident fair fights for the freedom of expression and existence turn into ruthless acts of violence? When we are divided into “us” and “them”?

The category is: Circus

• Clowns or simply ludicrous?
  Protagonists or extras? Truth or spectacle? When we will discover the humor in the midst of disagreement, the joy within hardship, in order to become able at some point to compensate ordeal with communication?

The category is: The utopia of pleasure

• Our personal paradise
  The discovery of this new land, which reveals to us that certain pleasure we draw from diversity. The moment when we can savor our victories. The points or pauses between the ceaseless struggles. The place we find peace. The place where normal is defined by exceptions.

The category is: Tenderness

• The weapon of the many. The majesty of existence.
  In an era where half of us take it for granted that there is no reason to even discuss such matters as we are fully aware of the freedom of existence and, at the same time, the other half still discovers that we may not be the same after all.

All of us are having a hard time. We do feel though that in a world teetering and shaking, the joy is found in those short pauses between battles.

Welcome to our show!

Welcome to the impromptu freefall into the future!

– Patricia Apergi

• Patricia Apergi’s relationship with Onassis Stegi begins ten years ago, with “Era poVera.” That was her first large-scale choreography, a comment on body expression as a means of survival in the urban environment. At the same time, it heralded the beginning of her dialogue with the reality of the city as an embodied experience. Five years later, she returned to Stegi, with “Cementary” (2017). The title of the performance is a word play with “cement” and “cemetery.”
  
• In between, the work “Planites” (2014), a European co-production based on her choreography, had its premiere at Hellerau in Dresden and triggered consequently her European career.
  
• Patricia Apergi’s choreographic vocabulary places the human body at its core as it converses with public space and urban culture. Absorbing the sociopolitical upheavals of the last decade, the distinguished choreographer was inclined to “read” the body as defeated, outworn, distorted. Now, “The House of Trouble” arrives to dislodge this perspective. The bodies that inhabit its stage are proud, beautiful, and powerful. “No matter if they are different. No matter if they don’t represent the average. They are the bodies of today; those who accept themselves as they are, who don’t wrangle with nature, and will not fight it. Instead, they embrace themselves, respect and accept them. And this is how the beauty of their uniqueness is revealed” she notes.
  
• In the course of her research for “The House of Trouble,” Patricia Apergi traveled to New York and Paris, with the support of Onassis Stegi, joining residencies in order to discuss with the pioneers of krump and voguing and understand up close their kinetic vocabulary. In December 2022, she visited New York, the city where voguing thrives through the tradition of ballrooms in Harlem. A little later, in January 2023, she visited Paris, which marks at the moment the European hotbed for the evolution of street dance culture, assimilating new kinetic forms and aesthetics. Apergi’s “educational” tour brought her to Newyorkian and Parisian ballrooms, kiki balls, battles, and krump sessions, spaces where novel ways of expressing and determining a contemporary identity emerge.