Christiana Kosiari | UnPhobia (working title)

What are you afraid of?

How does the autonomic nervous system respond to a threat? How can the initial bodily freeze, an elevated heart rate, shortness of breath, sudden sweating, dizziness, and trembling lead to a panic attack? Or, conversely, to a confrontation with danger?

“UnPhobia” is a choreographic and multimedia exploration of the fear of change and uncertainty. It focuses on how these existential fears—loss, loneliness, failure, or an uncertain future—are shaped by today’s social and technological conditions. An evolution of the piece “RUNWAY”—a frenzied solo on a treadmill first presented at Onassis Dance Days 2024— “UnPhobia” redefines its choreographic language, methodology, and themes. Here again, the human body remains central: a body that records, resists, exposes, deconstructs, and creates. A body onto which fear is both etched and rewritten.

The creative process incorporates ChatGPT and other AI tools as active collaborators, tested as instruments of living dialogue with body and text, enabling real-time interaction and experimentation. Technology proposes, reacts, converses, and shapes the path of composition. While its presence in the final performance remains open, AI operates as an organic part of the research process, a partner in both practice and thought.

In a world of accelerating technological development, where artificial intelligence has permeated even everyday communication, the work asks: Can this new relationship with technology heighten or ease our fears? Can it act as a mirror, an empathic interlocutor, or a source of uncertainty?

“UnPhobia” is a live experiment in fear, the unknown, and the possible. It combines dance, language, technology, and philosophical inquiry, seeking to create an embodied experience where fear is not only a theme, but also a material, a tool, a condition, and a creative possibility. It invites the viewer to encounter fear not as a dead end, but as a fissure—an opening into the unknown and the uncertain.