Onassis Dance Days 2026

The Onassis Dance Days (ODD) contemporary dance festival focuses this year on the ‘familiar and the unfamiliar,’ exploring notions of origin, family, the known and the unknown, as well as chosen kinship. How is choreographic identity shaped through ties of blood, memory, or imagination? What new forms of ‘kinship’ emerge in a world of fluid connections? Can choreography become a meeting ground for relatives by blood, by choice, or by surprise?

The festival’s centerpiece this year is "NÔT", an international co-production of the Onassis Stegi by Portuguese choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas; an unconventional ritual that breaks apart form and reconstructs collective experience through the ecstatic physicality of its eight performers. Among the works featured, we will also see productions emerging from the research of last year’s Onassis AiR Fellows, Efthymis Moschopoulos and Katerina Foti.

Some of the choreographies resemble family photo albums: at times tender, at times strange, sometimes truthful, sometimes entirely fictitious. They search for the cracks, the imprints, and the subconscious traces of family, whether biological or invented, as well as places of origin, both real and imagined. This year’s ODD invites audiences into a transformative experience, where familiarity meets the uncanny, and where the body remembers, forgets, and invents new kinships.