NÔT | Marlene Monteiro Freitas

"NÔT" is a night like no other: bacchic, orgiastic, ritualistic, strange, unforgettable. A night filled with acts of violence, pleasure, and survival. Because darkness hides stories, and this night has many to whisper. Drawing constant inspiration from the carnivalesque, from the sacred and the grotesque, the tragic and the sardonic, Marlene Monteiro Freitas—one of the most explosive figures of the contemporary stage, awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale (2018) and honored at major festivals such as Festival d’Automne (Paris, 2022) and Brandhaarden (Amsterdam, 2025), as well as an Onassis AiR Fellow for the 2024/25 season—brings to Onassis Dance Days her latest production which opened the Festival d’Avignon in 2025 and became one of its most talked-about events.

Ecstatic dances and bodies in frenzy, with magical masks on their faces, in a fenced-in set that becomes the enchanted valley of a dream, filled with white beds and blood-stained sheets, where knives transform into percussion instruments. Here, chaos is not disorder but a path toward a new order. "NÔT" is a transcendent, hypnotic choreographic narrative, full of fragments of dream visions and nightmares. Like a memory from "One Thousand and One Nights" and Scheherazade’s act of survival, telling unfinished stories each night to her femicidal king-husband to escape death. Through this indirect reference, Freitas presents "NÔT" as an absurd hymn to freedom. It does not seek to explain but to etch impressions, like dreams do.