ODE | Elena Antoniou

“ODE” is an act of embodied poetry—dynamic, melodic, distilled. Choreographer and performer Elena Antoniou and musician Maria Spivak meet on stage for the first time. After “LANDSCAPE,” which for a third year continues to travel to festivals across Europe with the support of the Onassis Stegi Touring Program, Elena Antoniou’s new work follows that path that shifts the gaze, space, time, and the relationship with the spectator.

In “ODE,” the two artists redefine each institutional venue that presents it as a field of attunement, and stand where rupture and renewal meet. The gaze determines, seeing with an eroticism that claims the right to draw close, to unite. Vulnerability becomes a passage toward another kind of power. Hierarchies and roles recede. Presence asserts itself and becomes sound, movement becomes vibration, and coexistence becomes a form of claiming. As Audre Lorde says, “Your silence will not protect you.”

After the presentation of her work “LANDSCAPE” at Dance Umbrella 2025, a performance that “isn't a game of gazes, nor an invitation to gaze or desire: it's a protest” (Vito De Biasi, “Harper’s Bazaar Italy”), and receiving reviews for her work as a whole, Elena Antoniou returns with “ODE,” this time to seek the tender core of female power. As Eoin Fenton [“A young(ish) perspective”] notes in his review, “If anyone is to carry on that fine tradition of ‘dance from the vagina,’ as Martha Graham put it, it just might be Elena Antoniou.”