Onassis New Choreographers Festival 7

Pounding trance music beats greet us in “Becoming With Animal”, along with a rope that reins in – or gives free rein to – our primal instincts. In “manoeuvre_”, the focal element is a piece of construction material: a stiff timber beam. In “Reverie”, the stage is transformed into a magical rabbit-hole, a spacetime place for musings and daydreams. A protean being seemingly escaped from some sci-fi dystopia is created by two dancers in “Vanishing Point”. Attempts to connect and disconnect permeate the motifs elaborated by three dancers in “DisJoint”, while in “A Little More Than Nothing” audiences themselves are called upon the dance.

“Dancers are humanoids, just like you!” to borrow a phrase by British dance critic Sanjoy Roy. He was one member of the jury – alongside Vallejo Gantner, Ásgerður Gunnarsdóttir, Linda Kapetanea, Androniki Marathaki and Alexander Graham Roberts – that selected these core six works for this year’s festival, following an open call. Meetings and workshops these finalists had with Onassis Stegi artistic collaborators, such as Dimitris Papaioannou and Euripides Laskaridis, had the air of an informal lab, as well as the feeling that one generation was passing the baton on to the next in a setting marked by both reciprocity and constructive rupture.

The other two festival works resulted from direct commissions. “Zeppelin Bend” – presented here as a work-in-progress prior to its European premiere – was commissioned by former Onassis Stegi artistic director Katia Arfara from Katerina Andreou, a choreographer already acclaimed in France for her work who also appeared at the Young Choreographers Festival 5. What’s it about? Fitness and wellness practices, such as aerial yoga, as contentious new-age elixirs for wellbeing. “Re-call”, in which strength of character is proclaimed as an equivalent to emancipation, also resulted from an Onassis Stegi commission, this time as part of the Europe Beyond Access network, which seeks to support disabled artists in the performing arts.

“I’m not a choreographer,” notes the internationally up-and-coming artist Euripides Laskaridis, who sets the scene just before the Onassis New Choreographers Festival 7 begins with performances of his first two choreographies – “RELIC” (on 28/1) and “TITANS” (on 31/1) – exclusively for dance professionals and specialists, and Onassis Stegi Friends. His denial of this role serves to highlight the liberating fluidity of contemporary dance. More hybrid and dynamic than ever before, sometimes functioning at the limits of performance and beyond, dance today feels less like dance and more like a field blown wide open, embracing rites of action and interaction in space and time made from bodies, materials, and audiences – our perceptions and our gaze.

This more expansive choreographic direction marks all the performances at this year’s festival, which for seven years now has served as an incubator for young artists living and working here and/or beyond Greece’s borders. Some are experienced dancers and performers making their debuts as choreographers, either individually or collaboratively. Others have no background in dance, springing instead from other fields. Exceptional technical skill is no longer the be all and end all of dance. Much like the mastery of the choreographer, virtuosity is yet another stereotype under deconstruction. Here is perhaps what to admire now: new ways of thinking about things.