Manoeuvre_ on Tour
An Onassis Stegi Production. Premiered at Onassis New Choreographers Festival 7.
We wanted our lives – as material, imagination and relation – to have and make meaning. Meaning that is comprehensible to us so that it provides meaning to our attempts to live it. This piece tries to document the handling of such a problematic request, which is annulled the moment it is articulated, insistently, sympathetically and humorously, the same way that we would like to face our daily struggle.
A plank of wood and two dancers. Is that all there is to it?
Candy Karra and Chara Kotsali test things and are tested themselves in what is their first jointly-created choreographic piece. Their materials are to be found in the outputs produced by the dancing body, in pure movement – without the demands of a narrative form that would force us to read their on-stage partnership in some symbolic way. Their emancipation from such interpretative mechanisms is focused more on the “how” of their process rather than on providing explanations; that is to say, they urge us to think that if there is any “meaning” in dance, it is to be found in dance itself.
A plank of wood and two dancers. Is that all there is to it? Possibly, but obviously not. An absurd situation and yet a well-chosen constraint for exploring the inventive limits of movement, and for studying the dancing body in action.
Starting from Charles Ray’s Plank Piece, Eric Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures and a stock of wooden planks in my storeroom, we felt impelled to rise to the challenge. Two people and a plank, or else a mixed media trio that attempts a great deal but delivers nothing. The bodies play, carry, lift, prop, complement and oppose one another and this is the most important task they perform. The process is freed from any meaning ascribed to the ultimate goal and surrenders to the domain of the absurd. Short lived mobile sculptures that self-construct and self-destruct on stage in front of our very eyes and unwittingly reflect millions of stories of obscure heroism and proud insignificance.
Photo: mavra gidia
Choreographed & performed: Candy Karra & Chara Kotsali
Set & Props Design and Construction: Chrysoula Korovesi, Marios Gabierakis
Lighting Design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Soundscape & Music Composition: Jeph Vanger
Produced by: Onassis Stegi
Premiere at the 7th Onassis New Choreographers Festival, -1 Exhibition Space, 1st February 2020
