Time & Date
Information
Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends presale: from 15 FEB 2022, 17:00
General presale: from18 FEB 2022, 17:00
Full price: 7 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 6 €
Groups 10+ people, Unemployed, People with disabilities, Companions: 5 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org
Duration
40 minutes
Info
Strobe lights will be used during the performance
Introduction
What are the paradigms by which we are raised, and how do we live our lives at the end of the day? Modern-day guides containing instructions for proper use – what are they like? In this solo performance, Konstantinos Papanikolaou formulates a manual for the 21st century.
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
The user manual, also known as a user guide, is intended to provide people with information or instructions concerning a particular subject or object. This category has also included (more commonly in the 19th century) a distinct type of text offering young ladies and gentlemen rules and guidance regarding proper etiquette, so that they might rise to meet the particular demands of each and every societal occasion.
What do we have in place of young ladies and gentlemen today? And what might a contemporary such guide include? What representations are we being asked to identify with, in a constant game of validation and rejection? And what relation might these representations bear to the true circumstances of our lives?
Konstantinos Papanikolaou draws material from etiquette guides and gentlemen’s books dating to the 19th century, texts by Georges Perec and James Baldwin, film and advertising, and from his personal memories and mythologies in this solo performance that’s a cross between a lecture, a game, and a spectacle. And all this in order to negotiate – with the sly wink of a stoic, other Buster Keaton – issues relating to love, masculinity, social status, and proper behavior in every instance: which is to say, quintessentially everything that a real 21st-century gentleman needs to know.
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Konstantinos Papanikolaou also featured in the previous edition of the Onassis New Choreographers Festival (ONC8) with his lecture-performance “The Diving Horse and Other Mythologies”. This work was also presented in Luxembourg on February 3, 2022 – this time before a live audience – at the Trois C-L Centre de Création Chorégraphique Luxembourgeois. This presentation was realized as part of the support provided by the GRANDE LUXE network, of which Onassis Stegi is a member (via its “Outward Turn” Cultural Export Program).
Portions of the research and development for “A User’s Manual” were undertaken at Trois C-L (Luxembourg) and Le Grand Studio (Brussels) as part of the GRANDE LUXE network’s annual support program. Konstantinos Papanikolaou is one of eight emerging European choreographers being supported by the network throughout the 2021–22 season, taking part in a varied program of events (residencies, platforms, seminars, meetings, and presentations of work).
Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou
A User’s Manual| Konstantinos Papanikolaou
We are constantly exposed to representations of a “reality” that’s a far cry from the actual circumstances of our everyday lives. We identify with such representations through a game of validation and rejection that conceals certain other possible options from us. And we assimilate these representations as stereotypes, thus legitimizing dominant discourses that not only do us a disservice but also often undermine us. While we may have our reasons for doing what we do, we are not however mindful of what what we’re doing actually does.
—Konstantinos Papanikolaou
