6/2009: Modern Dance Festival ,
Cairo Opera house, Alexandria Opera House, Egypt.
5/2008: Chora theatre, Athens
Choreography: Patricia Apergi
Music: Dirk Polak
Sets and Costumes:Rossina Baltatzi
Lighting: Nikos Vlassopoulos
Dramaturgy: Georgina Kakoudaki
Assistant Choreographer: Aspasia-Maria Alexiou
Video: Yiannis Mavrogenis, Dimitris Kordelas
Performers: Nondas Damopoulos, Georgina Kakoudaki, Hara Kotsali, Maro Marmarinou, Dirk Polak
“I am not the personification of exception
I am not a ground weapon
I am just a stigma
and a bit of memory”
– Dimitris Chalazonitis
What happens when the people you love more than anything in the world become history and memory? When can we actually speak about loss; when somebody is dead, or, when you kill him within you? What is the funeral of (my free) time, of youth, of beauty? What is the grave of my freedom?
Is it the Earth for my trust, the flowers for my identity, the coffee (no milk, no sugar) for my faith in you, in us or even in Him?
A short way from your (necro)polis there is only one signpost:
«Attention! Side-losses»
If life must be a journey (and a nice one), did anyone lose the ticket? Which sheep will I come across when I sleep? Why must I still treat my history as a game of domino? Why must I lose what I love the most in order to mature? Do I look wiser, prettier, more confident? I only know this: You won’t return if I turn this page. I can simply remember you, I can only forgive you.
P.S. When will we have a chat?
Aerites Dance Company comes together with Dirk Polak (Mecano) to stage a multimedia dance performance. The central theme: Loss. Five people, each one with his own medium, seek and are sought after. They have lost and they are lost. They are searching. When do we actually experience a loss? Death is not the only ticket for this journey. Because after all, our life is a game and if there is a winner it’s not the one who has lost the least… The performance is not saying goodbye to those who are gone. She’s not mourning for what’s lost. She only dances and sings. For youth, for beauty, for ideology, for faith, for freedom, for love, for trust. And for all that we might lose while we live. She dances. And so she remembers. And she deals with loss. So that «life won’t become a settlement with the void they left behind them…..»
In the Greek Apolost, by the Aerites Dance Company, choreographed by Patricia Apergi, loss — of beloved places and dear ones, of beauty, youth, trust, or faith — was the matrix, generating a series of poignant and deeply arresting images in which Apergi’s intensely emotional and highly imaginative choreography was complemented by Yiannis Mavrogenis’s and Dimitris Kordelas’s video projections of the dancers, wandering as solitary figures through deserted places, a home or a school, strewn with torn books and odds and ends of the kind people usually leave behind when they move out of a place.
There was poetry too, recited or sung live to the accompaniment of an accordion by Dirk Polak.
This gripping, deeply moving show can be described as a sublime celebration of grief, and the climax of it was the unforgettable last scene in which the five performers sat round a simple, plain box and gradually transformed it through the movement which covered the whole gamut of all the expressions of grief into the coffin of someone deeply loved.
Nehad Selaiha 5/7/2009
