Choreography: Patricia Apergi
Music Composition: Vasilis Mantzoukis
Set: Adreas Ragnar Kasapis
Costumes: Patricia Apergi, Ilias Chatzigeorgiou
Lighting Design: Nikos Vlasopoulos
Dramaturgy consultant: Roberto Fratini
Choreographer’s assistants: Chara Kotsali, Dimitra Mitropoulou
Assistant for the set: Konstantinos Michalakeas
Photography: Tasos Vrettos
Design of Promotional Material: Kallina Kyratsouli
Promotion and Communication: Frosso Troussa
Perfomers: Ilias Chatzigeorgiou, Nontas Damopoulos, Konstantinos Papanikolaou, Konstantinos Rizos, Dimokritos Sifakis
Creative contributors: Nadi Gogoulou, Androniki Marathaki, Maro Marmarinou, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Martha Passakopoulou, Margarita Trikka.
Coproduction and residencies:
Maison de la Danse – Lyon
Hellerau Europäisches Zentrum der Künste – Dresden
Mercat de les Flors – Barcelona
Graner – Barcelona
Tanzhaus NRW – Düsseldorf
DanceIreland – Dublin
Duncan Dance Research Center – Athens
Dance Cultural Center – Athens
In the frame of modul-dance program and
Centre Chorégraphique National Rillieux-la-Pape
Supported by
modul-dance and the Culture Programme of the EU
For actually this strange destination is where someone becomes no-one, and no-one becomes nothing. It also could be the place wherein a childish way I perform the things I’ve lost, organizing my nostalgia, my homesickness, my longing for the past. It could be this swaying geography.
That’s why I’m as disoriented and fabulous as on a flying carpet: you could think it’s just the shabby surface of a poor street business, but all my life is packed in it; still, that carpet concentrates in a domestic object all the routes, lines and tracks I’ve walked. If I unrolled it in the desert, all those colours and lines would mark a tiny piece of difference, and that difference would be my only rag of an identity. Since this special travelling (they call it immigration) is not about going from A to B: it’s not a choice, nor a voyage of conquest. It depends on the fact that I simply can’t stay anywhere: my chair, my house, my fatherland just crumbled under me. And when this shifting trouble began, early one morning, I entered a perilous space of disappearance: disappeared for the ones that knew me best, and still invisible to all the ones I was to meet on my path. Travellers are blackmailed by the vanishing. If ever an engaged photograph decided to give me the alms of some visibility, there you’d have my image, not as an image of me, but as the image of the one representing the thousand who presumably resemble him: another way of vanishing.
Nowhere is a strange place, you know: it can be as huge as a desert, or as tiny and narrow as a carpet, an ashtray, a water closet. As unlimited and restricted as a refugee camp.
For all that, during the travel, I’ll be struggling against the invisibility, celebrating my pain, celebrating my own culture, celebrating the shape of the travel itself. Or performing all those things for a public that loves the intriguing, folkloric smell of exile.
You know, I’m really like global trash: human garbage that has to move around because no-one really wants it anywhere. I’m really like a global insect or beast: no-one can really understand the reasons and logic of my untiring motion, even if I believe I know them. That way you’ll see quite easily this unending traveller staying in your streets as motionless as an object someone put in the right place where it might not bother anymore: another way of vanishing. That stillness is the bitter secret of all my dances. Now, the problem is that once I’ve had a moment of rest, the place spits me out towards a new unknown. Then I won’t but keep on travelling, even when sleeping: something will travel me out of myself. Never on the spot – always escaping or pursuing the things that are before or after me.
I’ll vomit the route out of my stomach; and vomit the story of that voyage, trying to tell it in a language which will always appear stranger, as incomprehensible as the barbarian rumbling of something. Spitting the story of getting spat out. Finally, I won’t have but the garbage of the travel to explain, to unfold itself; call it the museum of my unconditional surrendering; all the things my body paid back when the struggle was over and the battle was lost: a treasure to me, and a meaningless amount of trash for anyone else.
Once I’ve been someone; after I’ve been something; and soon I’ll be no one.
The garbage will come after me. The garbage will travel for me.
Roberto Fratini
The latest work of Aerites takes off where d.opa! and Era poVera ended.
It maintains the spirit of navigating the urban labyrinth. The collective mind and body of the city is the raw material, which the team draws upon. This time these elements are reevaluated so that the concepts of the streets and wandering (dérive) include the foreigner, the immigrant, the person who travels whether by choice or by force.
We speak then of the path which is chosen and on which civilizations are mixed and created through their mediators, the people.
Since the days of the Surrealist movement in particular, but in world art as well since the 20th century (literature, cinema, comics, painting, music, architecture) the narrations of the flaneurs, the wanderers and the emigrants, the journeys, the transgressions, the deviations, the inscriptions and happenings which affect the body of the city, provide the most vibrant substrate for art to flourish. Nowadays as the old urban centers undergo rapid changes due to gentrification, creation of ghettos and reclaiming of unused areas, new interpretations and practices are formed in the field of culture. New social phenomena seek pathways through which to be expressed.
For the Planites project the complexion of the streets changes. They become a place of wandering and searching for a better tomorrow, the melting pot of the foreign and the separate, the embodiment and incorporation of force and exile.
Modul Dance intention/ Participation
As a team, we wish to focus our research on the integration of contemporary dance, with the various types of dance, bodily expression, movement and music that have risen through the intermixing of ingredients differing civilizations offer. Because “modul dance” is a program that gives groups the opportunity to travel to many cities, in order to complete their research, we find that it transforms us a priori into drifters. It also provides us with an opportunity to study the kinetic and musical codes of other cultures and to integrate these elements into our own code, something that would otherwise be impossible to accomplish.
For example, we intend to research the traditional Celtic dances from Ireland, the flamenco from Spain, and the African dances; all of which are traditional modes of expression and motion of these peoples. Continuing this process we wish to study how these modes have been incorporated within the local communities or even lent some of their elements to an international environment.
And what is of interest within our research, is precisely the fact that every society has the ability to embody the various and/or foreign elements which originate from those peoples who travel through them, and eventually each society might incorporate these elements in their own expression and cultural inheritance.
Planites are people of the world. They travel and carry with them stories and experiences from the past in order to adapt to a foreign way of life without losing their own identity. They are contemporary immigrants; they are the citizens of the world.
I am borrowing your history in order to erase the frontiers of the accomplished civilizations and to raise my voice through radical actions that hold me responsible for the decision to travel. I drag my wants along with my severed rights, in order to coexist with those favoured nations who support my freedom; up until they encounter me. I collected all my ‘tomorrows’ together with my children and my work and piled them onto the limitless paradise you advertised. And you were alarmed because I asked to share an opportunity.
I have chosen to wander in the world of deficiency and of discrimination in order to claim a small share of compensation from the lottery drawn by my own cursed nation. No matter. I fit. I fit into your laws, I laid out my dreams onto your streets, I set up my household in your conscience and I shared your history in order to tell the fairytale in the mother tongue tomorrow.
