Dancing among the clouds, struggling through the stars and the mud. From April 3 to 6, a dance marathon fills the stages of the Stegio to capacity. From 5pm to midnight – and for two days and a little after – Greek choreographers will be tackling at Onassis Dance Days 2025 everything that concerns them, experimenting with new aesthetics and setting the pulse of this year’s festival. Onassis Dance Days 2025.

Michalis Theofanous, Chara Kotsali, Fotini Stamatelopoulou, Sophia Mavragani & Janis Rafa express their anxieties, hopes and frustrations by setting up altars, shaking off roles and identities, talking to history, vindicating the untamed bodies.

For another year, the festival program includes an international choreographer, in the first presentation of his performance in Greece, Damian Jalet and his unique world.

Dancing in the clouds, grappling among the stars and mud. The Onassis Stegi Main Stage is turned into a landscape of cosmogony. The dancers confront the untamed beauty of nature: wind, water, earth, smoke, fog, light, and darkness. Black sand, silver dust, potatoes, water, and glue may all become works of art with the appropriate gaze and treatment. These are the materials that iconoclastic choreographer Damien Jalet and sculptor Kohei Nawa have tackled in the two works they are presenting as part of Onassis Dance Days 2025: the choreography “Planet [wanderer]” with an 8-member ensemble and the film “Mist” with the 18 dancers of Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT 1).

Sculptors, visual artists, architects, and sound designers have worked closely with all four Greek choreographers of this year’s festival to explore the materiality of bodies, the aesthetics of sound, the poetics of speech, and the visuality of stage objects.

Michalis Theophanous’ solo piece “ecdysis” invites us to invade, like voyeurs, the personal space of a creature in perpetual transformation. We witness their vulnerable disrobing as they shed a series of identities. For perhaps flow is the only possible condition; thus, no one “is no longer what they were and is not yet what they will become,” according to the choreographer.

Chara Kotsali’s “ΙT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” depicts three women embarking on an anarchic kinetic, aesthetic, and sonic marathon in pursuit of pleasure that is constantly interrupted. With the sculptor and visual artist Periklis Pravitas as a collaborator, a frantic panorama of dances is created in a perpetual interchange with History, “this bond of progress and destruction,” in the choreographer’s words.

Sofia Mavragani and visual artist Janis Rafa created “Horse Me,” a surreal, poetic allegory on the limits of the coexistence between humans and non-humans, focusing on the image of the horse and the relationship between bodies that ride and are ridden. Their aim? The right of the body to remain unexplored, undefined, and untamed.

In “NEAR MISSES,” Fotini Stamatelopoulou choreographs Despina Sanida Crezia in a solo performance that is also a visual installation, in collaboration with Dimitris Tampakis and Panos Alexiadis. It investigates strategies of self-defense and resilience, drawing liminal lines between silence and rage. The performer is accompanied by a set of metallic wearables generating a sonic and vocal altar that reveals an overexposed gesture amidst chaos.

Credits

Curatorial Direction: Afroditi Panagiotakou

Design & Curation: Iliana Dimadi, Konstantinos Tzathas

Head of Production: Vasilis Panagiotakopoulos

Production Coordination: Despoina Sifniadou, Dimitra Hatzicharalampous

Line Production: Marianotta Giannaki, Danae Giannakopoulou, Ioulia Stamouli, Marianna Antzoulatou, Faye Minopetrou

Technical Manager: Antonis Kokkoris

Deputy Technical Manager: Giannis Dovas

Stage Managers: Natalia Vorria, Katerina Kotsou, Melina Lorkidi

You may read more about the festival:

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/onassis-dance-days-2025