Christos Papadopoulos: Larsen C (2021)

Thursday, 23 November 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Kino Šiška, Katedrala

Larsen C is the potent culmination of the previous relationship between dynamic natural structures and social compositions choreographed by Papadopoulos. Meditative choreographic sorcery as a symbiosis between natural and human communities.
The history of dance art could also be recounted as a sequence of interruptions with something that artists have identified as artificial or unreal. The models of bodily renewal they offered were based on choreographic differences with which the renewed bodies addressed the audience’s sensibility in a variety of forms. At the dawn of the twentieth century, culture and art were obsessed with expunging the artifice from society, culture and art. Nature was another name for something real, authentic, inartificial. Dance art sought its naturalness in scientific models of nature, chemical and physical sketches, and the rhythms of the body’s anatomical micro structures. Dance was embodied in various forms of movement. One of the merits of Christos Papadopoulos’s choreographic work is the vibration of the bodily material, of bodies that do not turn into forms. This allows him to develop a knowledge of movement, which, in the twenty-first century, has reached extraordinary possibilities in contemporary dance through intricately detailed systems, because movement can now be constructed in ways that in the twentieth century it could not be. The choreographer is no stranger to Ljubljana audiences with his virtuoso dance company. We first welcomed them to CoFestival in 2017 with Elvedon, in 2019 with OPUS and in 2021 with Ion. Larsen C (2021) is the culmination of his long-term interest in the synthesis of natural and social processes, in the ways in which the dynamics of animal, chemical or plant organisms and structures can inform the relations of social, interpersonal and community arrangements. A politician, in a manner of speaking. Papadopoulos’s work belongs to the order of time, not to a spatial static that would be realised in forms. The delicate balance of bodies is a transition, not stability. A constant bodily negotiation, balancing, arranging and pulsating, in which we recognise not only natural but also social and political intensities. In the works of Christos Papadopoulos, we seem to understand for the first time what it can mean for dynamics to take centre stage in dance or even in human communities and politics.

Concept and choreography: Christos Papadopoulos
With the performers: Maria Bregianni, Chara Kotsali, Georgios Kotsifakis, Sotiria Koutsopetrou, Alexandros Nouskas Varelas, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Adonis Vais
Music and sound design: Giorgos Poulios
Set design: Clio Boboti
Lighting design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Costume design:Angelos Mentis
Dramaturgy consultant: Alexandros Mistriotis
Choreography consultant: Martha Pasakopoulou
Assistant set designer: Filanthi Bougatsou
Production management: Rena Andreadaki, Zoe Mouschi
Tour lighting head: Alexandros Mavridis
Set technicians: Marilena Kalaitzantonaki, Stefania Elettra Pantavos, Angeliki Vasilopoulou Kampitsi
Tour manager: Konstantina Papadopoulou
International distribution: Key Performance
Pictures: © Pinelopi_Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi

Duration: 55 min
Entry: 8/10 EUR

Presented with the support of Onassis STEGI – Outward Turn Program.