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Geneva,
on tour

Christos Papadopoulos
My Fierce Ignorant Step

by Plamen Harmandjiev

Greek-rising-star choreographer Christos Papadopoulos opened Vienna’s ImPulsTanz Festival with a sweaty and mesmerising meditation on politics, togetherness and joy. What starts with repeated pops, serving both as music and cues for the dancers' subtle moves, grows in just 60 minutes into a brief but inspiring victory over the spirit of today’s cynicism. In My Fierce Ignorant Step Papadopoulos sets the ten performers in a constant state of resistance. As if they have to cut their path through a gooey air surrounding them. Their minimalist gestures grow larger, and the intensity of their presence amplifies along Kornilios Selamsis’s music, into which their loud breaths melt. It seems inevitable not to think of it as related to Ravel’s Boléro.

Its minimalism, however, is not solely an aesthetic one. Which, if it were so with its cold light, bare black stage and (at first) expressionless faces of the dancers, moving in unison, might as well belong to the dystopian techno-fascist near future. In the course of the piece, the spare movement vocabulary and its repetitive nature reveal themselves as a transgressive gesture of channeling ever-stronger vigor into claiming space outside the collective body, yet simultaneously an exercise in tuning the very same body to the vibrations of its individual members. Its precise and seemingly strict system is the antipode to the gradually disappearing rigidness imposed by the sheer heft of this unnamed and invisible presence they move against, in, around, and away from. It feels both as if they reach deep down into a memory which has to be regained and towards a future which can be seized. The joy they find in the process is infectious.

Further performances in Geneva, La Bâtie, Comédie de Genève, 8, 9, Sept.;
Turin, Torinodanza, 12, 13 Sept.;
Lyon, Maison de la danse, 23–25 Sept.;
Clermont-Ferrant, 30 Sept.; 1 Oct.;
London, Sadler's Wells, 13, 14 Nov.;

www.arthappens.be