The new work of the dance company Aerites aspires to converse with the concept of identity through the violence each one of us may undergo or inflict in order to define ourselves, the world, and our freedom. It is a paean to individuals and their choices, to diversity and self-determination. It is the beginning of a show that is staged to present us everything that deviates from what we are used to, a show made in order to admire the different, that dares to put in the spotlight everything that is not counted as “average” and that exists to remind us the majesty and the beauty of each body, of each existence. Just like it happens in a circus.

That luminous world we conjure at any age to define our ideal, special, and unique society, our tender and fair microcosm; where courage and boldness were applauded, provided that we were sure that all safety measures were followed; where violence was glorified as we were assured by the fact that it derives from faith, discipline, and obedience. But what happens when we are no more able to tame all these? When our visit to this world touches upon the darkest areas of our fears? When the dwarf we have been applauding all this time stops dancing cutely and decides to pull the trigger on us?

This new work explores the concept of utopia, drawing from and responding to the societal crisis today. How does it feel to be a citizen of a society that is in decline? Which emotion is the most difficult to confront, anger, fear, or defeat? What is of most value, the fight or its outcome? Can one emerge a hero from failure? Who are the citizens to be praised today? In those, yet-to-be-identified, societies, world citizens hear the last sounds of things familiar and learn how to accept the organic, fertilizing presence of chaos. They are confronted with an urgent demand; to invent new sounds, new images, and other languages in order to reveal the reality that is coming.

On the occasion of Greece’s independence, the piece “National Adulthood” speaks of a world of today that, while borrowing elements from the past, it refers to the needs, challenges and demands of a modern society. A world that elaborates the different elements of Greek identity and heritage, with the imprint left by the fight for liberation, through a contemporary prism. For us, this world is as melancholic as it is vitalizing, enlivening. Dystopian, yet promising. It belongs not just in the hands of the past but also to the hands of today, to the here-and-now. And it reveals the contradictions of our people and the complexity of our history. 

On the occasion of the 200 years from the Greek Revolution we would like to talk through our work, for the contemporary “utopias”. The Greek Revolution was a utopia that became reality 200 years later. Today this seems inconceivable. Starting with the notion of utopia and its elements, it would be interesting for us to research which could be the utopias of the future. The work seeks to discover these ideas based, though, on the knowledge of the past. In this point, utopia becomes for us Ur-topia. The prefix -Ur that means ancient, primitive, prototype, symbolizes the path for the definition of a new utopia, which revisits our history.

Do we still need heroes? Who are they? What do they mean to us in our everyday life?Patricia Apergi and the dancer Eva Georgitsopoulou investigated contemporary heroes of our society and transformed their narratives into movement. Hero speaks for the people who turned their defeat into victory and those who became heroes without noticing. It shows the courage, effort, perseverance and strength needed to take up any fight. Powerful, courageous, energetic and with humour. Hero refers to a society where effort and strength become the protagonists. Whose citizens have wasted all of their smiles in battle, until they realized they had nothing more left.Or could it be that, through defeat, they won everything?

This new work by Patricia Apergi explores, as her previous ones, the emergence of the historical subject within specific socio-political processes. Although its content is shaped by Apergi’s Greek origins and experience it also draws from, and responds to, every kind of societal crisis. Apergi and her team researched the meaning and ways of mourning, as expressed by the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy in order to develop the specific choreography and achieve a transfer of the mournful dance-performance / state / representation to the contemporary reality of citizens being confronted with fear and defeat. Mourning together is, in fact, a radical confrontation of the phenomenon of loss. By occupying the space of loss we master the art of consolation and gain the wisdom of collective recovery and change.

The new work by Aerites Dance Company, keeping the thread of an elementary ‘exploration’ in the urban labyrinth, visits one more time the urban environment, but this time, the thematic of the company, focuses more on the idea of the dwelling of the city. Cementary is an imaginary city. A city, that belongs to the future using contemporary issues and the nowadays examples. Cementary is a city that survived a crisis although still mourns for its victims. It is the city of blending. It is the city where voices scream underneath the cements. Cementary is the future, even though today we are unable to imagine it.

A dance piece performed with dancers of 65+ years old. The body can dance forever. A performance for those who believe that dance has no age limits. The OCC’s 65+ dance company consists of people aged 65 or over who took part in a series of movement seminars in 2013. Having completed the training process under the guidance of the Aerites dance company, the participants did what any other company would do and embarked on an intense rehearsal programme in preparation for a performance. With the Aerites at their side, the dancers set about discovering a personal movement idiom and creating an original choreography.

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.

The new work by Aerites Dance Company examines the streets and the tropes of the urban condition in its current state as well as in its transformation to something different. The city, the body, the dwellings and their ghosts, the unexpected and the continuous, the novel tactics of the urban experience and its tragic and comic aspects, become the company’s raw material. If it is true that what characterizes cities like Athens in the 21st century is incompleteness, endlessness and the myriad interventions mainly from below to above with which they go along ensuring their longevity, then Aerites’ work has no other ambition but to capture this yet undefined spirit and its other and still “uncategorized” rhythm.

Aerites Dance Company created the piece ‘The Manifest of the Other’ after a proposed collaboration by the artistic director of the Skopje Opera. It is a collaboration between the opera of Bordeaux (France), the opera of Porto (Portugal), the opera of Sofia(Bulgaria), the company Compajia EgriBianco Danza (Torino, Italy), and the contemporary dance company Aerites (Athens, Greece). The piece was shown at the international festival of Ochrid, on the 14th July 2010. Inspired by the idea of unity, we declare our own choreographic manifesto using ideas and phrases from various poets and artists in a symbolic way. Our manifesto, therefore, is composed of images of Eluard, Varnalis, Lennon, Einstein, Chalazonitis. A fragmented composition of ideological places, a narration of kinetic nuances, a tantrum of the subconscious, and an accumulative triumph of the body. Within the utopia of the idea, we assume that “like the old days, we shall simply eat the flowers”.

The new work by Aerites Dance Company, keeping the thread of an elementary ‘exploration’ in the urban labyrinth, visits one more time the urban environment, but this time, the thematic of the company, focuses more on the idea of the dwelling of the city. Cementary is an imaginary city. A city, that belongs to the future using contemporary issues and the nowadays examples. Cementary is a city that survived a crisis although still mourns for its victims. It is the city of blending. It is the city where voices scream underneath the cements. Cementary is the future, even though today we are unable to imagine it.

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?

The theme is inspired by Frank Bidart’s poem about Ellen West, a real person who died of anorexia and became the first medical case for existential psychiatry in the 1970s. Trying to dissect Ellen West as a ‘clinical case’ Anorexia Socialis addresses the ways in which a person suffering from an eating disorder functions symbolically in western societies: dance and medicine, psychology and performance, all interweave in the intimate relationship we create with our bodies. The play focuses on the female body in order to refer to its weaknesses and imperfections, its mortality, its loneliness, the reality that surrounds it. The body that resists and succumbs, at the same time, raises many questions: Do I have a body or am I a body? What is the healthiest way of being ill? How do our desires become pathologies? How do we seek beauty?