YEAR 2 | U(R)TOPIAS ACADEMY OF CHOREOGRAPHY

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YEAR 2 | U(R)TOPIAS ACADEMY OF CHOREOGRAPHY -

PART OF 2023 ΕΛΕΥΣΙΣ | EUROPEAN CAPITAL of CULTURE

MYSTERY 59 / YEAR 2 / EPISODE 4


THE KITCHEN DANCE:

A House Trance Vocabulary (S.02 E.04)

Katerina Foti

DATES: 29 & 30 June, 1 & 2 July 2023


Concept · Choreography · Performance: Katerina Foti Original Music: Jan Van Angelopoulos Set design: Gina Iliopoulou Costume design: Lina Stavropoulou Lighting design: Stevi Koutsothanasi Trailer: Tasos Goletsos Photography: Anastasia Giannaki


Kaiti is a woman who lives almost exclusively in her kitchen. There, her past, present and future pass before her eyes by association and are transformed into a universal and collective female narrative.

Exploring the dimension of leisure and its existence in a suffocating everyday environment defined exclusively by the restriction of work, the choreographer contacted women from the cultural associations of Elefsina, all of them workers, wives and mothers. Their testimonies and narratives led her to the nuclear and universal place in which leisure and work coexist in delicate balance: the kitchen.

Although fully identified with domestic work, the kitchen is also a place of female confession far from social criticism. It is a prison of endless manual work − often an additional task for the already working woman − and a family hearth, and at the same time it becomes a place of worship, a meeting place and a place of celebration, as well as a place where a woman can take stock of a whole life and set up a small personal revolution.

A NOTE BY THE CHOREOGRAPHER

The female body is laden with guilt and burdens, and we are now at the point where the need for self-determination is more prevalent than ever. If there is one thing I notice about women it is that the way they move seems to carry age-old baggage; our grandmothers, our mothers, all the women who raised us have left an imprint on our bodies comprised of fatigue, love, a will to live, burns from irons, hand creams and bleach, and most importantly an imprint released in redemptive dances to popular tunes. My choreographic proposal is motivated by the body’s cores of resistance and its journey towards a liberating process, centred on all oppressed female bodies that seek their own glimmer of light and to shed their multiple constraints.

© Photos: John Kouskoutis

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STATION: DEALING WITH FIREWORKS
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S.02 E.03

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S.02 E.05