Anastasia Valsamaki

THE VERSO

AEF2024-Αναστασία Βαλσαμάκη ©Wassilios Nikitakis (1)

How can the dance body and choreography resist the typical ‘on recto’ contact with the audience and create moving landscapes?

The performance THE VERSO is inspired by the romantic movement Rückenfigur’s aesthetic tendencies and experiments with the ‘back figure’, symbolically and literally.

In the early 1800s, the German painter Caspar David Friedrich revisited the same theme over and over: figures gazing magnificent landscapes, with their backs to the viewer.

In THE VERSO, four dancers expose their backs to the audience, creating a series of atmospheric images that alternate between moving and static landscapes. The absence of eye contact and a sense of bodies being misplaced make up an unprecedented dramaturgical pact, where visible and invisible elements each time propose new performative narratives. A ‘passport’ performance to new explorations, like a painting’s verso, which reveals its journey through time.