Disoriented Dance / Misled Planet
City Project 2020 - NEON in collaboration with Athens & Epidaurus Festival

This year, the Athens & Epidaurus Festival collaborates with NEON Organization for Culture and Development, participating in a highly original visual and curatorial project that highlights the various connections between performing and visual arts, while also painting the iconic Odeon of Herodes Atticus in an entirely different, surprising light for spectators.

Aiming to bring audiences in closer touch with contemporary culture and expand their contact with contemporary art, NEON has visibly contributed to the Athens & Epidaurus Festival programme in the past, presenting works of contemporary artists selected from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection since 2010. This year marks the first collaboration of the Festival and NEON in the context of the City Project programme. Each year, an artist is commissioned to create an original work of art, exhibited publicly for a specific amount of time and creatively connecting historic sites with contemporary culture.

Dionisis Kavallieratos’ commissioned work Disoriented Dance / Misled Planet will come alive at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, curated by art historian and Benaki Museum curator Polina Kosmadaki. An in situ installation, the work consists of a circular dance of about forty sculptures unfolding on the orchestra pit of the Odeon, bringing together aspects of different eras and civilisations, from prehistory to antiquity to modern art to theatre to pop culture and folk art, referencing the tropes, rituals and kinesiology of ancient drama. According to the curator: “Drawing on the religious, physical and socio-political connotations of circular dance – a ritual and motif that can be traced back to the prehistoric age – Kavallieratos addresses the meaning of community, comradeship, friendship, laughter, gesture and physical expression”.
A powerfully original dialogue between the Roman monument and the artist’s dancing figures that capitalises on the fraught tension of contrasts, offering us a unique experience laden with memories of beloved Festival performances.

 

Opening hours Tuesday-Sunday 17:00-20:30. Mondays closed.

Free admission.

Up to 20 persons will be admitted to the venue every 20', in compliance with the directives of the Ministry of Health.

Booking is required.

More information at neon.org.gr