Koliva

Koliva is a dance performance bringing together Greek ritual tradition and contemporary stage language, focusing on the fragile threshold between life and death. At its core lies a paradoxical rite: every year, five women over the age of sixty gather to prepare their own koliva* while they are still alive.

The stage evokes a domestic setting, a space of shared intimacy. The women laugh, gossip, reminisce, and tease one another as they prepare this special offering. A symbol of remembrance and parting, koliva takes on a double meaning: it becomes both a memorial to lost youth – a gesture to bodies that once were otherwise, to choices made, and to all those that never happened – and a celebration of the enduring desire for life. They stir the wheat, dust it with sugar, and garnish it with pomegranate seeds. The cycle of preparation repeats itself, becoming rhythm, becoming synchrony, gradually transforming into dance. At the same time, an underlying irony runs beneath the surface: koliva must be consumed quickly, before it spoils and turns harmful. Its almost voracious consumption becomes a metaphor for existence itself: the urgency to live life to the fullest before the inevitable decay. As time unfolds, life and death begin to share a common substance, and the figures on stage emerge as presences slipping between the two realms.

Choreographer Christiana Kosiari continues to focus on non-youthful bodies, bringing onstage two professional and three non-professional performers over the age of sixty. Sharing the same stage, each carries her own distinct trajectory, experiences, and relationship to the body.

Koliva is a celebration that gently dismantles death with humour, reconciling it with the cycle of life. It is a gathering that honours what has been lost without losing sight of what remains – reminding us that memory, companionship, and joy are forces that continue to resonate beyond the end.

*Koliva: a traditional Eastern Orthodox ceremonial dish made from boiled wheat and used in funeral rites for the commemoration of the dead. It is typically blessed during memorial services and may include sesame seeds, almonds, ground walnuts, cinnamon, sugar, pomegranate seeds, raisins, anise, and parsley.