Performances Alternative Stage
21.07 | 20.00 | 40'
Kalamata Dance Megaron / Alternative Stage
KATERINA FOTI
The Kitchen Dance: A House Trance Vocabulary
A ritual for female self-determination set against a backdrop of hot irons, cigarettes, and market carts, inspired by the resistance nuclei of the oppressed female body and its journey towards the longed-for liberation. A glance at our foremothers, grandmothers, mothers, and all the women who raised women, through the legacy of their bodies that carry love, a will to live, fatigue, burns from irons, scents of hand creams and bleaches, and the need for redemptive dances.
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.
- Concept – Choreography – Performance: Katerina Foti
- Original music: Jan Van Angelopoulos
- Set design: Gina Iliopoulou
- Costume design: Lina Stavropoulou
- Lighting design: Stevi Koutsothanasi
- Trailer: Tasos Gkoletsos
- Photography: Anastasia Giannaki
The work was first presented in a shorter version as part of the artistic programme of Elefsina 2023 – European Capital of Culture. It was developed through the residency programme Mystery 59 U(R)TOPIAS – Academy of Choreography, under the artistic direction of the contemporary dance company Aerites / Patricia Apergi.
The KITCHEN DANCE : A HOUSE TRANCE VOCABULARY TOUR is conducted with the support of the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation.
KATERINA FOTI
Katerina Foti is a dance artist based in Athens. She researches gestural and pedestrian movement, inspired by daily routines and developing the material through a theatrical process and from a feminist point of view. She develops her dance practice working as a choreographer, a movement director, and a performer, having collaborated with the National Theater of Greece, Athens and Epidaurus Festival, Onassis Stegi, and with many dance festivals across Europe.
Her latest solo work The Kitchen Dance: A House Trance Vocabulary, created in the residency program “Academy of Choreography U(R)TOPIAS” of 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture, was presented in its full version at the Theseum Theater in Athens, Greece (November 2023) and in short version as a site-specific performance at 2023 Eleusis (June–July 2023), and it has recently launched its international tour, starting from the Istanbul Fringe Festival (September 13 and 18, 2024), as well as its Greek tour, starting from the Dimitria Festival located in Thessaloniki (October 1, 2024).
During the same program, she also created the dance film The Kitchen Dance: An Off-Beat Arrival, which has already participated in “La Città dell’Utopia” International Film Festival in Rome, Italy (2024), at the Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival, where it won an honorable mention (February 2024), and at the sessions of the First-Time Filmmakers Showcase of the Lift-Off Global Network 2023.
Katerina Foti is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2024/25 through the Dramaturgy Fellowship of Onassis Stegi.