ODD – Onassis Dance Days: Four Days of Unique Performances Across All Stages of the Onassis Stegi

This year’s contemporary dance festival of the Onassis Stegi, ODD – Onassis Dance Days, returns from February 5 to 8, taking over all stages of the Onassis Stegi with a four-day programme featuring four exceptional performances and one video installation. The festival invites audiences into an experience of transformation where the body inscribes memory and new forms of kinship are created. After all, there are many family secrets that never make it to the Sunday table.

This year, Onassis Dance Days (ODD) focuses on the “familiar and the unfamiliar”, exploring ideas of origin, family, acquaintances and strangers alike, as well as elective affinities. How is choreographic identity shaped through bonds of blood, memory–or even imagination? What new forms of “kinship” emerge in a world of fluid connections? Can choreography become a meeting point for relatives by blood, by choice, or even by surprise?

The flagship performance of this year’s festival is an international co-production by Onassis Stegi: NÔT by Portuguese choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas–a work that opened the 2025 Avignon Festival and sparked intense discussion like few others. An unconventional ritual that dismantles form and reconstructs shared experience through the feverish energy of its eight performers. A strange hymn to freedom that does not seek to explain, but rather to leave impressions through fragments–much like dreams.

Among this year’s works, audiences will also experience productions that emerged from the research of two Onassis AiR Fellows of last year: FÁE by Efthymios Moschopoulos, and (REST IN) BLUE by Katerina Foti. Two solo pieces that, through explosive physical writing and a contemporary neo-pagan sensibility, open into the terrain of auto-ethnography. Both works draw from lived memories, collective visions, and invented origins transforming the body into a site of storytelling, rupture, and the reinvention of kinship.

Also an Onassis AiR fellow, Efi Gousi presents in the Stegi’s -1 Black Box Tectonic Riders, the video installation that premiered at Pedion tou Areos as part of the exhibition Plásmata 3: a meta-shamanic hymn filmed in a post-apocalyptic landscape of Central Greece, where young girls–like modern Amazons–revive the ritual of bull-leaping, fertilising the arid land.

Finally, Cypriot choreographer Elena Antoniou returns to the Stegi after LANDSCAPE with her new work ODE: a duet-ode to femininity, female eroticism, and vulnerability transformed into strength. Together with musician Maria Spivak, the two artists rise onto a platform where movement becomes sound, presence becomes an act of freedom, and “together” means “no one alone”.

The festival’s curators note:

“Where does the safety of the familiar end? Where does our unsettling relationship with the unknown begin? This year’s Onassis Dance Days moves along that threshold, inviting us to wander between the familiar and the unfamiliar–where ancestral places intertwine with our darkest dreams. The five works presented this February at the Stegi resemble a strange, tender, and unpredictable family: from the collective ritual ecstasy of Marlene Monteiro Freitas’ NÔT to the personal, auto-ethnographic solo confessions of Efthymios Moschopoulos’ FÁE and Katerina Foti’s (REST IN) BLUE; from Elena Antoniou’s ode to femininity in ODE to Efi Gousi’s meta-shamanic Amazons in Tectonic Riders. Because contemporary dance—one of the freest and most autonomous fields of artistic research that we consistently support–can speak of the body as the ideal ground on which to reimagine who we are and with whom we connect.”

Some choreographies resemble family albums–sometimes tender, sometimes uncanny, at times true, at times entirely fabricated. They search for cracks, imprints, and subconscious traces of family–biological or invented as well as places of origin, both real and imaginary. This year’s ODD invites the audience into a transformative experience: where intimacy meets paradox, where the body remembers, forgets, and invents new kinships.

NÔT

Marlene Monteiro Freitas
06–08.02.2026 | Main Stage | 21:00
Duration: 90 minutes

NÔT means “night” in Cape Verdean Creole. The performance that left audiences speechless at the 79th Avignon Festival unfolds as a ritual eruption of everything you keep inside: the absurd, the repressed, the irreconcilable. Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights and steeped in ecstasy, this is this year’s international production of Onassis Dance Days.

NÔT is a night unlike any other: Bacchic, orgiastic, ritualistic, uncanny–unforgettable. Filled with acts of violence, pleasure, and survival. Because darkness hides stories, and this night has much to whisper to you.

Drawing constant inspiration from the carnivalesque rituals of her place of origin–where the sacred meets the grotesque, the tragic meets the sardonic-Marlene Monteiro Freitas, one of the most explosive figures of the contemporary stage, brings her newest work to Onassis Dance Days: the production that opened the Avignon Festival in 2025, co-produced by Onassis Stegi. Awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale (2018), honoured artist at Festival d’Automne (Paris, 2022) and Brandhaarden (Amsterdam, 2025), and an Onassis AiR Fellow (2024–25), Freitas presents a transcendental, hypnotic choreographic narrative–shaped by fragments of dreamscapes and nightmares. Here, chaos is not disorder, but a passage toward a new order.

Ecstatic dances and feverish bodies, magical masks on their faces, within a fenced stage set that becomes the enchanted valley of a dream: filled with white beds and blood-stained sheets, where knives transform into percussion instruments. Here, chaos is not disorder, but a passage toward a new order.

A transcendental, hypnotic choreographic narrative, NÔT is saturated with shards of reverie and nightmare like an echo of One Thousand and One Nights and Scheherazade’s act of survival: the woman who, night after night, told unfinished stories to her murderous king and husband in order to escape execution. Through this indirect reference, Monteiro Freitas offers NÔT as an irrational hymn to freedom. It does not seek to explain, but to imprint impressions – like dreams.

Credits

Choreography: Marlene Monteiro Freitas
Assistant Choreographer: Francisco Rolo
Performers: Ben Green, Henri “Cookie” Lesguillier, Joãozinho da Costa, Mariana Tembe, Marie Albert, Miguel Filipe, Rui Paixão, Tomás Moital
Set Design: Yannick Fouassier, MMF
Lighting & Technical Direction: Yannick Fouassier
Costumes: MMF, Marisa Escaleira
Sound: Rui Antunes
Stage Manager: Ana Luísa Novais
Special Stage Objects: Cláudio Silva
Set Design Intern: Emma Ait-Kaci
Artistic Advisors: João Figueira, Martin Valdés-Stauber
Production: P.OR.K.
Distribution: Key Performance

Co-producers: Festival d’Avignon (Avignon, France), Berliner Festspiele (Berlin, Germany), International Summer Festival Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany), Culturgest – Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal), MC2: Maison de la Culture de Grenoble – Scène nationale (Grenoble, France), Le Quartz – Scène Nationale de Brest (Brest, France), La Comédie de Clermont-Ferrand scène nationale (Clermont-Ferrand, France), Maison de la danse, Lyon – Pôle européen de création (Lyon, France), La Villette – Paris (Paris, France), La Comédie de Genève & La Bâtie – Festival de Genève (Geneva, Switzerland), Onassis Stegi (Athens, Greece), Teatro Municipal do Porto (Porto, Portugal), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels, Belgium), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany)

Artistic residency support: O Espaço do Tempo, Alkantara, OPART, E.P.E./ESTÚDIOS VICTOR CÓRDON, Onassis AiR, MC2: Maison de la Culture de Grenoble – Scène nationale, International Summer Festival Kampnagel
Institutional support: Dançando com a Diferença
Acknowledgements: Carlos Duarte, Atelier MC2 Grenoble
Dramaturgical research for NÔT was supported by Onassis AiR (2025).

NÔT – After-premiere talk

After the premiere of NÔT on Friday, February 6, a talk will follow on the Stegi’s Main Stage, on the occasion of the publication of the book Troubling the Stage: The Choreographic Work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas (Lenz Press, 2025).

The discussion features choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas and the book’s author Alexandra Balona, moderated by director and performer Euripides Laskaridis. The talk will be held in English, with no interpretation into Greek.
Duration: 30 minutes

ODE

Elena Antoniou
05–08.02.2026 | Stegi -1 | 18:00
Duration: 43 minutes

Elena Antoniou’s ODE is about togetherness about no woman left alone. About the ways we can expand the space that belongs to us as women. A physical poem that explores the core of female strength through gaze and movement. Following LANDSCAPE, which for a third year continues to tour European festivals with the support of the Onassis Stegi Touring Program, Antoniou’s new work follows a trajectory that shifts the gaze, space, time, and the relationship with the audience.

In ODE, the two artists reframe each institutional venue of presentation as a field of attunement, standing at the point where rupture meets regeneration. The gaze defines seeing with an eroticism that claims closeness, seeks to unite. Vulnerability becomes a passage toward another kind of power. Hierarchies and roles recede. Presence asserts itself, becomes sound; movement becomes vibration; co-existence becomes a form of claim. As Audre Lorde writes: “Your silence will not protect you.”

After presenting LANDSCAPE at Dance Umbrella 2025 a performance that “is not a game of gazes nor an invitation for gazes or desires: it is a protest” (Vito De Biasi, Harper’s Bazaar Italy) and receiving strong critical acclaim for her overall body of work, Elena Antoniou returns with ODE, seeking this time the tender core of female strength. As Eoin Fenton (A young(ish) perspective) notes in his review: “If there is someone today who seems capable of keeping alive that tradition of ‘dancing from the womb’, as Martha Graham used to say, it is Elena Antoniou.”

Credits

Idea, Choreography & Performance: Elena Antoniou
Music & Performance: Maria Spivak
Dramaturgy: Odysseas I. Constantinou
Art Direction: Christos Kyriakidis
Lighting Design: Vasilis Peteinaris
Photography & Graphics: Saint
Styling Coordination: Filippos Missas
Production Coordination: Alex Papasimakopoulou

The performance premiered in Cyprus as part of the “Terpsichore 2025” programme of the Department of Contemporary Culture, Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture.

(REST IN) BLUE

Katerina Foti
05–08.02.2026 | Small Stage | 19:00
Duration: 45 minutes

(REST IN) BLUE is a rollercoaster of memories marking the end of an era, where the heroine’s identity is transformed and redefined.

The work is inspired by the traces of those who are no longer here, yet live on through us, inhabiting our bodily inheritance. A choreography sparked by the blue tarps that cover every construction site in Athens. Beneath them lies buried a fragment of collective and personal history: a piece of memory, but also the past lives of those who shaped the rebuilding of Athens and raised our generation in its apartment blocks the millennials, relentlessly hit by crisis, disillusionment, gentrification, nostalgia, and sweeping social change.

Linking the blue of the tarps to the phrase “I’m blue,” choreographer Katerina Foti searches for the imprint of life embedded in the walls that are now being torn down in order to be repurposed. How much intergenerational memory can a residential building hold before it turns into an Airbnb? And how many stories are uprooted through shattered mosaic floors? How do you carry your roots and foundations when you’re forced to place them somewhere new?

During the research process, Katerina Foti unexpectedly lost her father and became a mother. As a result, (REST IN) BLUE evolved into a choreographic auto-ethnography: she draws on personal material connected to her own memory and the fluidity of identity-amid grief and early motherhood-in dialogue with an Athens whose identity is gradually fading.

On stage, the heroine will move house-and through this condition we are invited to ask: what do we carry with us from our roots and youth? How does our identity continuously shift, even as our luggage holds everything that has shaped us?

Research for (REST IN) BLUE was conducted within the framework of the Onassis AiR Residency 2024.

Credits

Choreography, Dramaturgy & Performance: Katerina Foti
Music: Jan Van Angelopoulos
Dramaturgy Consultant: Eva Fraktopoulou
Set Design: Katerina Charou
Lighting Design: Stevi Koutsothanasi
Costume Design: Lina Stavropoulou
Assistant Choreographer: Eleftheria Agapaki
Production Management & Execution: LeFou Productions (Vasia Attarian, Serafeim Radis)
Associate Producer: Angelika Stavropoulou
Commission – Production: Onassis Stegi

FÁE

Efthymios Moschopoulos
05–08.02.2026 | Stegi -1 | 20:00
Duration: 42 minutes

In a world that is falling apart–until dead matter becomes nourishment again–time seems to be the only thing that endures. The title of the work is a misdirection, a carefully hidden hint. The imperative “Fáe” (“Eat”) reaches our ears as a command and, at the same time, as an act of care.

On stage, Efthymios Moschopoulos unfolds memories, thoughts, and references from a place that feels strangely familiar. He composes a system that unlocks the way he relates to nature, origin, and kinship. The work emerges as a sequence of fragmented acts-rituals: one after another, they are placed like a gastric reflux from now to then, from the individual to the collective, from the contemporary body to the primordial—ultimately shaping a new body.

Working through absurdity and rawness, the piece attempts to articulate a narrative around the instinctive stumblings of adulthood. A choreography for the ecstatic irrationalities of adolescence. It ultimately constructs an unfamiliar landscape: an ASMR tenderness, a sensory embrace for the herds of our childhood.

FÁE unfolds as a queer survival manual for a world that keeps chewing on itself. Research for FÁE was conducted within the framework of the Onassis AiR Residency 2024.

Credits

Concept, Choreography & Performance: Efthymios Moschopoulos
Set Design: Theo Triantafyllidis
Sound Design & Music Composition: Yakovlev
Lighting Design: Nysos Vasilopoulos
Costume: Taskin Goec
Curatorial Advisor: Kostas Stasinopoulos
Dramaturgical Contribution: Steriani Tsintziloni
Artistic Collaborator: Xenia Kongchylaki
Sound Artistic Collaborator: Jeph Vanger
Flute: Evi Nakou
Assistant Set Designer: Fabien Neisius
Video: Efthymios Moschopoulos
Production Coordination: Nikos Mavrakis – TooFarEast
Production Execution: Aristeidis Kreatsoulas – TooFarEast
Commission – Production: Onassis Stegi
Co-production: Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse | Montpellier Danse + CCN Occitanie
Artistic residency support: Onassis AiR, Réseau Grand Luxe, L’Abri Genève, CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva, POLE-SUD CDCN Strasbourg

Art Film – Video Installation

Tectonic Riders

Efi Gousi
05–08.02.2026 | -1 Black Box | 18:00–22:30
Duration: 5’43’’ (loop)
Free admission

The Earth dries up and splits in two. On what ground will we be buried if the dead return to the surface?

As part of this year’s ODD 2026, Tectonic Riders by Efi Gousi–the video installation first presented at Pedion tou Areos within the exhibition Plásmata 3–will be shown at the Stegi’s -1 Black Box, once again reviving the ritual of bull-leaping. A mystical act of resistance and regeneration, attempting to bridge the gap between a shattered past and an uncertain future. Here, climate change is framed not only as environmental catastrophe, but as a profound rupture in our bond with nature and history.

The Earth dries up and splits in two. On what ground will we be buried if the dead return to the surface?

A group of young girls reenacts the ritual of bull-leaping, whispering to the Earth: “We are here, and we are listening.” Tectonic Riders becomes a ceremonial act of resistance and renewal–an effort to mend the distance between a fractured past and an unstable tomorrow. Before this transition, a new generation rises: searching for light inside the darkness, reclaiming its connection to the world, redefining resilience.

But after all this does it have the means to restore what has been lost?

Credits

Direction: Efi Gousi
Screenplay: Efi Gousi – Alexandra K*
Director of Photography: Evangelos Polychrontopoulos
Cast: Lydia Antonatou, Anixi Kartalis, Christiana Matelska Toka, Vicky Mnatsakanyan, Eleni Nikodimou, Evini Pantelaki, Yasmin Papadimitriou, Clarisse Saunier
Commission: Onassis Stegi Foundation for the exhibition Plásmata 3

See the detailed program