elc team
Seventeen years ago, it transmitted its strange signal into the field of the performing arts for the very first time. From that moment onward, it has never stopped opening our eyes and awakening our senses, listening closely to what is new, creating pathways toward the future, staging “scenes” in the most unexpected places, revealing sides of the city we had never seen and creative forces we had never known existed. This is MIR, the inventive, exhilarating Athenian festival that is once again preparing to touch down in the city, from 21 to 30 November.
Like a small space station orbiting a parallel universe, it brings with it unique artistic projects from the place where adventure begins, between stage, image, sound, performers, “spectators,” ideas, the city and its citizens, opening new horizons. It also brings to light secret dramaturgies, hidden forces, the captivating, unseen stories of the people of Athens and the world, illuminating the need for reckoning with reality as artists look at it and transform it.
MIR invites Greek and international artists with vision and strong artistic viewpoints to shed their own light on our lives, advocating that contemporary art is not distant, irrelevant or inaccessible, but the opposite: something that touches us deeply, a generative force we must learn to trust. Today more than ever within the dark landscape shaped by successive wars—this belief becomes urgent.
For MIR 2025, curator Christiana Galanopoulou brings together the creative perspectives of sixteen artists or collectives, presenting sixteen projects most of them created specifically for the festival—across twelve different locations in the city, from cultural venues to unexpected spaces across greater Athens. Bustling, eclectic, and experimental, MIR radiates outward into even more neighborhoods of Athens, redirecting our gaze to the most exhilarating and deeply political dimensions of the performing arts and drawing into focus what must be spoken aloud and what must remain unspoken.
After the blow, the silence and everything that fits inside it.
That is the invisible conceptual thread weaving the performances of the 2025 program.
With the support of the Region of Attica, MIRfestival 2025 longer in duration and richer in performances than previous editions embarks on new adventures, inviting the public of Athens to tune into the urgent voices of Greek and international artists in theatre, dance, and performance. These artists have something essential and pressing to say about the world around us and the human condition today.
With additional support from the Ministry of Culture, the festival will also host, for the first time, the KOSMOS Platform for emerging artists from Greece and the Mediterranean, creating opportunities for young creators to meet professionals from parallel festivals and institutions across Europe and strengthening the channel between “inside” and “outside.”
The sixteen works selected by MIR’s founder and artistic director, Christiana Galanopoulou, are connected by subterranean thematic affinities.
“After the blow, the silence and everything that fits inside…”
The program of MIR 2025 was created, like those of previous years, with concern for where humanity is headed, with anxiety over whether we, as a species, will be able to face the worlds that are to come. For although MIR has presented dystopian works that illuminated the war silently corroding the psyche of people in the Western societies of savage capitalism, none of us expected the rapid catastrophes the planet has recently endured.
MIR 2025 has been shaped and will continue to be woven as it unfolds with its gaze turned toward the East, the North, the South; toward those struggling with the aftermath of natural disasters; those striving to survive the realities of their countries and the world; peoples suffering under wars and authoritarian regimes. With the hope that one day, the utopian works we present will be less dystopian. With the hope that the small crack through which MIR peers into the future will face the light rather than the darkness of humanity’s presence on the planet. With the demand for more humanity, more reflection, more compassion, more political responsibility more culture, more revolution.
The sixteen works of MIR 2025 open the space of silence after the blow, and everything contained within that parenthesis of time when no one can or wishes to speak. This condition of soundlessness, like weightlessness deeply comforting when placed in the perspective of eternity, yet terrifying when viewed through the finitude of human life is in truth a pregnant, mysterious, generative silence. A path toward introspection and awareness.
A silence that is a trap and a mystery, like in David Lynch; a hallucinatory silence, like in Tarkovsky’s Solaris; or perhaps a redemptive silence, like in Bob Wilson. This silence is the space within us—the cosmogony of the world to come. It is the space of celebration and sacrifice, of the recording of History, of resistance, poetry, and political necessity.
The mission of MIR 2025 takes its position there inside this silence.
And if our bodies burn like fireworks, if at the bottom of the well we have lost faith in our wishes,
if we fear that our eyes will grow accustomed to darkness, monstrosity, and ugliness then the daring with which the works speak of the rise of totalitarianism, of the distortion of History, of a contemporary Middle Ages, of monstrosity, war, domination, pain, and violence becomes the water in which we are rebaptized, so that we may once again perceive, even within darkness, the poetry, integrity, and beauty of the world.
This is the water we ultimately find at the bottom of the fountain of wishes; the sound made by our hearts as they reassemble after being shattered; the enigmatic, magical, invisible wink in the battle with the absurd; our ability to survive through hacking and camouflage.
Opening space to the deafening silence of the universe after a generative big bang to that staggering pause, welcoming the in-between, the ambiguous, the ineffable, the unsayable, embracing fertile, redemptive silence and all it carries we welcome aboard the MIR satellite the artists and works of this year’s program.
On 21 November, MIR 2025 launches toward the inescapable future. – Christiana Galanopoulou, Artistic Director of MIRfestival (Excerpt from the catalogue introduction)
The Program of MIR 2025
Sixteen artistic projects open the crack through which MIR peeks into the future of the performing arts. Twelve of them make their world premiere, created specifically for MIR.
Prometheus’ Echo – Konstantinos Rizos | Futur Immoral
The festival opens with the performance Prometheus’ Echo by Konstantinos Rizos. Known in Greece as a dancer with important choreographers, he left for Montpellier to join the renowned Exerce MA program and continued his career in France, founding the company Futur Immoral and earning accolade after accolade. In collaboration with musician Enrico Malatesta, and commissioned by MIR, he presents a work of revelation: the laborer’s body burning like a firework; the human form confronting a relentless yet magnificent industrial landscape; the dancer’s body battling noise; a body that is celebration and sacrifice. Prometheus’ Echo is an inner, artistic, and real journey an elegy to the beauty and violence of the ephemeral.
darkwaves – Eleni Roberts Kazouri & Vladimir Babinchuk
With a signature MIR “big bang,” the post-punk scenes of Athens, Brussels and Amsterdam collide. Eleni Roberts Kazouri, familiar to MIR’s 2023 audience teams with performer and visual artist Vladimir Babinchuk. Both graduates of PARTS and based in Brussels, they present the premiere of darkwaves, a choreographic act of piracy: slogans, disobedience, rebellion, hacking, leakage, and a language searching for or losing its meaning. A performance-sabotage, an archive of ruptures and re-directions of the dominant narrative.
heartbreakingheartbrokenartbreak – Mercedes Dassy
One of Belgium’s explosive new-generation performers, Mercedes Dassy arrives with a work commissioned for MIR. Singing her own songs and dancing, she confronts vulnerability and the borderless, identity-free broken heart. Expect to have your heart shattered and pieced together better than before.
And after the three performances that open the festival, let us look at the closing event, where MIR bows before a major creator who honours us generously with his presence, in a context entirely different from what we are used to… Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Dance Biennale, American choreographer Trajal Harrell is considered one of the most important artists in contemporary dance. His work is presented in theatres, museums, festivals and galleries around the world. He became known on the international dance scene through a series of works that combined the tradition of voguing with analytical postmodern dance, bringing the underground Black culture of New York to the fore.
In his recent works, he combines theories and forms from butoh with early modern dance, exploring the ways in which the body becomes a vessel of memory, fiction, the past, and the oeuvre of historical figures who have inspired him. In A ghost dance, he creates, with his unique touch, a new, profane yet dreamlike kind of dance, weaving together contemporary dance, butoh, street dances, underground cultures and voguing. In this “dance of fiction,” hovering spirits come to life for a moment, to remember the beauty of earthly existence and take their leave of us.
Choreographer Racha Baroud and musician Kinda Hassan from Lebanon (Deaf-Tones) met while the recent war in their country was raging. That experience forced them to confront their identities, their choices, and the most intimate aspects of their emotional lives. On stage, they create a third space, a ground where sound and movement can sustain their echoes and contradictions. How do you speak about the experience of war when you simply want to remain in silence?
Fueled by the need to express what words cannot carry, the two Lebanese creators and performers weave, through music and movement, a staggering pause a gap that hovers between the urge to stay silent and the urge to keep building while your inner worlds are collapsing. When adjusted to darkness: two outstanding young artists create for MIR a silent yet deafening work.
Emerging playwright, dramaturg and curator Rhianna Ilube from London, passionate about the history of Black people in Africa and decolonial theory, initially set out to create a performance about what the peoples of the continent she descends from have endured. She ended up making a work about the rise of totalitarianism in Western societies and the distortion of historical facts in order to conceal crimes against humanity.
But what happened in 1884, and why did she choose this title? That was the year of the Berlin Conference, which defined the fate of Africa. There, fourteen Western powers with designs on African territories set the rules for how they would divide them up according to their interests, trampling on the rights of its peoples.
After three years of research and collaboration with a large group of artists and specialist scholars, and with the decisive contribution of the collectives Coney and Koro, the piece 1884 was created, which we are delighted to present at MIR. In this gripping performance–role-playing game, a colony is formed, driven into authoritarianism and then revolts. What will resistance and uprising bring? How will History record the events? This participatory performance lasts three hours, but it is so fascinating that time passes without one even noticing. Dare to play you won’t regret it!
With a background in dance studies at Paris 8 in France and psychology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Konstantinos Papanikolaou made his presence felt as a performer in international contemporary dance productions. He began choreographing in 2021, immediately developing a personal style. At MIR 2023, we enjoyed him with his company in Correction – Part I. And since it “broke bones”, how could we not ask for the complete version?
Correction – the director’s cut premieres at MIR 2025, taking over an entire theatre to welcome all those who are dying for answers to burning questions: What is “high art” and what is “pop”? How surreal is it to try to survive in the artistic ecosystem of contemporary culture? Remaining both cinephile and dance-lover, the seven wonderful performers continue their search for the philosophical meaning of art, picking up where they left off at MIR 2023. And since no answers were given the first time, they surely won’t be given the second either… Unique and delightful, Papanikolaou makes the most unexpected twist to the familiar forms of the performing arts Konstantinos Papanikolaou and his incredible team, especially for MIR!
arisandmartha is the artistic vehicle of dancers, performers and choreographers Aris Papadopoulos and Martha Pasakopoulou. Moving between stage work and site-specific choreographic projects, their practice challenges contemporary choreography and the field of expanded choreography, interweaving movement, text and conceptual approaches that explore identity, coexistence, image consumption, the body as archive, and ritual practices.
After years of pioneering work, arisandmartha finally create a piece for MIR. Outliers is the first step in a broader research on the dynamics of power that emerges from the matrix of dominance–submission and on the fluid boundaries between permitted and forbidden. The work creates scenic “monsters” in order to activate situations in which performers and audience are invited to reassess their views of the Other, their relation to alterity, and to position themselves between acceptable and unacceptable, desirable and undesirable.
La Tierce is a dance collective from central France. Its creators and choreographers are Sonia Garcia, Séverine Lefèvre and Charles Pietri. The bodies that La Tierce brings on stage are reconciled with their vulnerability and attempt to reduce the distance between auditorium and stage, drawing on a shared present and the imagination. In Construire un feu (“To build a fire”), six performers search for the moment when time expanded and that fiery need for expression, dance and performance, was born. Keeping only what is essential from poetry, history, and ritual, they return to the most timeless form of art, one that could belong to any era, past or future, even those we know nothing about: the art shared by people gathered around a fire.
With an enigmatic gestural writing reminiscent of David Lynch’s inverted worlds, choreographer and photographer Monia Montali and director François Bodeux, two singular artists from Brussels, present a work full of poetry and unfathomable allure that makes its world premiere at MIR. In it, they seek a visual language that links the human being with the invisible world.
In Sur la nature des choses invisibles (“On the nature of invisible things”), two performers and a mechanical structure occupy the stage to open a passageway toward the enigmatic, the incomprehensible and the unspeakable. Centuries of history settle upon a dance like a prayer and a war cry, akin to a new initiation ritual.
Wandering among texts, scents, memories and images, and drawing from his beloved city of Brussels as well as other places he has visited, a unique performer and photographer, Antoine Neufmars, weaves a discreet confession between fiction and autobiography: Odorama an invitation to explore memory through a scent.
Androniki Marathaki investigates in various contexts the ways in which people perceive movement, shaping social relations and the self. Over the past three years, she has been developing a dance improvisation practice under the title Let’s be comfortable in our own skin, while also curating nightscores, through which she cultivates networks of artists.
A choreographer who has long been building solidarity as an artistic practice comes to MIR with the ideal work also a world premiere. In My heart as an antidote: Practices of solidarity, the heart as the point where the flow of blood changes into a vortex, the heart that distinguishes what nourishes it and what does not functions as guide, shedding light on otherness and liberating love as an embodied act of resistance and desire for a shared life.
A new generation of creators is emerging, and we are listening closely. We reveal to the Athenian public some of the city’s most compelling forces, supporting them through co-productions, the platform for emerging artists from Greece and the Mediterranean (KOSMOS), and residencies for the creation of new works.
A well-camouflaged gem of the Greek performing arts scene, performer, theorist and curator Christina Karagianni honours MIR with her first fully developed choreographic work, Camouflage. Giving space to the hidden and the unnoticed, she “camouflages” herself, disappears and reappears constantly, deceiving and disorienting the gaze. This ambiguous and relentless figure invites us to rethink, together with her, the visible (and invisible) politics of visibility and concealment.
When you have lost everything, what can you wish for? In the still waters of a fountain at Plateia Argentinis Dimokratias, you can hear the wishes that were never spoken, until words turn into water. And then let the current carry them away.
A small cosmogony of the kind that magically happens at MIR: a deeply political being, dancer and performer Theano Xydia, takes her first steps in choreography with Until words become water…, commissioned and co-produced by MIRfestival.
Writer and dramaturg Giorgos Daskalakis and director, actor and drag artist Themis Theoharoglou join forces with a group of talented young creators and performers to offer us a work-experience inside and outside the theatre space a walk through an Athens we are trying to forget. Who has the right to public space? And who decides which parts of the city are worth preserving?
A physical, political work about the unseen side of our urban landscape, about its ugliness that carries its stories, about the square that is both the “navel” and the “toilet” of Athens, about the heart of a city that still beats—louder than we think. POVerty guide is a moving performance in and around Omonia Square by a young company that is bound to make history.
Undoubtedly known to MIR’s most “in-the-know” audience, but a revelation for everyone else, Tsolimon, aka Nikos Tsolis, is a young performer, musician and creator whom we are delighted to introduce to those who don’t yet know him, with a musical performance created for the festival: Tsolimon – Akida: Pantelis & Ermis.
He plays so many instruments and makes such wonderful music, with so many layers of sensitivity, melancholy and joy, that his fans are growing exponentially. Trance, electronica, acoustic, echoes of folk and laïkó, the music we grew up with: everything fits into his eclectic, Beckettian and spontaneous post-post world. Alongside the songs from his album Akida, there is room for stories, sounds, words, tastes, and a duo that plays music while reinventing friendship through the rituals of everyday life.
All Greek works of the program make their world premiere at MIRfestival.
Mercedes Dassy, Konstantinos Rizos / Futur Immoral, Eleni Roberts Kazouri & Vladimir Babinchuk, Racha Baroud & Kinda Hassan / Deaf-Tones, Monia Montali & François Bodeux, Antoine Neufmars, La Tierce, and Rhianna Ilube & Koro present their work live in Greece for the first time.
See all the detailed program in this link
Venues and Access
MIR 2025 radiates out into even more neighborhoods of Athens, presenting the sixteen projects of its program across twelve different locations—in cultural venues as well as unexpected spaces throughout greater Athens—offering even more performances to welcome its ever-growing, bustling audience.
It presents sixteen projects, twelve of which have been created especially for the festival and will have their world premiere here.
The festival’s works will be presented in the following venues:
- Lipasmaton Cultural Park, Keratsini–Drapetsona Municipality (in front of the Silo)
- Space Baby, 80 Megalou Alexandrou St., Metaxourgeio
- M54, 54 Menandrou St., Omonia
- opbo studio, 86 Filonos St., Piraeus
- TO OΧΤΩ, 8 Polytechneiou St., Athens
- ROES Theatre, 16 Iakhou St., Gazi
- Dot wip, 40 Zacharitsa St., Koukaki
- Rabbithole, 20 Germanikou St., Metaxourgeio
- Fountain at Plateia Argentinis Dimokratias, 8 Argentinis Dimokratias Sq., Athens (Panathenaia)
- PalmTree MCA, 13 Krinagorou St., Neos Kosmos
- MAMMOT, 52 Sina St., Athens
- Cantina Social, 8 Leokoriou St., Thiseio
Across the city
On beaches and squares
In an industrial park
In studios and galleries
Inside a fountain
In imaginary cities
On a space station
On a meteorite
Admission to all events is free, with the option of reserving seats online
(reservations are not required for performances taking place in public space).
A number of seats will also be available at the venues, on a first-come, first-served basis.
Reservations & information: www.mirfestival.gr
