SXK 26-Ode

ODE is about togetherness, about no woman being alone. About the ways we can find in order to expand the space that is ours as women. A bodily poem that explores the core of female strength through gaze and movement.

ODE is an act of embodied poetry—dynamic, melodic, distilled. After LANDSCAPE, which for the third year continues to travel to festivals across Europe with the support of the Onassis Stegi Touring Program, Elena Antoniou’s new work follows that path that shifts the gaze, space, time, and the relationship with the spectator.

In ODE, the two artists redefine each institutional venue that presents it as a field of attunement, and stand where rupture and renewal meet. The gaze determines, seeing with an eroticism that claims the right to draw close, to unite. Vulnerability becomes a passage toward another kind of power. Hierarchies and roles recede. Presence asserts itself and becomes sound, movement becomes vibration, and coexistence becomes a form of claiming. As Audre Lorde says, “Your silence will not protect you.”

After the presentation of her work LANDSCAPE at Dance Umbrella 2025, a performance that “isn't a game of gazes, nor an invitation to gaze or desire: it's a protest” (Vito De Biasi, “Harper’s Bazaar Italy”), and having received reviews for her work as a whole, Elena Antoniou returns with ODE, this time to seek the tender core of female power. As Eoin Fenton [“A young(ish) perspective”] notes in his review, “If anyone is to carry on that fine tradition of ‘dance from the vagina,’ as Martha Graham put it, it just might be Elena Antoniou.

Elena Antoniou is a Cypriot dance and performance artist. She graduated with honours from the Greek National School of Dance and London Contemporary Dance School “The Place”, as a member of Edge. She was a scholarship recipient of the Koula Pratsika Foundation and the DanceWEB Programme at ImpulsTanz Vienna. She has presented work internationally and collaborated with Onassis Stegi, Marina Abramović Institute, NEON, and the Athens Epidaurus Festival. Since 2021, she has worked with choreographer Maria Hassabi and served as performer, choreographer, and movement director in Greece and Cyprus. Her work LANDSCAPE is supported by the Onassis Stegi Touring Programme and tours internationally. She has received multiple awards.

Concept, Choreography, Performance: Elena Antoniou

Performance: Anna Papathanasiou

Music: Maria Spivak

Dramaturgy: Odysseas I. Konstantinou

Art direction: Christos Kyriakides

Lighting design: Vasilis Petinaris

Styling coordination: Philippe G. Missas

Photography & Graphics: Saint

Production Coordination (Internationally): Alex Papasimakopoulou

Production Coordination (Cyprus): Loukia Vassiliou

With the support of the NEON Organisation for Culture and Development & ONASSIS STEGI Touring Programme.

The premiere of the work took place in Cyprus, as part of the "Terpsichore 2025" programme of the Department of Contemporary Culture, Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture.

Duration: 45’ 

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