31st Kalamata International Dance Festival-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.