31st Kalamata International Dance Festival-XENIA KOGHILAKI/Slamming

Slamming invites the audience into an immersive choreographic experience of extreme dancing. Three performers commit to one shared agreement: a furious dance that originates from slamming. They transform mosh pit practices on stage, oscillating between rage and softness, rawness and trust, ache and pleasure, violence and tenderness, exploring these notions not as binaries, but as interconnected elements within a sui generis dance form. The audience ‘sees’ the sweat dripping, the breaths intensifying, the hearts beating faster, as the three performers are wholeheartedly “caught in a mosh.” Slamming begins with Xenia Koghilaki’s interest in embodied practices that emerge spontaneously in moments of collective expression. It seeks emotional nuances in the aggressive crowd, symbolic affiliations in brutality and frenzy, revealing a collective ritual that lurks behind an ostensible rage. It approaches crowd dances not as something to be deciphered, but as sites of experience, where new intimacies and alternative ways of moving and relating—both individually and collectively—can emerge.

During the performance, strobe lights will be used.