"Dance with me Father" By Katerina Antoniadou

A few words about the project

A father with dementia and his hysterical daughter try to communicate in vain. Through their own disorder, everyone pulsates within themselves, seeking personal redemption.

The daughter has devoted herself entirely to her father. She visits him every day, takes care of him, and has complete responsibility for him. She has completely put her life aside. This evolving day is also when her father suffers a great crisis. He doesn't recognise her. He himself, clinging to a stopped clock, confines himself to repetitive patterns, stubbornly denying the truth. He denies his children, the job he served, and his inability to support himself.

Despite the hysterical pressure he receives from his daughter, he seems to be constantly escaping reality—or so the daughter thinks.

She is lost and unable to communicate with the new reality. Unable to manage her long-ago broken relationship with her father, but above all, her relationship with herself, she gets confused. She gets confused and accuses her father. She goes so far as to question her father, terrifying him and shouting, "I don't believe you... This is one of your games...!".

Being permanently in the victim's position, attached to her past, which is directly involved with her father, she recalls it, triggering wild memories and seducing him into a violent dance of sensations and hallucinations.

Communication is a lost game. Understanding on both sides is non-existent, and each hero's ego is enormous, leaving no room for them to see beyond their noses. Dementia and hysteria advance, strangled, with sickly steps, half tottering to the left and half to the right.

There is no destination. They both go where the wind blows. One afternoon. A delirious day, where each following day follows another, where nothing changes.

Always through humour, always through a laugh, always through a cry, one afternoon, father and daughter meet and look at each other with closed eyelids.

Cast:
Giorgos Armenis & Katerina Antoniadou

Performance ID

Text: Katerina Antoniadou
Directed by: Giorgos Armenis