Art Happens

In My Fierce Ignorant Step, Papadopoulos seeks to consciously process the influence that the monumental musical work “Axion Esti” by Mikis Theodorakis, set to the poetry of Odysseas Elytis, has had on him, as a collective memory activated through listens. The subject is not the music itself but the shared landscape it evokes. A landscape that lives within us, travels with us, and allows us to instantly revisit a moment from the past that has never really passed. Everything is still here. Or at least, this is what the work explores: the truth of the youth, momentum, and courage; a truth that, if we consider it fleeting, quaint, or charming, will be forever lost—and along with it, the meaning of our world.

For the choreographer, the initial impulse for creating My Fierce Ignorant Step is rooted in the sonic memories of his childhood and youth that he shares with many other Greeks; these are collective memories tied to the fate of this country, even if that is not always visible. The work resists conformity with a cascade of forms, with an insatiable longing for the present, the future, and the past, with a desire for a life that is bold, laborious, and entirely humane, made of our fragile, insignificant flesh.

The work brings to the fore qualities that have always been present in Christos Papadopoulos’ oeuvre, but the emphasis shifts radically here. Specific themes and materials have concerned him from the beginning, but now they are clearly discernible and among them is the idea of “togetherness,” the simple initial point where both politics and love seem to appear. That is why the performers dance together in this work.

The synchronization of multiplied movement occurs, but it is not the goal; we do not dance together because we are synchronized, but we synchronize because we are together. The system that emerges is not a priority, nor is beauty. These appear to be mechanisms that allow us to find one another, to exist, to meet, and to marvel at the energy that is born, multiplied, dispersed, and offered. There is a value that holds things together here. It is not faith in a system, a machine, or a trick, but a daring trust in the good.

PAPADOPOULOS’ NOTE

How can there not be anger with everything going on around us? How can one bear this reality? The political situation, the rise of the far right, corruption, wars that we have now come to accept as a kind of political normalcy, environmental destruction—all the things we once believed we would never have to live through are here.

In this bleak reality, where the lines of dystopia have already been crossed, I’ve recently found myself reverting to my adolescent years. I remember that lust for life, the speed, the unwavering drive, the sense that anything was possible. That fearless confidence that the world was in front of us, open, and ours, and that we would live it the way we desired and deserved.

This work is my attempt to revisit that feeling. To find it again. And with it, to regain that strength, that optimism, and that sense of “together.” I have to remind myself that hoping is already an act of resistance and that such courage was neither naïve nor quaint at all. It was true. And it still is.