Transnational artistic residency

Dance Days Chania & Dance House Lemesos

28.07 | 19:30 | Platform (swimming pool) former Xenia hotel

Free entrance

The idea of this transnational residency has been around for many years before its realization in this year’s DDC programming. It is seen as an investment in the potentiality of research and development of young Greek artists through the opportunity to engage in an embodied dialogue between movement artists/researchers from different cultures, backgrounds and techniques.

The aim of the project that is implemented for the second time at the festival is to contribute to the exchange of ideas and artistic practices, creating a network of support.

Vacationists in the absurd

What is the relation between the absurd, the meaning of life and the tenuous structures on which we build our lives? What is the relationship between The Myth of Sisyphus and the sociopolitical reality we live in today? Can friendship give an answer to the futility that insists on screaming?

A savior appears. Promising growth. Everything will be fixed. Nevertheless the heroines cannot resist this which with so much audacity and insistence keeps making its appearance: but it is collapsing!

It is 1961. There is so much abundance, so little restraint. There is only audacious hope.

It is 2023. There is so much rain, so little water. There is no hope.

It is 2046. There is no more water.

Taking part in the Transnational Residency of Dance Days Chania x Dance House Lemesos, the fundamental question motivating the first steps of our research is how we, through the condition of distant communication – a condition so common in the contemporary work ecologies – and through the invitation to collaborate with a so far unknown colleague, can create a common ground that hosts listening, exchanging and encountering in a mutual and equal collaborative framework. We thus put the inherent conditions of this Transnational Residency, the distance and the invitation or challenge to collaborate and coexist, as the base of our artistic research, approaching them as a potential to progressively mold new collaborative methodologies of research and creation. Our initial exchanges set off in experimental methodologies of exchange that aim to invite us to collaborate and develop relational intimacy, creating leakages between the professional, personal and sociopolitical spheres of our lives and disregarding the resistances of distance to meaningful connection. This approach evoked thoughts and questionings around topics related to artistic vulnerability, when working with a new collaborator, around how to nurture trust and how we infuse the in-progress work with the qualities of an emerging friendship and the attempt to build a common, non-hierarchical world that, more than the individual voices of each of us, listens to and bridges the space that arises in between us. Through this process we reached the topics of our in-progress piece Vacationists in the absurd that deals with the attempt to find or create meaning in a world that serves absurdity, with friendship as a weapon to toxic times and a supportive cradle for solidarity. Navigated through sociopolitical and relational matters, the piece thus results as an artistic necessity and need and a solidarian quest for redemption, when confronted with the fear of a world that is changing rapidly and audaciously insists on neglecting its collapse.

Polena Kolia Petersen (GR) & Styliana Apostolou (CY)

Transnational Artistic Residency

28 July | 19:30 | Platform (swimming pool) former Xenia hotel

Dance Days Chania & Dance House Lemesos

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