I found myself working as a choreographer, but knowing little about dance or any other art-form from which I could make the lateral leap into dance. So I started out using my body as my primary--and music as my secondary--material. Meaning I’d always start a choreography from a neutral condition. In reality, I began to compose, which is something that had interested me since I was a child. As had organizing a group, which was something I’d undertake with those first childhood shows in the courtyard of our apartment block. A little later, we made an entire neighbourhood out of cardboard-box houses; it was like a huge installation. Looking at old photographs, I realized that every single game I played as a child was staged as a performance. Memory in my mind, is not an act but rather an image, a depiction, a trace.

My relationship to my body. I was not interested in words and could never draw, but movement was always of fundamental importance to me; which is how I ended up choreographing my first work and setting up the OKTANA company.

No, the atmosphere comes first, entire and self-contained. Like an installation with movement.

When I graduated from the State Dance School in 1993—as a dancer, because there was no choreography department back then—I’d already set up my own dance company, so it was fairly inevitable that I should enter a period of research. As far as the visual arts were concerned, I only really knew what we’d been taught on our dance course. But that changed when I realized it was the performance as a whole that interested me, not just the movement. Then, as I set about reading, learning and viewing shows all over the world, I began to find out that my main sources of inspiration were actually cinema and the visual arts. Of course, I’d define the latter far more broadly than works on display in a gallery or a museum to encompass anything and everything that can be read as visual art. So I’d regard someone simply sitting on a terrace as an abandoned body on a spatial plane, in the sky. In a way, the everyday is included in the material of my mythology.

The sets for all my works have been fixed and had an installation-like feel to them. Even in Winterreise trip edition—a study with works by Schubert as its starting point which led to our production of Winterreise—the process began with a series of small installations at various points around Thessaloniki’s Royal Theatre. Viewers followed a route visiting these points, where they found dancers placed like in situ kinetic sculptures. One dancer, for instance, was jammed into a corner covered in chocolate writing verses from a Schubert lieder on the floor using chocolate scooped off his body.

Yes, it was performance art, pure and simple. It was my third piece since my work had begun to veer towards the visual arts round 2000. I’d definitely describe my work as performance now, not dance.

“The stripping of the twenty masks” in draft b of Free Besieged takes the use to which masks were put in draft a further. For twenty minutes, twenty performers wearing masks depicting the faces of famous people from all over the world strip extremely slowly, declaring that the global community is naked in the face of the siege. You can’t hide behind your mask, whichever one you’ve chosen. The piece could be performed in a museum, or anywhere else, for that matter. I consider it my most meaningful performance to date.

As I gradually explored the territory I had marked out for myself, I began to make more meaningful contact with visual artists and their work, which started fuelling my inspiration more directly, sometimes in the form of images and sometimes as a particular ‘feel’ or atmosphere. It felt really right. And I started experimenting with my—usually naked—body as a part of a visual composition. That I now asked my dancers to do the same clearly affected the structure and form of my works from Crazy Happiness on.

I can’t perceive of a space without a human presence. I can’t imagine an art installation devoid of the human element as an image, an absence or something else.

I’ve only used dancers very rarely in my visual works, because I conceive of the human body entirely differently in that art-form: I treat the body as an unprocessed object in my visual works.

Do you perceive your visual work in a more documentary light? My visual work deals with real spaces and real situations; it records actual conditions. There are visual artists who create a new world in their art, but that is something I do in the theatre, in dance. I’m not interested in doing the same in my visual work, where I want everything that happens to be as rough as possible, like a sketch.

It does make it more abstract. I use a lot of conflicting elements in my performances, but focus on a specific condition in each of my visual pieces.

I’m not sure about that, though I would say that the visual arts don’t use body experientially. With the exception of performance artists, visual artists don’t approach the body in a free or experiential way... So while thought and construction take the lead role in the visual arts, with performers it is the embodiment of thought. As a choreographer, I learnt to move before I started to think, and started to choreograph before I became ‘political’. Actually, I firmly believe in this different experience of the body; I am convinced that when the body is liberated, our thoughts become more generous, more humble. And when our bodies learn to function, to move, we acquire a more moral view of the world and our relationships with others. I don’t mean that in any conservative sense; what I mean is that it makes us... more just.

Theory, instinct and the performance context.

It’s the artistic act that fuels my inspiration, not the theoretical discourse that accompanies it. I’m interested in art’s power, not its sentiment in any melodramatic sense. I’m drawn to the image, to the power of the image and of form, which is to say the feeling art exudes as a construction. It’s the power of the construction that moves me.

Dance and the visual arts: exchanges and embargos.

The performance context is completely different: you go into a theatre, a space with entirely different production capabilities, you’ve paid for a ticket. The same work presented in a museum might follow an entirely different logic. Another difference is that theatre performances usually include the element of repetition.

I most often draw inspiration from the cinema and from photography, and have been particularly influenced affected by the worlds created by directors like Fellini, Antonioni, the Koreans, Gus Van Sant, and David Lynch; very different worlds which nonetheless have something in common. I’m interested in what I want to achieve in my own works, meaning I don’t want to charm the viewer with the ‘miracle’ before him; I don’t want to point in a particular direction; I want to grip the viewers without them registering the point at which they become lost in the work.

Not really. I have worked with set designer like Dionysis Fotopoulos, though.

Though I don’t really want to admit it... with very few exceptions, I’m really quite autocratic: the set designer has to execute my vision.

Dance is definitely more open. Look how easily it accepted Dimitris Papaioannou, for instance. But it’s still very hard for a dancer to move into the visual arts in Greece. The art scene and the art market are very much a closed circuit, and you’ll encounter a lot of prejudice if you haven’t had a purely visual education. I have to say, too, that the attention journalists sometimes pay to me in group exhibitions, at the expense of visual artists of my own age but less well-known, can sometimes become a source of friction. These are my reasons for deciding not to seek to participate in visual arts events.

Yes, but not in Greece.

I’d say every idiom needs to seek renewal, to transcend what has already been expressed through them. But just as it makes no sense to speak the same language to everyone, we cannot aspire to a single unified language in the arts. After all, it is the limits of idioms and the way they relate that is fascinating, though their removal would not be a problem. But I do feel that if the visual arts do not approach the body as experientially as dance—you sweat, for instance, when you dance—they have simply missed out on an additional element.

There is an obvious need for things to recombine, for alternative forms to emerge in greater numbers. However, while this could lead to the removal of the boundaries delimiting different forms of artistic expression, it could just as well entrench them still further. Whatever the case, I don’t hold out much hope of anything truly alternative emerging in the future, barring the possibilities opened up by new technologies.

The idea of flesh and blood being replaced by some sort of virtual body leaves me virtually panic-stricken and disinterested in anything: the cinema, dance and the visual arts as well as new technologies.

In Greece, we are only as of late encountering the first instances of performances which tend towards spectacle. This means that people feel a need for ‘big’ images, to see things that will stimulate and impress them. Maybe because people need to experience what they see on the television up close, or to see something entirely different. But while the spectacle is purely commercial by design, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing: the phantasmagoric isn’t easy to pull off, either.

First of all, I don’t consider myself to belong exclusively to the dance scene. In a way, my work’s power has transcended the dance framework. And what we call mass spectacle can be terribly powerful. The Madonna “Confession Tour” concert I attended was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life in terms of the visuals, the music, the movement... everything. The emotion conveyed by that concert, the way it took an ideological stance and its combination of images, movement, actions and visual phenomena was unmatched. What is especially shocking is that someone who you know buys and sells everything also takes a political stance. It’s all a game; an utterly bizarre construct designed to impress. I grew up in this culture of the disco glitter ball, and that isn’t something I can cast off. I don’t know how to deal with materials that don’t sparkle in one way or another; I could never make a cardboard set. Of course, given the relative size of her market, Peggy Zina can never be a Madonna, but I’m absolutely delighted when people are pleasantly surprised by the aesthetic of her video clips, posters and CD covers. It’s an extra benefit, this bringing of a mass public into contact with more refined forms of art. Image, spectacle and movement are all elements of the same edifice we’ve been discussing all along.