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I was fortunate while visiting my beloved Athens to experience ‘In Plain Site’, part of the curatorial “Dancing Athens”  This unique retrospective was  created in collaboration of the OCC/Onassis Cultural Center, (curatorial directorship: Katia Arfara)  at the (still not opened officially)  premises of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMΣΤ)

(under Extracts from earlier, more abstract works like Accumulation from 1971 was combined with more theatrical pieces such as 1990’s Foray Foret in an unexpected encounter with the Athenian public which puts the abundant natural light of the new museum space to good use. A tribute to the ground-breaking work of the choreographer who put dance into the everyday life of the city).

photos@Venetia Kapernekas

….Dancing Athens invites us to change the way we move and behave in the city, the way we perceive our everyday gestures, our reactions to the unexpected and the random, but also the way we perceive contemporary dance. (Onassis Cultural Center/Dancing Athens press) 

In Plain Site, Trisha Brown Dance Company’s new performance program, allows Brown’s dances to be freed from the constrictions of the conventional stage and to be once again performed in unexpected locations. But unlike her previous site-specific adventures, Trisha Brown: In Plain Site mines and then recombines material from her vast repertory to accommodate the unique spatial demands of the particular venue. Brown’s long-time dancers—and now hand- chosen associate artistic directors Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden—visit the venue, collaborate with the presenting organization in the selection of a site and then decide the pieces that would best fit the selected location. They are re-thinking Brown’s work and finding new ways to express and share her genius. Drastically shortening the distance between the dance and its audience, Trisha Brown: In Plain Site engages the audience in a dramatically different way, illuminating Brown’s fifty years of investigation. (press ) 

 photos @Venetia Kapernekas

….The experimentation that began back then in New York when dancers, composers, poets and visual artists set out together in search of new representational codes has never stopped. Fifty years on, Trisha Brown is still fascinated by and experimenting with the relationship between space, movement and the viewer. In Plain Site is different from her previous site-specific works in so far as it presents a collage of fragments from a half century of emblematic choreography.

It was April 1970 when Trisha Brown tied a dancer to a length of climbing rope and sent him walking down the front of a seven-storey building at 80, Wooster Street, Manhattan. The American choreographer was looking for ways to unsettle the relationship between the human body, gravity and space and the way New Yorkers had learned to think of everyday movements like walking and running. And it was there in the early Seventies that the experiments and unconventional ideas of the Judson Church postmoderns -along with their irresistible desire for change- spilled out into the streets, squares, parks, terraces and museums of New York. (Onassis Cultural Center/Dancing Athens press) 

photos@Venetia Kapernekas

Katia Arfara ; Artistic Director for Theatre and Dance at the OCC
Conceived and curated by Katia Arfara
Head of Production: Dimitra Dernikou
General Technical Management: Lefteris Karabilas
Production Manager: Vassilis Panagiotakopoulos
Production Assistants: Despoina Sifniadou, Eirilena Tsami

Read here latest news about the EMST opening by Margarita Pournara in Kathimerini (end of October 2016)

The ΕΣΜΤ /the “old FIX brewery” – a signature example of post-WWII modernism, designed by the innovative architect Takis Zenetos (1926-1977), which accentuated the horizontal dimension of the building that runs parallel to Syngrou and Kallirois Avenues