Yesterday, on the 15th of November, we went with 10 teeNEXTers to the dance performance of Katherine Andreou, named Mourn Baby Mourn.
Katherine Andreou is a Greek actress and dancer who studied and lives in France. She has already done several performances. In her former shows, she had a very good structure but there is still room for improvisation.
An example of a former show is BSTRD. In one corner of a ring-like set, a record spins on a vinyl turntable. Katherine is moving to the sound of house music, a hybrid flow of electronic music where samples and influences mix. It is precisely this composite nature that the choreographer transforms into movements in BSTRD. It is a bastard that is not an absence of origin, but a multiplicity of origins integrated into a new language, a choreographic writing composed of recurring gestures and moments of improvisation.
Mourn Baby Mourn was mainly centered on a wall, which K Andreou built and then demolished, K. Andreou projected her text on it and danced with it.
This show was entirely produced by Katherina Andreou, she did the music, the text, the artistic direction and performance.
This show, which was written during the covid pandemic, is all about ill-being (“mal-être in the text). The artist was going through a depression when she decided to do this show. It was really a way to escape those feelings by confronting them through dance. The result is an emotionally heavy show. The dance looks like a attempt to escape herself, the text is very dark, it really deals with her feeling of incapacity and her need to « passer à l’acte ».
We had the chance to talk at the end of the show with the artist, and she opened up about the difficulties of the first representations. She wasn’t over those feelings yet, and deal with them in front of people in such a frontal way was very hard for her. She wanted to wear her favorite clothes because it made her feel like herself during the show.
The audience, which we were able to interview at the end, all felt the emotional weight of her performance. Many people heard about the show from their professors at school and they all loved it for many different reasons. Some of them liked the dancing, others liked the music but all of them were left speechless due to the emotions of the performance.
Romane (France), Anne-Laure (Belgium)
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