Time & Date
Information
Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends presale: from 13 MAR 2019, 12:00
General presale: from 20 MAR 2019, 12:00
Full price: 7, 10, 15, 20 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 8, 12, 16 €
Groups 10+ people: 7, 11, 14 €
Νeighbourhood residents: 7 €
People with disabilities & Unemployed: 5 € | Companions: 10 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@onassis.org
Duration
50 minutes
Introduction
What materials make up a dancer’s life? Ioannis Mandafounis stages his own grand finale, with autobiographical elements and touches of humor, offering a secret peek at the life onstage and behind the scenes.
What materials make up a dancer’s life? In the eyes of the public a dancer’s career may seem like a sprint, but in fact it is a marathon of challenges, beginning with training at a young age and coming to a close with the final bow. As a career wanes, every dancer is called upon to refute the obvious: the body, exhausted by the constant technical demands, has to resist decline and continue to shine before the triumphant exit.
Classically trained dancer Ioannis Mandafounis, who has performed with internationally recognized modern dance troupes, returns in this work to his “first love,” ballet, paying it a final tribute by dancing some of its most challenging male solos (“variations”) one after the other. The piece plays with the overblown sentimentality of the farewells of the “étoiles,” the great ballet stars, while also retaining its own sentimentality, as well as humor.
His accomplice on stage, talented actress Antigone Frida, accompanies him not only musically, but also emotionally, engaging with him/us in a dialogue rather danced than spoken about the flight of youth and the love of dance.
An evening that takes us behind the scenes to show how ballet routines are learned, offering a commentary on the superhuman struggle hiding behind the seemingly painless art of dance.
Photo: Elina Giounanli
Literary Reference Text:
Extracts taken from “Journey to the End of the Night” by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
List of Variations (in order of appearance):
All the variations listed below have been specially reworked for "Faded" by Smaralia Karakosta.
“Le Réveil de Flore” – Marius Petipa / Riccardo Drigo (1894)
“Coppélia” – Enrico Cecchetti / Léo Delibes (1894)
“La Belle au bois dormant” – Marius Petipa / Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1890)
“Les Sylphides” – Michel Fokine / Frédéric Chopin (1909)
“Other Dances” – Jerome Robbins / Frédéric Chopin (1976)
“Manon” – Kenneth MacMillan / Jules Massenet (1974)
“Le Lac des cygnes” – Marius Petipa / Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1895)
“Suite en blanc” – Serge Lifar / Édouard Lalo (1943)
“Le Papillon” – Marie Taglioni / Jacques Offenbach (1860)
Mandafounis was twice recipient of Onassis Foundation fellowships. Both times were catalytic for his career: the first gave him the opportunity to study at the Paris Conservatoire, one of the most important dance academies in the world. Several years later, in the context of his continuing education as a dancer, he received a second fellowship to study alongside Master Akira Hino in Japan.
Setting out and coming to an end. Typically, the life of a classical ballet dancer begins with training at a young age, in some cases as young as 8, and ends in middle age, around 45. While there are always exceptions to these rules, the career of classical dancers is relatively short. For stars (“étoiles”), the final bow is a moment of ultimate exaltation.
Despite his training in classical dance, Ioannis Mandafounis didn’t follow the career of a classical dancer. Nevertheless, he still declares ballet to have been his “first love.” Like anything else you devote yourself to entirely, ballet involves moments of painful preparation, and others of great joy and reward. The dancer constantly struggles with the limits of his body, of his endurance, with himself and the exaggerated demands of the profession.
Though the utter admiration for the hard-won bodily capabilities of a dancer may be a cliché, underneath remains an entire system of discipline to rules. And while on stage everything hinges on upholding those rules, behind the scenes, that entirely “ascetic” dedication can also comprise an excuse for humorous, light moments.
Credits
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