IT'S THE END OF
THE AMUSEMENT PHASE
2025
CREDITS
Performance – Material Co-creation Sofia Pouchtou, Christina Skoutela, Chara Kotsali
Assistant Choreographer Vassia Zorbali
Set & Costume Design Periklis Pravitas
Lighting Design Eliza Alexandropoulou
Dramaturgy Consultant Dimitra Mitropoulou
External Eye Κοnstantina Georgelou
Line Production and Tour Production Chara Kotsali & TooFarEast
Warm thanks to Evangelia Chatzitzanou, Katerina Spyropoulou, Spiros Papadopoulos, Stathis Ioannou, Aliki Kazouri, Giorgos Kotsalis, Aspa Aroni, Dimitris Mpourzoukos, and all the ‘unknown’ and ‘renowned’ choreographers and musicians that gave us inspiration during the creative process.
The research for “IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” was supported by Onassis AiR and Réseau Grand Luxe. Special thanks to TROIS C-L Luxembourg, CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva (Porto), Grand Studio Brussels, and L’Abri Geneva.
DATES
Onassis Dance Days 3-6.04.2025
Dance Days Chania 22.07.2025
Maillon, Théâtre de Strasbourg
Scène européenne 6-7.02.2026
In a dance marathon that spans the historical continuum, three women regress between personal and collective history.
Focusing on the dancing body and using sound and poetry as materials, the piece grapples with the notion of progress as the most exhaustive linear narrative. In the wake of a technological and social revolution that ultimately did not happen, “ΙT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” attempts to speak of the present’s emotional history.
Three female dancers interact on stage with the past that lies ahead of us and the future we have left behind. They engage in a dance that exhausts their emotional and physical resources. It is a choreography about the ambivalent relationship of the individual and collective body with history, about the link between progress and destruction, about dances of fun, pleasure, and propaganda.
Choreographer’s note:
Broadcasting from a place in the South that has never sent a rocket into Space and grew old with slow internet, I wish to compose a messy kinetic and sonic chronology of the collective feeling created by launching into Space and simultaneously diving into cyberspace for bodies floating like space debris, for spectacle as the most durable fetish.
I draw inspiration from the dialectical relationship between continuity and discontinuity in how history is portrayed, discussed, and experienced. I experiment with both forms of linear flow (the cinematic single-cam setup, the musical ison, timeline) and discontinuity (collage, mashup, and medley).
“ΙT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” is not another eschatology for use, nor is it another declaration of nostalgia for an exoticized past, but rather an acknowledgement that the experiment has thankfully failed. The end of the world has not yet come, and certainly not the end of history. The poetics of vertigo emerges as the most tender gesture in this hour of the fall.
REVIEWS
Anastasio Koukoutas
https://springbackmagazine.com/read/onassis-dance-days-2025/
Chara Kotsali’s It’s the end of the amusement phase could unapologetically be called a noise manifesto, in the same trajectory as her previous work, creating the kind of whirling nausea that’s so typical of our devastating times. Here, along with electrifying performers Sofia Pouchtou and Christina Skoutela, she not only charges the stage with an inventory of dance-steps and video clip moves (one soon recognises references from Bob Fosse to Trisha Brown and Beyoncé that become a mélange of body automatisms) but creates an aurally dense performance, with high pitch guitar chords and drummings that mess with your heartbeats. Kostali’s choreography feels like a capsule rocketed in time, from a complicated past straight into a vast unimaginable future. A carousel of feelings, facts, images, parade on stage, at times marching to their ridiculous glory, at times defeated yet withstanding, making the performers look like uber-marionettes in this puppetry of absurdity. Cheerleaders of menacing optimism, crushing a birthday cake, covering themselves in body paint, like charlatans in a hyper-nothing realism, they delve into a choreography which becomes a synecdoche for chasing our own tales. If history repeats itself like a farce, then this performance reads the disarming farcical potency of history with courage, pausing our own dark present for one moment to breathe, even though the dancers are left breathless, maybe ascertaining one’s human limits or as Kotsali fiercely recites: ‘Unable to land, unable to take off. So, I pray for a crash in my cyber rabbit hole.’
Stella Charami
“IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” is a bitter and sarcastic commentary on the flimsiness of Western culture and capitalism. “Go West, fuck the rest”, one of the mottos you manage to grasp during Kochali’s merciless rapping. The modern individual’s heavy grief for a present that has no future becomes an angry and, ragingly energetic, choreography by three dancers (in addition to Kotsali, Sophia Pouchtou and Christina Skoutela), a historical monument to the dystopia that passes us by. A performance that has all the guarantees to find its way to stages abroad, especially at this time of global chaos.
