TO BE POSSESED
2023
CREDITS
Concept, Choreography, Performance
Chara Kotsali
Dramaturgy
Dimitra Mitropoulou
Artistic Consultant
Periklis Pravitas
Music & Sound Design
Jeph Vanger
Original Music Piece – “Furiosa”, lip sync transcription and harmonization
Dimitra Trypani
Lighting Design
Eliza Alexandropoulou
Line Production
Delta Pi
Commissioned & produced
Onassis Stegi and first presented as part of Onassis Dance Days 2023
Supported in touring by Onassis STEGI’s “Outward Turn” Programme
photos: Pinelopi Gerasimou
DATES
Onassis Dance Days, 4, 5.3.2023
Ιn the Shadow of the rock festival (Vironas) 24.6.2023
Impulstanz Festival- 8: tension young choreographer’s series, 10,12.7.2023
Mill of performing arts (Larissa), 26.9.2023
Euro-Scene Leipzig, 10-11. 11.2023
Theseum theatre, 7,14, 21.1.2024
Spring Forward Festival 2024, 22.3.2024
The work “to be possessed” is a solo physical and sound performance that showcases material and aural aspects of a heteronomous DIY archive of “possessed” women drawn from a variety of cultural contexts.
The piece experiments with the creation of rituals of remembrance and the stirring of the multiple voices that dwell within us. Kotsali indulges in the demonic as she attempts to animate the phenomena she encounters, inviting them to reveal their overwhelming yet subversive character. She summons spirits that haunt our language, our scriptures, our knowledge, our minds, and the material world itself.
The performer and choreographer lets herself become a mouthpiece for these stories about demons, exorcism and the invocation of spirits. Doing so, she presents a moving body that is forever outside the self, a form of experience that calls into question the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the individual woman.
Choreographer’s note: “The possessed body; riddled with holes and manifold, rude and counterproductive, it cedes in an emancipatory and, oftentimes, healing mania. Ever since I was a teenager, I had an obsession with horror movies and especially whatever involved haunted places and demonisms. The idea of a girl or woman talking with many voices, speaking in tongues, spitting her exorcist and contorting her body in extreme ways, instilled in me a sense of fear and gratification. Years have passed and my obsessions have settled in other fields, but the sense that all is “haunted” and all people are “demonized” has morphed into a certainty. Bodies that overflow, that know languages they were never taught of, bodies that step into a danger zone and at the same time become menacing. Bodies terminally outside the self, like forms of experience that defy sufficiency and autonomy of the individual. The genealogy of possessed bodies tells us on the impossibility of perfect solitude and reveals that discourse and writing, deed and conscience, the immaterial and material world are haunted by voices that preceded and voices yet to be born. Compiling an archive of sounds, images and materials, I endeavored to insert different voices in a conversation on the experience and concept of possession by powers that go beyond the individual body, on solitude as a gateway to the spectral presences of memory and thought, on the objects that bear their own lives and, finally, for the “unheard songs,” the unseen music breathing within the documents on stage.”







REVIEWS
Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung
“A study on demonology about exorcism and incarnation and about how one brings all of this into an art form, that is rationally reflective and at the same time expressive and intuitive.”
(…)
Her out-of-body body spasms (realized in a high accuracy), the lip-syncing/speaking in tongues, her scenic interplay between staggering and resting points, her scenic interplay is less a sign of defense than of acceptance and devotion. Kotsali propagates the body, as she puts it, in its obsession “counterproductive” body as one that has lapsed into “emancipatory and often healing madness”. This is boldly conceived – and masterfully realized.”
Tanznet (Caroline Helm)
” a captivating debut by Chara Kotsali (…)The Greek dancer’s language of movement is intense, captivating, precise and demanding. (…)Leipzig’s audience thanked Chara Kotsali for this impressive journey into the world of impressive journey into the world of demons and inner voices”
8:tension στο Impulstanz 2023 (honorary mention by the jury)
We want to honor Chara for her virtuosity, precision and eye for detail in working with multiple media; and for creating a system of cultural, historical and spiritual references around uncanny femininity that came together as a complex semantic and affective, embodied landscape.
(Tamara Alegre, Anna Kozonina, Mateusz Szymanówka- jury of the Impulstanz- 8 tension: Young Choreographers’ Series 2023)
Stella Charami, monopoli.gr
“Her performance (technically flawless) came across as deliberately elusive, projecting a lonely, manic spirit and body in a society that refuses to see it except through a filter of normalization.”
Klimentini Vounelaki, Epohi Newspaper
“Chara Kotsali’s choreography To Be Possessed, a contemporary interpretation of spirit possession and exorcism from the demons that haunt her (us), highlighted the many gifts of the choreographer-performer who managed to transcribe elements of her experiential space into visual, kinetic-gestural, and sonic material of the performance.”

