to be possessed
2023
CREDITS
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
Primavera Dei Teatri Castrovillari, 25.5.2024
Opera Estate Festival Veneto 44, 25.8.2024
Trois C-L Luxembourg, Hors Circuits, 7.9.2024
Ou Dance Festival (Finland), 11.9.2024
Festival Excentriques, La Briqueterie CDCN Paris, 24 & 26. 9. 2024
Tanz Platz Novi Sad, 19.9.2024
Roma Europa Festival, 18.10.2024
Festival L’année commence avec elles/Pole-Sud CDCN Strasbourg, 17 & 18.1.2025
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.
A dancer and choreographer who has also been trained in theater studies, anthropology, and music, Chara Kotsali is seeking to investigate the phenomenon of spirit possession via a broadened understanding of the term. By means of a disarticulated staged ritual, she engages in a trial possession, attempting to bring each of the documentary instances she encounters to life, and calling upon them to reveal their shattering and subversive nature.
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
Paneacqua Culture
“Her disjointed gestures, her moving without apparent direction in a continuous sabbah, her pulling a meter-long black tongue out of her mouth, certainly have to do with the ancestral dimension of the uncanny but give the artist a way to exhibit an impressive number of skills(…)Returning to Kotsali: the intense and semantically powerful performance is certainly among the most interesting things seen in Bassano, and again we point out that it will be in the 2024 Romaeuropa program. We highly recommend its viewing to our Roman friends!”
B. MOTION Bassano La furia generazionale e la possessione nell’arte – seconda parte
Stefano Tomassini on Teatrocritica
“Another very instructive solo on what performance can, therefore not to be missed, was To be possessed by Greek dancer and choreographer Chara Kotsali(…) In this “genealogy of the possessed,” Kotsali juggles a polyphony of voices, sounds and objects incorporated according to a disorder capable of sudden spectral epiphanies, of very personal rituals of remembrance.(…)But it is in the dissociation of the playback through which many voices in many languages are spoken, as the body goes through contortions and vibrations describing loss and fall (but also excitement and triumph), that one senses the overwhelming, disturbing and subversive character of possession that tries to escape the grip of order and colonization of bodies and minds.”
Forme della stasi e atti bianchi nella danza a Castrovillari
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.”
