sarma

In “Boudoir 1810”, her second work, and this time with her own group named Griffón, Ioanna Portolou, a visual artist turned choreographer, depicted women’s world as a restricted space, symbolically presented in the confined and very private space of a boudoir. Four females chatting and spending time in a boudoir pass from exercising power upon each other (because of the –absent- male gaze?) to trying and look pretty. After a while the desire to displease each other and please the Other (to the point of looking strange or “disfigured” according to different tastes and styles), wears off and the four women seem to feel bored. (We did too.) Then they started to play using the props: first they sat on them and showed off, then they used them as disguise (i.e. wearing the covers of the arm-chairs). A good moment was the dressing up of one of the performers, corsets, gloves, suspender-belts and bras being replaced by athletes’ belts, knee-pads et.c., so by the time she was ready, she looked more like “Robocop” than like sweet “Barbie”. Longer than its true potential and at points naïf and merely decorative (trapped in what it aimed at subverting), Ioanna Portolou’s Boudoir 1810, is worth as one of the first attempts by a female Greek choreographer to comment upon gender issues in a contemporary, non-symbolic way, while also trying to rid herself of old-fashioned theatricality. Great danger: she tries to cut down to measure (Procrustean logic) very serious issues to fit a superficial, stylish atmosphere.

4.2.1, the second piece of this double bill, was an indeed very long, duet. The (female) dancers, appeared on stage wearing hats with reindeer horns on top, which they used as they played and quarreled. The game of loss and distancing between them was based upon muttering of words, gestures and simple movements repeated to exhaustion. In the end, one of the dancers moved to the back, and slowly pulled the curtains across the side opposite to the spectators, revealing a huge poster of a tropical beach with palm-trees, while the other was lying exhausted on the floor, staring at the poster. A scene, probably alluding to the future seen as “paradise”, or to the past, that is their once shared, now lost friendship, equaled to “paradise”. Lost and found friendships, secrets, playfulness…Do “girls’” performances have always to be about “girly” staff?