The starting point for the HOW ROMANTIC project is the dance marathons organised during the Great Depression of the 1920s and ‘30s in the United States. What drew you to that phenomenon?
Katerina Andreou
Annabelle Bonnery, the director of Carte Blanche, based in Bergen, Norway, invited me to create a piece with the company's full team of fourteen performers. It was the first time I had worked with so many people, and I needed to hold on to an idea—or rather, to a shared imaginary world—that would establish the conditions for composing a dance in which many people take part, without creating an ensemble or retreating into individual solitudes. The dance marathons in the United States in the 1930s and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Sydney Pollack allowed me to start from fertile ground in terms of composition, which is inherent to their logic—both choreographic and existential. The participants who came forward to take part in these events were very poor people who were not seeking recognition but rather to survive during a period of widespread social, human and economic crisis. Dancing to the point of exhaustion, being the last one standing, allowed them to earn money to make ends meet. It was these intense emotional states, hovering between despair and anger, that interested me. It was an opportunity to address the malaise of society, in which we are still trying to stay afloat today—a kind of persistence in the struggle to survive. I wanted to speak about this tragedy made visible through dance marathons, this feeling of being consumed by the world that we are constantly encouraged to believe in. This interest in tragedy runs through my work and also engages with the question of romanticism—in the sense of a hope, sometimes naïve, that never lets go of us.
How did you work with the performers on stage?
The idea was to draw a line between the group and the couple. What does it mean, on stage, to represent “a group of couples”? What different degrees of intimacy can be brought out? Between them, between the audience and the stage. Between those who dance and those who watch. We worked scene by scene to bring forth an awareness of intimacy, which here comes through the act of being watched, by an audience, but also by the other performers. It was also about highlighting our own projections of what it means to be a pair. We looked for tools and materials to create friction within the dual directive of “never be alone” / “always be alone”. It is in this discomfort between partners that tension emerges.
How were the set design and the sound environment of the show developed? Was the idea to evoke those dance halls where the marathons took place?
For the set design, I wanted to propose a form that would be highly adaptable and aligned with ecological guidelines. This was both a technical and artistic starting point, one that takes into account the question of sustainable production, which I find important today. I focused on the vision of a simple stage architecture: the lighting frames and marks out the space, and a platform at the centre becomes a kind of abstract diving board. Floor markings allowed us to suggest references, while also playing at erasing them. They exist in a kind of abstraction. The music for this piece follows the same approach. I worked with Cristian Sotomayor, drawing above all on samples and sound mixing that function as traces of imagined worlds and echo the references —the spaces and eras—that run through the piece, sometimes also offering a way into it. This persistence of reference allows me to create a form that also engages contemporary issues, highlighting the absurdity of certain situations. Dance marathons carry a kind of spectacle of misery, and even of death, which shocks us today, and yet we have since become accustomed to far worse. Keeping the scenography minimal also allows me to focus on the essentials and to address this distortion of the gaze that we are still subjected to today, through our consuming video content, reality TV, or talent shows that expose us to this kind of constant, diffuse violence, , consuming the reality of our own existence as an image, or an endless competition.
Does the audience have a role to play in this show? What exactly are they witnessing?
Throughout the performance, we play with the question of the gaze and of testimony. It is a performance, embraced as such from beginning to end, and at the same time the performers sometimes become an audience onstage—a show within the show, with us as witnesses to the witnesses of a dance. We aim to build a sense of complicity in our relationship with the audience. This mise en abyme also brings out the reality-show aspect of dance marathons, which were in a way the first reality TV programmes. In HOW ROMANTIC, we highlight the gaze we direct toward the audience. This allows us to bear witness to this suffering and this struggle to survive. Distress becomes something that can be shared**, because dance and its physical intensity are capable of infecting even the witness—of making everybody in the room, seated or not, want to move I want to share my perspective on the tragic and the absurd, but above all I want to convey to the audience a desire to move, to let physical exertion become a kind of joyful contagion that mobilises bodies and encourages more collective forms of action. What gives hope in this piece is that it begins with fourteen performers and ends with fourteen, carried by the same momentum of pleasure, despite the distress or solitude.
As a choreographer, which encounters have been decisive in your career?
I started studying dance and piano at the age of five. I saw them as hobbies, but I devoted a great deal of time and energy to them. I’m from Greece, where it’s very difficult to pursue an artistic career, to make it a “real profession.” As a teenager, I was politically active, and questions around rights and justice resonated very strongly with me. I began studying to become a lawyer while continuing to practice dance. Very quickly, reality caught up with me, and I realised it was impossible for me to continue on that path if I wanted to be happy. At twenty-five, I entered the Athens Conservatoire, where I trained for three years. I had to take the risk of fully committing myself to my practice. At that point, I felt it was a matter of survival. I then joined a master’s programme in performing arts and research at ESSAIS in Angers, under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh, where I focused more specifically on staging and choreographic writing. That was one of my first cultural shocks after arriving in France: the possibility of exploring a wide range of creative spaces and encountering different modes of artistic writing. I worked as a performer for several years before beginning to choreograph in 2016. When I look at where I come from and where I am now, I feel as though I’ve crossed the cosmos. I’ve drawn inspiration from a wide range of artistic worlds, including the work of Pina Bausch, the aesthetics of Maguy Marin, opera, and the American avant-garde. All these influences feed into my creations. It is through this blend of aesthetics that my choreographic writing has become “fractal,” in the sense that I seek to multiply the layers of interpretation within the works I create.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux in February 2026