To be possessed

Being possessed, exorcism, inner voices, haunted places and demons: Already as a teenager, Chara Kotsali was as intimidated and as she was fascinated by horror films and their characters, especially the archetype of the “possessed woman”, who has been blamed for all kinds of things throughout history and was usually exorcised by men of the church.

In her solo TO BE POSSESSED, a “genealogy of the possessed” (as she puts it), the dancer and choreographer turns herself into the polyphonic mouthpiece of these bodies that master languages they were never taught, “sprawling bodies”, “bodies that put themselves in danger and thus also become dangerous”. She listens, explores, investigates, tries, tests and awakens the ghostly presences for individual rituals of memory.

It is an ecstatic sound and movement collage of enormous technical precision that shows an archive of “possessed women” from different cultural contexts and reveals their overwhelming, disturbing and subversive character.

TO BE POSSESSED, which premiered in Athens in 2023, is the young Greek dancer and choreographer Chara Kotsali’s first own piece. She studied dance and theatre science, anthropology and music, and – as a dancer – has worked with such famous choreographers as Christos Papadopoulos, Euripides Laskaridis, Tzeni Argyriou and Patricia Apergi.

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