Chara Kotsali (Greece) explores choreography and performance through an expanded approach, attempting to involve methodologies from anthropology, documentary art, music, and other performing languages while being particularly concerned with the politics of sound and movement. Her practice includes writing, field recordings, and DIY sound composition. Her work has been presented in Greece and internationally at festivals and venues including Onassis Dance Days, Athens Epidaurus Festival, and ImPulsTanz, and has been selected for the Aerowaves network’s Twenty24 and Twenty26 programmes as well as the Moving Balkans platform. She has worked as a movement director in theater performances by renowned Greek directors, receiving in 2023 the Greek Critics Association award for best theater choreography (“The Rise of Arturo Oui,” directed by Aris Biniaris).
In a dance marathon unfolding across the historical continuum, three women move between personal and collective memory, between the past that still lies ahead of us and the future we have already left behind. Focusing on the dancing body and using sound and poetry as choreographic materials, It's the end of the amusement phase confronts the idea of progress as the most exhausting of linear narratives. In the aftermath of a technological and social revolution that never truly happened, the performance traces an emotional history of the present.
On stage, the three dancers engage in a relentless choreography that gradually depletes their physical and emotional resources. Their dance unfolds in the space between pleasure and propaganda, amusement and collapse. It reveals the ambivalent relationship between the individual body, the collective body, and history itself — between the promise of progress and the violence of destruction. It's the end of the amusement phase is neither another apocalyptic prophecy nor a nostalgic longing for an idealized past. Rather, it acknowledges that the experiment has, fortunately, failed. The end of the world has not yet arrived, and neither has the end of history. In this suspended moment of falling, the poetics of vertigo emerges as the performance’s most fragile and tender gesture.