Where there’s friction, there’s fire

• By Jonas Schildermans / Contributing reporter

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A leading voice in Europe’s contemporary dance scene, the Greek minimalist choreographer Christos Papadopoulos makes his Taiwanese debut this month, as ARTQUAKE Festival opens with his latest group piece, My Fierce Ignorant Step.

For Papadopoulos, the road to international recognition and to the playbill of Taipei’s National Theater has never been the result of a series of carefully calculated moves.

Early in his career, he recalls feeling that he was “no one and had nothing great to say.” That changed when his first works, Elvedon (2015) and OPUS (2016), attracted attention through the European dance platform Aerowaves.

“Presenting my work with Aerowaves helped me to achieve what would normally take me five or 10 years,” Papadopoulos says about the connections he established with European theaters and festivals through this platform.

Since that breakthrough, Papadopoulos has created works for leading institutions, including Nederlands Dans Theater and the Ballet de l’Opera national de Lyon. He last year became the first recipient of the inaugural Rose International Dance Prize.

For the choreographer, however, what constitutes success is less a question of awards and international tours, and more of the hard work that happens inside the rehearsal studio alongside his dancers and artistic collaborators.

“Every work of mine, it’s in the same pot with all the rest,” he says.

Each creation brings new discoveries and understandings that feed into the next, accumulating into a continuous artistic evolution rather than a sequence of isolated achievements.

That way, Papadopoulos lives by the advice given to him by his colleague choreographer and friend Dimitris Papaioannou, to not panic over international recognition, but to just “ignore it, go into the studio, make good work, and all the rest will follow.”

“Winning the Rose Prize offered some financial breathing room,” Papadopoulos says. He re-invested the prize money directly into his team and his next work, My Fierce Ignorant Step, now bringing 10 dancers to Taiwan.

My Fierce Ignorant Step emerged from a personal reckoning. After roughly a decade of relentless work, Papadopoulos realized that he had neglected his health, friendships and need for time away.

He worried that continuing at the same pace would make him resent his profession, while political victories of the far-right, wars and corruption left him feeling increasingly hopeless.

To find a way forward, he looked back to adolescence, when he possessed a fierce belief that he could help make the world better simply by fighting for it.

The work became an attempt to recover that conviction. Rather than offering uncomplicated optimism, he wanted to explore whether reconnecting with others could restore a sense of agency.

“If we find each other again,” he says, “we might also re-find our connection with action and activism.”

That idea was embodied through a demanding choreographic process, in which Papadopoulos experienced almost constant failure in the first month and a half, trying to grasp that feeling of youthful euphoria.

Eventually, he found something essential in the complex movement sequences that demanded almost inhuman powers of memorization. As the dancers struggled to memorize and execute the material, they began helping one another.

For Papadopoulos, these moments revealed the work’s central idea: difficulty could make people withdraw, but it can also encourage them to reach out for one another.

The choreography itself resists predictable patterns. Its irregular rhythm become a small rebellion against uniformity, opening space for friction and the unexpected.

Making this piece also changed Papadopoulos’ personal working methods. He reduced his working week from six days to five, and split the creative process into two blocks separated by two months of rest and reflection.

“If it wasn’t so rewarding, it would be impossible to keep creating and performing at this pace,” he says, aware of both the privilege and joy of pursuing his artistic vision and the personal sacrifices it demands.

For audiences encountering his work for the first time, Papadopoulos offers a simple suggestion: “Resist the urge to decode everything, just sit back, relax and enjoy.”

He sees no problem in allowing the mind to wander. In fact, he encourages audiences to embrace absent-mindedness, which should be seen as a sign of feeling safe enough to follow your own thoughts.

With My Fierce Ignorant Step, Papadopoulos invites us to rediscover the passion and defiance of youth, and reminds us that hope itself can be an act of resistance, that the courage to imagine a different world is neither naive nor lost.