choreography

Several of the works in this section emerged through my long-term artistic collaboration with Achilleas Chariskos, with whom I formed the performance duo Black Swans. We first met during the SNDO intensive course in 2009 and reconnected at a workshop led by Ivo Dimchev in Rotterdam in 2010, moments that sparked an ongoing collaboration. Between 2010 and the mid-2010s, we were often occupied with what we called the “misfits”: bodies, narratives, and images that resisted easy categorization. Through improvisational processes and dramaturgical research, we developed choreographic works exploring physical presence, performative image-making, and psychological landscapes shaped through movement, text, and scenographic experimentation.

This period was also deeply shaped by my collaboration with Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos, with whom I studied at the Dutch Art Institute. Panagiotis designed costumes for many performance experiments and shared processes of play, curiosity, and critical dialogue. Through our exchanges, I began to understand costume as an extension of the body, if not the body itself — a proposition we constructively disagreed on, generating ongoing artistic and conceptual discussion. Through him, I was also introduced to the House of Hopelezz and Jennifer Hopelezz, whose activist work within LGBTQIA+ communities profoundly influenced my understanding of how to hold space for alternative artistic practices, collective risk, and the transformative power of performance beyond institutional frameworks.

My theoretical formation during this time was strongly influenced by theory teacher Bassam El Baroni, who introduced me to dialectical thinking and the philosophical potential of the image as praxis during my studies at the DAI, and by Jon Mikel Euba, whose teaching shaped my approach to understanding methodology in artistic practice. These artistic and pedagogical encounters formed a crucial foundation for my practice as choreographer, holding spaces of encounter between bodies, images, environments, and lived experience.