Choreographer: Elena Antoniou
Although presented under Dance Umbrella, Elena Antoniou’s uncompromising show is more performance art than dance. For 50 minutes, she invites a standing audience to watch her execute moves more likely to be seen in a sketchy strip joint than in Shoreditch Town Hall’s Victorian Assembly Room. Antoniou twerks, slut-drops and does the splits, but her weary resignation guarantees that her piece is not by any means saucy titillation.
Instead, LANDSCAPE interrogates ideas around objectification and ways of seeing. We are required to watch – indeed, that is why we are here – nevertheless, it’s uncomfortable to watch when she appears to be so unhappy; her routine is, well, routine. We could easily turn away, but the nature of theatre demands that we don’t, and so we become complicit in her humiliation.
With the house lights on, it’s obvious that she can see us, too. And she will search out people in the audience, eyeballing them until she or they drop their gaze. This method of challenging the viewer in such a way is reminiscent of that employed by other performance artists. Of course, there is Marina Abramović, who took this strategy to the extreme in her performance piece The Artist Is Present, when she stared into the eyes of an audience member over a table in New York’s MoMA. But Italian performance artist Franko B forced his audience to watch him bleed, most strikingly in the Tate Modern, among other places. More recently, Carolina Bianchi carried out the unthinkable when she swallowed date rape drugs on stage in front of her paying audience.
In Landscape, Antoniou welcomes her observers to film or photograph her as she dances on the raised platform. However, not many do, as taking pictures could make you as guilty as the men who pay for this kind of erotic performance, or worse, the people who employ her (coerce her?) to dance so suggestively. It’s odd how the audience reacts when it’s first led into the space. We’re told that we can move about, but most people leave a wide gap between the platform and their standing positions. Some even sit down. And yet, despite the access to tech, time moves differently.
There are the slightest glimmers of humour: she smiles at one female audience member as she squats provocatively towards the floor, and at one point, while completely still to three sides of the onlooker, she permits the fourth side to witness the twitching of a single buttock.
We know when it’s time to leave, but again Antoniou plays with the idea of theatre. Most people don’t leave, even though they’ve run out of coins for the peep show. They’re not sure if the show is over; there has been no applause, no bow. Again, we subject her to her fate. She might be there now, still waiting for the last person to depart.
Runs until 25 October 2025
Dance Umbrella’s Digital Programme is available until 30 November 2025
