The future is dark which is the best thing a future can be is a performance-board game that seeks critical ways of connecting with today’s reality while activating alternative speculations about the future. Starting from the question ‘What am I/are we doing now?‘ as a trigger for identifying collective urgencies, each performance explores a new theme. Three performers, different each time, move as pawns across a floored landscape of stations of knowledge/notions such as The Palace of Feminist Governance, The Rock of Responsibility, The Cavern of Care, charting their own personal journey, while supporting each other and empowering their journey, in order to reach the Beginning/End of the World all together and win. While the threat Dark times are coming lurks constantly to subvert the game and interrupt their course, the rules of the game guide the performers through choreographic and dramaturgical scores in the production of poetic manifestos, speculative narratives, critical questions and embodied landscapes.
The project is shaped by the choreographic and dramaturgical practice of its two creators, Petros Konnaris and Rodia Vomvolou, and explores the connection between the logic of a board game and choreographic thinking, blurring the line between performing arts and everyday life. The board game as an imaginary performative stage proposes a horizontal redistribution of agency and power hierarchies, an open, vulnerable and playful space that hosts critical thinking, dialogue and reflection drawn by dance, bodily practices and dramaturgy. A landscape in which a collective thinking body can be activated as an exercise in connectivity and ultimately perhaps even action.
* The title is borrowed from a quote that Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1915, in view of the beginning of the First World War, as an attempt to preserve hope.
Concept/Artistic Direction: Petros Konnaris, Rodia Vomvolou
Scenography/ Game’s Visual identity: Chryssa Georgiou
Performers: Eleana Alexandrou, Konstantina Skalionta, Areti Chourdaki, Costantina Peter, Miriam Gatt
Children of Knowledge: Evagoras Vanezis, Belinda Papavasiliou, Roz, Eleni Mylona, Marita Anastasi, Seta Astreou−Karides, Christos Polymenakos, Despina Michaelides, Eleftheria Sokratous
Graphics: Mary Pillakouri
Electronics: Yiannis Poulakis
Technical Support: Antreas Petrou
