Lenio Kaklea

Forests are many things, ranging from fragile ecosystem, and biodiversity reserve, to place of fascination and legend. They are also everyday spaces for walking, foraging, hunting, observation and listening. The forest is an area where we might roam, lose ourselves, hide, or shelter. They exert a profound attraction on our bodies – as a place of transformation, flux and exchanges between organisms. Drawing on research spanning both anthropology and the imagination, the choreographer Lenio Kaklea traverses the foliage and woodland, with the objective of reinventing the presences which inhabit them over the course of rituals and dances which render these bodies permeable to their environment. Seizing upon the forest as a poetic, powerful, and dangerous force, rather than decor or landscape, Αγρίμι (Fauve) gives us the opportunity to experience identities that are in a constant state of metamorphosis – by turns meditative, untamable, eruptive or ecstatic.

Lenio Kaklea

Lenio Kaklea was born in Athens and now lives in Paris; she is a dancer, choreographer, director and writer. She was trained in the Athens conservatory and she joined the Angers CNDC in 2005, before embarking on a MA in experimental arts and politics directed by Bruno Latour in Sciences Po Paris. Since 2009, she has been working on projects that include dance, performance, text and film; an important part of her work is devoted to the project Encyclopédie pratique: de 2016 à 2019, in which she explores European territories and gathers close to 600 narratives testifying to the habits, rituals and trades that compose and characterize these territories. She was awarded the Dance prize by the Hermès Italia Foundation and the Milan Triennial in 2019, and she created her autobiographical solo Ballad. In 2021, she choreographed Age of Crime, a piece for nine dancers, for the bicentennial of the Greek Independence war for the Athens and Epidaurus Festivals. That same year, she choreographed to the emblematic prepared piano piece by John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes, accompanied on stage by pianist Orlando Bass.