Lenio Kaklea

© Ayra Dil, Alexia Caunille et Kiki Papadopoulou


Everyone has practices — be they intimate or collective, spiritual or physical, original or dull; invented, learned, pleasant, fastidious, social or invisible. Gradually, habits establish themselves as rituals — doing the washing up, sewing, praying, going shopping, boxing, shaving, rendering, posting videos, listening to reggae, wandering around in construction sites…
Inspired by the research of American sociologist Richard Sennett, Greek choreographer Lenio Kaklea decided for three years to exit the dance studio in order to observe how our intimate relation to movement has been affected by the rapid transformations our societies are undergoing.
From 2016 to 2019, together with a group of writers, researches and dancers, she followed the streets and pathways of six peripheral European territories in order to encounter their permanent and temporary inhabitants. With the use of a printed formulary that poses twenty simple questions on what one does in their daily life, Lenio Kaklea conducted over six hundred interviews with people of different age, social background, language, practices and professions.
The fruit gathered from her meetings with the inhabitants of Athens, Aubervilliers, Essen, Guissény, Nyon, and Poitiers is found in her new book, Practical Encyclopedia. Detours. Organised in twelve chapters, this multilingual publication (French, German, Greek and English) opens onto 185 practices by following a typology that is voluntarily heterogenous (places, rhythms, substances, gestures, instruments, spheres of activity). Together with co-writer Lou Forster, Lenio Kaklea developed strategies to edit the questionnaires into individual and collective portraits such as they are written in the practitioners’ language. This encyclopedia of gestures is available to the audience before and after the show in a reading room accompanied by a soundscape designed by Eric Yvelin.
Detours is also the title of Lenio Kaklea’s new choreographic group piece. At the beginning of rehearsals, the choreographer had proposed to dancers Jessica Batut, Nanyadji Ka-Gara and Élisa Yvelin to choose practices in terms of their familiarity or their unfamiliarity—a manner of situating themselves vis-à-vis this gestural landscape. They limited their choices to eleven portraits that exposed a wide range of activities, from hunting to makeup to donating blood, by way of Zumba. The choreographic process was elaborated in a flow between the texts themselves and time in the studio.
This dance quartet exposes a contrasting landscape where different manners of moving through the world intersect. Lenio Kaklea composes an epic work that departs from our intimate relation to movement, and invites us to consider the space where the subject is built in action. The viewer follows a group of four women who traverse forms of violence, alienation, dispossession, joy, and resistance towards a discovery of what permits them, still, to dance.

Concept and choreography : Lenio Kaklea
Performance : Jessica Batut, Nanyadji Ka-Gara, Lenio Kaklea et Elisa Yvelin
Dramaturgy : Lou Forster
Sound design and general regie : Éric Yvelin
Light design and décor : Florian Leduc
Costumes and props : Alexia Caunille
Production and touring : Teresa Acevedo
Monitoring : Agnès Henry - extrapole
Production : abd
Co-production : Traversées/Kimsooja Ville de Poitiers in collaboration with le TAP Scène Nationale de Poitiers, Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans, Centre Pompidou Spectacle Vivant in collaboration with festival Faits d’hiver - micadanses, Centre National de la Danse, Le Quartz/Scène Nationale de Brest in collaboration with Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Le Dancing CDCN Dijon Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Fondation Onassis/Athènes, PACT Zollverein/Essen, far° Nyon Suisse.
Avec le soutien des Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers et de Tanzhaus Zürich.

Première November 22nd 2019 / TAP Scène Nationale de Poitiers

touring 2019 - 2020

November 28th 2919 / Phénix, Valenciennes - NEXT festival
January 10th, 11th and 12th 2020 / Onassis Cultural Center, Athens January 30th and 31st February 1st 2020 / Centre Pompidou, Paris March 20th 2020 / Le Dancing CDCN Dijon Bourgogne-Franche-Comté

Lenio Kaklea
was born in Athens in 1985. She graduates from the State School of Contemporary Dance in Athens (SSCD), is awarded the Pratsika Foundation Prize and continues her studies at the CNDC in Angers (FAC). She also completes the program SPEAP, a master on experimentation in arts and politics directed by Bruno Latour at Sciences Po in Paris. As a performer she collaborates with Alexandra Bachzetsis, Gerard & Kelly, Claudia Triozzi, François Chaignaud & Cecilia Bengolea, Emmanuelle Huynh and Boris Charmatz among others. In 2013, she dances Deux • L, a solo collaboration with Lucinda Childs on the music of Ryoji Ikeda. Since 2009, she develops choreographic projects such as Matter of Act (2009), Fluctuat nec Mergitur (2010), Arranged by Date (2012), Margin Release (2015), A Hand’s Turn (2017), Analphabet (2017), Practical Encyclopeadia, Chosen Portraits (2018), Unready dancer for Prepared Piano (2019), Ballad (2019). Her work has been presented in institutions and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, ImPulsTanz, Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Onassis Foundation, Triennal de Milan, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, La Ménagerie de Verre, documenta 14 Public programs, NEXT Festival, Passerelle/Art center and PACT Zollverein. She is the author of publications, A Hand’s Turn (Big Black Mountain, the darkness never ever comes, 2017), Encyclopedie pratique, Portraits d’Aubervilliers (Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, 2018) and Practical Encyclopeadia, Detours (Presses du reel, 2019) in collaboration with art historian and curator Lou Forster. In 2016, she is invited curator at DansFabrik festival and presents Iris, Alexandra, Mariela, Katerina et moi, a focus on contemporary female choreographic production in Athens. In 2017, she collaborates as a choreographer with Joris Lacoste. In 2019, she is awarded the prize of the Foundation Hermès Italia to create a new stage work for the Triennale of Milan.