In the choreographic and sound-based piece Mourn Baby Mourn, Katerina Andreou uses melancholy as its raw material. This solo piece functions as a distress signal, an attempted escape of a virulent kind.
At the origins of Mourn Baby Mourn, Katerina Andreou’s third solo piece, lies an underlying feeling of sadness and frustration, which is both intimate and shared. What if this confusion also corresponded to that of an entire era, society or generation? What should we do with these negative states? The Greek choreographer’s answer is to use them in a motor, the fuel for which is provided by the words, spewed out and projected in the form of a spontaneous text directly addressed to the audience. The dancer’s body coexists with these woes turned into woes, via an autonomous form of movement, an invigorating free style. Mourn Baby Mourn oscillates between the vivid sounds of electronic music and the chiseled contours of a soundscape devised in conjunction with the Chilean musician Cristian Sotomayor, swaying back and forth almost inevitably. To mourn, in English, means both to grieve and to lament. With its pop-music sounding title, Mourn Baby Mournattempts to find a way out of a personal impasse via movement of a powerful, life-enhancing kind. In this piece, music, words, bodies and words find themselves with their backs to the wall.
Katerina Andreou was born in Athens and currently lives and works in France. She is interested in developing states of presence sorting out from a constant negotiation between contrasted tasks, fiction and universes, often questioning the relation to ideas such as authority and autonomy, communication and censorship. She was awarded the choreography prize Prix Jardin d’Europe, at ImpulsTanz Festival in 2016 for the solo dance piece A kind of fierce. Before Mourn Baby Mourn(2022), she created the solo BSTRD (2018) and the duo Zeppelin Bend (2021) with Natali Mandila. She is an associated artist at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen en Normandie in 2022-2024.
