The commission for the poster images came from Korzo, and the brief pointed outward, away from the stage. The shoot was done on a hillside, outside, with the sky still holding the last hour of light. The piece is about bodies losing and finding their ground, and we worked with what was there: slope, grass, fading light, the figures against the earth. The images needed to feel elemental rather than theatrical.
Since Plato, the term khôra, Ancient Greek for "place, area, land, space", has been one of philosophy's most elusive concepts, not so much defined as circled, by thinkers from Aristotle to Derrida to Heidegger to Kristeva. Belgian choreographer Astrid Boons enters this place that is also a non-place: a reflection of our increasingly technologised world, pushing bodies to the margin, and at the same time a possible refuge from it. Five dancers, with nothing but their bodies and each other, keep resituating themselves in an eerily smooth wasteland, asking: how do we reclaim our humanity? The piece moves through a posthuman world and the social dissolution we are inside, searching, through the body, through each other's presence, for ways to re-ground.
Khôra was produced by Korzo Theater and co-produced by the Hessisches Staatsballett in the frame of Tanzplattform Rhein Main, with support from Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet. It premiered at Korzo in The Hague in October 2023 and toured extensively through the Netherlands and Germany.
