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The 15th annual Dance Days Chania festival proved that it is an event that is constantly seeking to strengthen its relationship with its host city and its inhabitants, to interact, to discover new, unknown places for events, to propose something fresh and different to those who decide to attend.

It is a contemporary dance festival that invests in performances with a strong social and political dimension and highlights the importance of collectivity and participation.

Besides, the great asset that distinguishes this festival is, apart from the great love of its organizers for dance and Chania, its volunteers, who contribute decisively to the final result.

Euronews was in the city on Crete for three days and followed the rich programme of performances and parallel events.

“This year, our big bet was to become even more inventive, to meet even more with unseen sides of the city that we had not reached until now,” says the artistic director of Dance Days Chania, Sofia Faliereou.

“To broaden the festival’s audience even more and to create safe meeting places for artists to meet the people of the city and its visitors, because we are interested in creating a different kind of image for the city during the summer months. To be even more human and warmer. This year at least 120 artists of contemporary dance art passed through the festival. I think it was a bet that succeeded.”

“Trilogy: For Old Times’ Sake” by the Swiss group Pit Co. explores the complex relationship between time, aging and memory loss.

It connects fragments of memories, revealing the emotions associated with them and the impact they have on us.

The show moves through three temporally interconnected moments, each echoing the others, creating a layered and deeply human narrative.

Along the way we meet an older man, his younger self and his lover, each representing different layers of memory and identity.

Inspired by choreographer Phoebe Jewitt’s personal experience with her grandfather’s dementia, the piece reflects on the role of memory in shaping who we are and what happens when we begin to forget. The show premiered in Rome in 2022.

“It’s a very difficult subject. As a 30-year-old, I don’t know of course what it means to have dementia, but I know what it’s like to be on the other side,” Jewitt said.

“It’s a disease that affects so many people around the world. I think the number of people suffering from dementia is currently around 50 million, but it is going to reach 150 million in a very short time, in the next few years. There is no cure. That is why I felt strongly the need to talk about dementia through my work. It is in conversation and human interaction that we perceive dementia most acutely.”

“So there was a typical moment with my grandfather. We were sitting and chatting about things. He then says to me: “Do you remember that amazing time when we went on holiday to France?” I looked at him then and told him it wasn’t me. It was my grandmother who was with him. And it was somehow at that moment that I witnessed the sense of the complete loss of generations and the loss of time. So what I wanted to do with this project was to explore how we lose our sense of time,” she explains.

Helene Weinzierl’s dance company Cie Laroque has been to the dance festival several times.

With the current “Escape”, the Austrian group invites us on a special journey in which we perceive exaggeration and collapse. In a time when we seemingly have everything, the dancers reveal on stage a world of suffocation, where everyone is looking for an outlet of freedom, peace and inner calm.

The spectators sit in a circle around them, watching this struggle of exhaustion, this universe of repetition from which they cannot escape either. The play had its world premiere in 2019 in Salzburg, just before the coronavirus, and it seems prophetic.

“I did Escape a long time ago. It was before the coronavirus. I had the feeling that I was really in a quagmire. Imagine I felt like those little animals, running on a wheel in a cage. They must be running somehow all the time. There was a moment when I thought: “Okay, how am I going to change my life? Or what can I do to get out of this system?” Austrian choreographer and artistic director of the Cie Laroque dance company , Helene Weinzierl, says.

“I think we need to find places and periods of time where we stop to do something, like meditation, yoga, whatever. I don’t know what. Or sit and watch the sea, or go for a walk in the sea, or go swimming, whatever. I think it’s very important to realize it. I would also say that it’s important to have periods when we don’t work.”

“Now on this occasion, we’ve picked up the project again. It’s new again. We also worked on it again. We are now also focusing on democratic systems, because I think that in Europe, but also in general and all over the world, we are really in a strange situation in relation to democracy. We have to fight for it again,” she says.

A dancer, a projection screen, a live camera, a set of silicone abs and a question that hovers in the air for an hour: How does a body produce masculinity?

Quindell Orton’s “Making of a Man” is an extraordinary lecture performance that humorously and poignantly presents us with different aspects of masculinity, archetypes it has imposed in modern times, as well as patriarchal attitudes and codes of our society.

It combines video projections, with personal interviews conducted by the choreographer with people who highlight different aspects of the issue. References and quotes from iconic personalities and current figures create a multi-layered mix that draws on elements from politics, pop culture and gender issues.

The show premiered last May in Munich.

“My source of inspiration for this play was my queer feminist approach. I have been working from this perspective for some years and felt the desire to understand masculinity more in order to understand the dynamics of gender and patriarchy. I think overall, the show aims and I hope to lead people to think about how we practice, how we all perform gender on a daily basis and how performing, practicing gender creates a system. This system has a certain power dynamic and a hierarchy.”

“I hope my performance will challenge this dynamic and hierarchy. To also challenge many of the biological claims and gender determinism, that this is the way things are because one must be that way because one was born with, for example, the XY chromosome. I hope we start to challenge more and more of these claims,” says Australian choreographer and performer Quindell Orton.