Sirenos'26: IT'S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE

IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE (Greece)

Premiere: April 3, 2025
Commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi 

Concept, Choreography, Text : Chara Kotsali
Performance & Material Co-creation: Sofia Pouchtou, Christina Skoutela, Chara Kotsali
Assistant Choreographer: Vassia Zorbali
2nd Assistant Choreographer: Clara Aguilar
Sound Design & Music: Anna Maria Rammou, Chara Kotsali
Set & Costume Design: Periklis Pravitas
Lighting Design: Eliza Alexandropoulou 
Tour Lighting Design: Ioanna Athanasiou
Dramaturgy Consultant: Dimitra Mitropoulou
External Eye: Κοnstantina Georgelou
Line Production: TooFarEast & Chara Kotsali
Tour Production: Chara Kotsali and Korina Vasileiadou
International Development & Touring: Εckhard Thiemann
The research for “IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” was supported by Onassis AiR and Réseau Grand Luxe. 

It’s the End of the Amusement Phase is an energetic rollercoaster of images and movement. It’s about progress, exhaustion and the failing promise of a future.

In a dance marathon that spans the historical continuum, three women regress between personal and collective history. Focusing on the dancing body and using sound and poetry as its materials, the piece grapples with the notion of progress as the most exhausting linear narrative. In the wake of a technological and social revolution that ultimately did not happen, “Ιt's The End Of The Amusement Phase” attempts to speak of the present’s emotional history.

Three dancers interact on stage with the past that lies ahead of us and the future we have left behind. They engage in a dance that exhausts their emotional and physical resources. It is a choreography about the ambivalent relationship of the individual and collective body with history, about the link between progress and destruction, about dances of fun, pleasure, and propaganda.

Kotsali’s gaze is focused, sharp and, at times, humorous. She shows how a society can celebrate whilst exhausting itself, and how history keeps repeating itself as long as no one dares to stop the music. The question the performance leaves in its wake is simple and urgent: how do we move forward?

“Ιt's The End Of The Amusement Phase”  is not another eschatology for use, nor is it another declaration of nostalgia for an exoticized past, but rather an acknowledgement that the experiment has thankfully failed. The end of the world has not yet come, and certainly not the end of history. The poetics of vertigo emerges as the most tender gesture in this hour of the fall.
-Chara Kotsali

Chara Kotsali is a dance maker, performer, and teacher based in Greece. She graduated from Rallou Manou Professional School of Dance, where she currently works as a teacher of contemporary dance, along with Marmarinou Professional Dance School, while she has been a guest teacher and choreographer at Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) and several festivals across Europe. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Theater Studies and a master’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology, as well as professional drums training in Modern Music School.

She explores choreography and performance through an expanded approach, attempting to involve methodologies from anthropology, documentary art, music, and other performing languages while being particularly concerned with the politics of sound and movement. Her work has been presented in several venues and festivals around the world, while she has been selected as one of the Twenty24 Aerowaves artists, and Twenty26 artists, as well as for the Moving Balkans Platform 2026.

In 2023, she presented her first individual choreographic work, to be possessed, as part of the Onassis Dance Days.The piece was selected as part of the Aerowaves Twenty24 artists and [8: tension] Young Choreographers’ Series at ImPulsTanz Festival in 2023, where it received an honorary mention from the jury. In July 2024, her second work, borborygmi, premiered at the Athens Epidaurus Festival, where it received an audience award. She was the supported Onassis Stegi choreographer for 2023–2024 as part of the Grand Luxe Network and Onassis AiR Fellow Artist for 2024–2025, where she developed the research for the work IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE that premiered in April 2025 (Onassis Dance Days).The piece was selected among the Twenty26 Aerowaves works as well as the Moving Balkans Platform 2026. 

This year she has been nominated for the Bloom Prize of the Saddler’s Wells Rose International Prize 2027. 

As a performer, she has collaborated, among others, with Christos Papadopoulos, Euripides Laskaridis, Patricia Apergi, Iris Karayan, Sofia Mavragani, Tzeni Argyriou, Argyro Chioti, Simos Kakalas, Sofia Paschou, Dimitra Trypani and many others, performing both in Greece and abroad. 

She has worked as a movement director in theatre performances by renowned Greek directors, receiving in 2023 the Greek Critics Association award for best theatre choreography (“The Rise of Arturo Oui,” directed by Aris Biniaris).