Xenia Koghilaki works in the field of performing arts as a dancer and choreographer. Her practice engages with issues of re-examining the moving body’s aesthetic, political and social aspects. She is a graduate of the Greek National School of Dance, the Architecture Department of the University of Patras and she holds an MA in “Solo/Dance/Authorship” from the University of the Arts Berlin (HZT Berlin). Her work has been presented in Onassis Dance Days (Slamming, 2024; Bang Bang Bodies, 2023), Sophiensaele (KOPANIMA, 2024) and Tanztage Berlin (Bang Bang Bodies, 2023), Kommuna Warsawa, Studio ALTA (collaborative piece Nudes and Conspiracies), Onassis New Choreographers Festival (collaborative work Besuch) and the Arc for Dance Festival, among others. As a dancer, she has collaborated with Kat Válastur for the works Strong-Born, Diana, Even, The FarNear, as well as with André Uerba, Armin Hokmi, the Hellenic Dance Company and others. Xenia was been a danceWEB Scholarship Recipient at ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival in 2021, was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS and is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2023/24.

In her choreographies, Xenia Koghilaki looks for a “radical aliveness” usually reserved for punk concerts. But the fact that even this ritual of supposed total anarchy foots on “invisible solidarity rules” stays at the forefront of her mind: in order to let go, we hold onto one another. In Slamming, the Berlin- and Athens-based choreographer and her co-performers Irina Georgiou and Noumissa Sidibé form a three-headed, six-armed crowd, letting us take part in their collective exertion. Between anger and sweat and pain and pleasure, the three of them keep rearranging their grip, they lose and find each other, following Giorgios Poulios’ haunting sounds down into the depth of a feeling that is both certainly alive and impossible to name.

Slamming is supported in touring by ONASSIS STEGI’s Outward Turn Program.