Published on October 25, 2025
Photo: Rachel Papo
Concept & Choreography: Christos Papadopoulos
Performers: Maria Bregianni, Chara Kotsali, Georgios Kotsifakis, Sotiria Koutsopetrou, Alexandros Nouskas-Varelas, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Adonis Vais
Music & Sound Design: Giorgos Poulios // Set Design: Clio Boboti // Lighting Design: Eliza Alexandropoulou // Costume Design: Angelos Mentis // Dramaturgy Consultant: Alexandros Mistriotis
Choreography Consultant: Martha Pasakopoulou
October 16, 2025
If there’s any reason for optimism in the arts these days, it can be seen in the proliferation of performance festivals happening around the city this fall: L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Performa Biennial, and the inaugural Powerhouse International Festival. With a mix of homegrown artists and touring presentations from around the world, this season offers endless reasons to celebrate the arts as a welcome respite from encroaching tensions and a source of encouragement in the strength of our collectivity.
Powerhouse Arts Exterior; Photo: Courtesy of Powerhouse Arts
While many of these festivals have long histories in the city, Powerhouse International is a brand new venture hosted by Powerhouse Arts. The multidisciplinary performance series unfolds inside Powerhouse’s purpose-built, multi-use facility in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The sprawling, beautifully renovated former power plant houses artist fabrication studios, including a print shop and ceramics workshop, as well as artist studios, community gathering areas, and a flexible-use performance space. This cavernous space retains visible elements of the 117-year-old building’s history, with layers of raucously colorful graffiti adorning its exposed brick walls as a living vestige of street artists’ creative use of the decommissioned building. Despite its high ceilings and impressive depth, the space manages to feel at once intimate and grand in terms of visual scale and sonic ambience.
On the occasion of Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos’s “Larsen C,” a single bank of risers faces a dark void framed by black curtains. Papadopoulos titles the work after a section of an enormous Antarctic ice shelf, the climate change-accelerated melting of which threatens catastrophic destabilization and global sea level rise. While this image remains submerged in this proverbial iceberg of a work, “Larsen C” carries an undeniably cold, ominous tone that demands both an intensity of focus and a sense of urgency from the viewer.
Georgios Kotsifakis and Sotiria Koutsopetrou; Photo: Rachel Papo
The work’s pervasive darkness seems only to deepen under Eliza Alexandropoulou’s masterfully architectural lighting, which draws the eye through the space with evanescent glows and directional shapes that hide and reveal an unstable world. As the performers slip through the void, the layered scrims in Clio Boboti’s set design unsettle ways of looking at their bodies, cut off at the neck or rendered into almost inhuman geometries. Lighting and design merge in large-scale, sculptural fog effects that loom and tumble through the air above and before us to evoke powerful ecological imagery and affective sensations.
Clad in the sleek black sheen of Angelos Mentis’s rippling costumes, the seven dancers are sleeker still. They seem to drift along the surface of the stage on silently shuffling feet, carried by a silent, unseen force. This smoothly continuous glide is unsettled by their writhing torsos and gestural distortions, as arms and hands unfurl in spidery, disjointed shapes that respond to the rushing crackles and thrums of Giorgos Poulios’s score. One body becomes two, locked in aquatically-inflected contortions and evasions. As bodies proliferate amid hissing static, deep rattling booms, and the sound of trickling water, they twine in pairs and clusters, only to be swallowed back into the void.
Adonis Vais, Alexandros Nouskas-Varelas, Sotiria Koutsopetrou, Georgios Kotsifakis, Maria Bregianni, loanna Paraskevopoulou; Photo: Rachel Papo
Their slippery, inscrutable language melds certainty and vigilance, veering suddenly from fluid cursives to stop-motion kinetics. The effect is hypnotic, with a gradual acceleration that emerges in the rippled facets of juddering formations and swirling trajectories. The tones of an organ urge toward ascension as a huge bank of fog wafts from the stage to hover over the house, pierced by a single shaft of warm light. Roiling curls of fog stream across the rear of the stage to produce surreal skyscapes that frame bodies in hazy silhouette. Light and sound slice tangibly through the air as bodies become abstracted columns tossed in the billowed outpourings. A lone figure emerges as the climax dissipates. He is recognizably human yet somehow transformed, his two hands protruding eerily from one side of his ribcage, fingers grasping tenuously for connection. Darkness and silence descend completely, leaving again the void, full with echoes of sensation yet absent of any sense of closure.
With “Larsen C,” Papadopoulos subtly intertwines human and ecological fates through distortions of space and time meant to sharpen our perceptions of the world. As we face urgent questions that demand equally urgent answers, we do so in an environment fraught with the conflicts between ecological inevitability and human uncertainty. Papadopoulos evades didacticism in his approach, opting instead to ground these conflicts in questions of the body, moving between singular and collective experience to illuminate our shifting relationships with our world.
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