Αγρίμι (Fauve)

The Ardennes, the Black Forest, Broceliande, the Vexin. Forests are spaces that can elude immediate understanding. Here, humans and animals scatter and hide, stalking, pursuing and trapping each other. Places of calm and meditation, of ecstasy and vivid life, forests can also be threatening and toxic environments. In Αγρίμι (Fauve), Lenio Kaklea meticu-lously choreographs a ‘rewilding of bodies’. Through on-stage exercises, dances and rituals, she explores the forest as a place – both physical and imaginary – for the dissolution of identities and the metamorphosis of bodies. Linking Kaklea’s choreographic creation to the geographical, environmental and poetic richness of the forests for the first time, Αγρίμι (Fauve) presents dance as another wild zone to be defended.

Lou Forster
March 2023

The title Αγρίμι (Agrimi) takes me back to the cultural history of this word that I often hear in Greece to mean a non-domesticated wild animal or an antisocial woman or girl. To my eyes, these free women refuse to see their destiny as being associated with the domestic (oikos). They are looking to blossom outside of the context of marriage, reproduction and the home. Placing the word “agrimi” at the heart of this creation allows me to link our perception of female sexuality to our relationship with the world of the wild. It’s my way of invoking an otherness to domestication.

Lenio Kaklea
March 2023

THE BEAR WOMAN TALE

“Once upon a time, during autumn, a woman left her family and went into the woods. A strong wind arose – there was a storm. She could not see anything; she was lost, her reserves were exhausted, she wandered around in the forest. On the ground she noticed the footprint of a bear, which she followed to a lair in order to kill it. But by penetrating the ground between the roots of the trees, she discovered a lit human dwelling. She stayed living with its inhabitants for the rest of the winter, in the depths of the woods. In the spring they said, ‘Our friends from the village are coming to visit us tomorrow.’ The next day, through a hole in the lair, she saw them. One of the men volunteered, put on bear fur, and went out. He walked over to meet them. Blows broke out, he defended himself very little so as not to hurt them unnecessarily. The hunters cut him up, cooked the meat, and ate him. The woman thought: ‘I didn’t know that the bear was also a person. I have seen how we kill them and how we eat their flesh. If I go back one day, I will tell them.’ And she went back. In the village she was welcomed with joy and she told them everything she had learned. Since that time, people have known that beasts are human and that some people go out to meet them.”

From a Nivkh tale, reported by Charles Stepanoff in Voyager dans l’invisible. Techniques chamaniques et l’imagination [Journeys into the Invisible – Shamanic Imagination in the Far North], Paris, La Découverte, 2019, pp. 371-372.