HOW ROMANTIC

HOW ROMANTIC confronts, with a sharp sense of irony, the tendency to turn life’s difficulties into spectacle—whether through grand gestures or the smallest details. The Greek choreographer Katerina Andreou, together with the Norwegian National Company of Contemporary Dance Carte Blanche, constructs a choreographic structure inspired by endurance dance marathons that took place in the United States between the late 1920s and the 1930s, in the context of the Great Depression. These were real endurance contests in which couples of dancers would remain on the floor for hours, days, even weeks.

In the same spirit, HOW ROMANTIC becomes a test of physical and mental resistance in which there are neither winners nor losers, only fourteen performers tasked with sustaining an uninterrupted flow of movement and sound. In pairs, alone, or moving as a pack through space, the dancers traverse a choreography made of bursts of energy, sudden collapse, friction, and relaunch. Between feats of strength, euphoria, and exhaustion, the group supports and depletes itself collectively, within a device that alternates surrender and discipline, impulse and control.

What emerges is a feverish landscape, suspended between order and chaos, where even love remains an ambiguous promise—continuously pursued and continuously questioned.