REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents HOW ROMANTIC By Katerina Andreou & Carte Blanche

In America, the dance marathon occupies a peculiar place in the cultural imagination. A relic of the Great Depression, it survives less as history than as nostalgic mythology. Greek choreographer Katerina Andreou and the Norwegian dance company Carte Blanche draw on that tradition for How Romantic, now performing at the Festival d'Avignon's La FabricA. Rather than reconstructing the marathon or dwelling on its social history, Andreou distills its physical and emotional logic into an exhilarating hour of relentless movement, asking what happens when endurance itself becomes choreography.

The audience enters to find the dancers casually seated on a long bench at center stage, chatting amongst themselves. Indrani Balgobin's costumes evoke a nostalgic America with echoes of the 1950s mingle with the streetwear of the 1980s and 1990s, but without becoming period dress. The clothes feel lived-in and contemporary, as though these performers had wandered in directly from the street. Then a whistle cuts through the room. The lights snap off and on. The dancers surge, and the marathon begins.

Endurance has become something of a recurring motif at the Festival. Miet Warlop's One Song subjected its performers to an hour of repetitive action, quite literally on treadmills, to reveal the action that comes from exhaustion. Andreou pursues the opposite impulse. Rather than repetition, How Romantic embraces accumulation. Individual gestures proliferate into an organized cacophony in which the eye constantly chooses between the collective image and the singular performer. The choreography freely absorbs different movement vocabularies, drifting between contemporary dance, tango, hip-hop, and social dance without settling into any one idiom.

Cristián Sotomayor and Andreou's pulsing electronic score drives the evening forward with almost uninterrupted force. As exhaustion accumulates, the dancers repeatedly collapse into one another. Kneepads, initially an inconspicuous costume detail, become increasingly necessary as bodies crash to the floor. Movement seems to migrate between performers, as though fatigue itself were contagious. At one point the music suddenly recedes, sounding as though the party has moved into another room. Couples emerge from the crowd, gently swaying together before the score swells again with what sounded to me like a segment from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Yannick Fouassier's lighting responds in kind, shifting from the dancers toward the theatre's rafters until the entire space seems charged with kinetic energy.

The final sequence returns everyone to the opening bench, now transformed into an launch pad from which the dancers bounce, sprint, and hurl themselves into space. There is no victor, only the exhilaration that arrives on the far side of exhaustion. The danger feels genuine as bodies scramble to reclaim their footing before launching themselves once more into the crowd.

Andreou has spoken of the sadness embedded within the dance marathon: participants endured these competitions not for sport but out of economic necessity. How Romantic never loses sight of that history, yet it finds something else within it as well. In the shared labour of exhausted bodies, it discovers optimism. Community emerges through endurance; intimacy through physical collapse. Rather than memorializing the dance marathon, Andreou transforms it into a joyous, reckless celebration of youth, resilience, and the strange forms of collectivity that arise when bodies refuse to stop moving.

Photo Credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage 

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