Interview: Alex Vassiliou on male intimacy and shivering

I speak to Alexis on Skype. He’s in Cyprus, in a room that looks bright, white, airy. His sentences are measured, his statements unhurried. He’s just, terribly calm. You get the sense that he approaches everything in life with a quiet curiosity.

We’re speaking about the double bill of duets he’s showing at the festival this year. Both feature only men and both are part of a series the Cypriot choreographer is developing on ‘the embodiment of pleasure’.

There are two ways Alexis approaches this elusive topic in the pieces, ‘Please Be Gentle’ and ‘Stay With Me’. One is through the lens of age, and the other through an examination of male intimacy and closeness.

Alexis: ‘The main theme of the research is male intimacy… how men generally deal with this aspect of themselves that is supposed to be a more female quality.’

As the conversation progresses, it becomes clear that what Alexis means by pleasure is something that goes beyond mere physical sensation to include all aspects of a person’s being, It’s also something that, for him, is fundamentally linked to ageing.

Alexis: ‘For me, I don’t think ageing is something that happens only physically… if you stay alert and happy and youthful, it’s there you also stay young… When you forget about that, the happy and the pleasant qualities of our lives, you start, I believe, to become less and less vibrant and then you start to be unhappier as a consequence of that, you start to age. You allow the ageing process to kick in and a sort of downfall begins.’

The first of the duets, ‘Please Be Gentle’, is structured around seven positions that are held and evolved by the dancers over the course of the performance. A key part of the work is the phenomenon of ‘shiver’, that involuntary spasm that can be the result of an unexpected breeze, or sometimes something less apparent that is often the stuff of superstition.

For Alexis, the shiver is a short, sharp shock that can snap us back to a sense of ourselves and our being in the world, something central to his notion of ‘pleasure’. During ‘Please Be Gentle’, the performers ‘summon’ this involuntary sensation through conjuring a ‘state of extreme pleasure and happiness’ within the performance.

Alexis: ‘When does the body get these reminders, or where from, of being alive? …I was interested in putting this sort of involuntary sensation in a different context.’

Where ‘Please Be Gentle’ focuses on the relationship between two middle-aged men, the second of the duets, ‘Stay With Me’, focuses on the bond between young men and the part music has in liberating their emotions. Electric guitars are played live during the performance, and the dancers react externally to, or internalise and process, the sounds that are made. Here too, pleasure is a focus, with the experience of pleasure prompted by music acting as a catalyst for the relationship between the two performers on stage.

The duets are only the start of an on-going investigation Alexis has planned – his next step will be to make a third duet between two older men, aged seventy plus. The area of interest where he’s staked his claim could be considered the nether reaches of abstract dance, a realm where concrete references are difficult to lay your hands on and attempts to articulate concepts can be like trying to grasp water. But Alexis’ stillness and curiosity are contagious, piquing the interest enough to lure the listener after him into those nether reaches.

Words: Rachel Donnelly (@racklette)

'Please Be Gentle' and 'Stay With Me' run from May 23rd - 25th (Fri - Sun) in Project Arts Centre. You can book tickets here.

Watch some of Alexis' work here.

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