There is no denying it: My Fierce Ignorant Step by Christos Papadopoulos, presented by Danse Danse last night in Montreal, is captivating. But, a bit like doomscrolling, strangely unsatisfying too.
It is an insistent soundtrack, with irrepressible beats, that accompanies, without faltering for a single second, the 60 minutes of Christos Papadopoulos’ metronomic choreography. A modern choral masterpiece is partially sampled (Axion Esti by Miki Theodorakis) and transformed by Kornilios Selamsis and Jeph Vanger, who also add their own personal contributions.
MY FIERCE IGNORANT STEP CONTINUES UNTIL OCTOBER 31, 2026
It starts with light beats, the clicks of a lighter that won’t ignite (the observation comes from a friend). But one quickly senses a crescendo that will prove relentless. In the manner of Ravel’s Boléro, the repetitive and tirelessly repeated rhythm serves as the framework for a slow, very slow construction. Little by little, elements are added: a drum kit filling the gaps, a piano playing a single chord, repeated as is every six measures of four beats, then strings, initially slightly off-center in relation to the rhythmic mechanics, and finally brass and a choir, in sampling. But it lacks, unlike the Boléro, a melody that would dress the whole, a sinuous phrase that would act as a counterweight to the rigorous and obsessive mechanics. A humanist mortar to this increasingly impenetrable sound wall.
On this framework, the bodies become one, moving like birds in coordinated flight. Rarely, almost never in fact, do the nine dancers interact with each other. Solitudes carried, guided, by the same system of thought. You don’t feel the oppression of any regime here. It is not, obviously, a disguised social and political critique. No, there is clearly an exaltation and satisfaction in living, individually, solitarily, the same pleasure as one’s neighbour. But to whom we never speak. Countless back-and-forths from back to front, from left to right across the stage. The same swaying, the same lunges, the same stretches, arms, legs, heads, except, as I said, for the rarest exceptions. All of this, to the musical beat, is initially captivating, hypnotic. Halfway through, I wonder if we are not running on empty. The attraction remains, but it has lost its initial magic. A bit like the mindless scrolling we all succumb to on our phones in the evening. The first spark is invigorating, the following ones maintain the passion for a while, then we start to wonder what all this really brings us, if there shouldn’t be more nourishing complexity to taste somewhere. If we shouldn’t be doing something else, stepping out of our comfortable bubbles, which are ultimately very conformist.
Curious symbolism, then, in this creation that has the merit of revealing a bit of what we have become: isolated monads moving, consuming, laughing, crying, and existing at the same pace, with the same twists, the same presence in the world as millions of others, who, like us, must watch the same Instagram or TikTok videos at the beat of the same contemporary techno-holistic algorithms. All of us, defying individuals, yet alike and similar; celebrated unique beings, but cast in the same mould, happy in our cocoon, barely aware that the next one, or the previous one, is something other than an intellectualised notion through a consensual matrix. A happy world?
Perhaps that is the unconscious strength of My Fierce Ignorant Step. That of showing us, if we know how to analyse it carefully, this collective reality without moralising, without descending into dystopian apocalypticism to scare us. We are shown an exhilarating utopia that, ultimately, calls into question its own inspiring aspirations by its mere existence. That said, I am really not sure that it was the creator’s intention. So, what can we conclude from this?
Papadopoulos claims to have conceived his choreography with the simple joys of his youth in mind. Joy made of hopes open to all possibilities. In the end, it seems to me, it is rather a display of collective failure.
How to be captivated while feeling a certain emptiness. There is, I think, the very essence of our first quarter of the 21st century.
