Katerina Andreou’s

Creative Explorations
in Foreignness

Copélia Mainardi

When Greek choreographer Katerina Andreou decided to relocate to France in 2011, she turned her experiences in the country into a vast creative playground. Broadening from solo creations, to intimate collaborations, to larger-scale pieces, her body of work, like her style, is proving to be expansive, unpredictable, and hypnotic to watch.

At the height of the Greek government debt crisis in 2011, Katerina Andreou, then about to turn thirty, decided to leave Athens and her home country. “It had become impossible to live off my craft, and I knew that having to take on a side job to pay the bills would be exhausting,” she remembers with a sigh, her bright sweater bringing out her expressive eyes. “I felt stuck. Leaving was the only way out for me.” It was not Andreou’s first drastic change: a few years before, she had quit her job as an attorney to get back to her roots, dance and music, which had been part of her life since childhood. “Rather than having a job to survive, I chose to create art to fill myself up.”

She chose to move to France in order to “discover new codes, new perspectives, new audiences, new relationships to the body.” The Athens contemporary dance scene she’d been part of at the time often venerated performances from Flemish-speaking Belgium and Berlin that emphasized athleticism and pushing physical boundaries. But, productions coming out of France “felt different.” she says “They considered the absence of music on stage, the idea of a ‘non-dance’, the place of performance… and that was precisely what I was looking for – other strange landmarks.”

Foreignness became a landmark: after moving to France without knowing the language, Andreou made the country her creative playground. On stage, she displays a world where the body is pushed to its edges, drawing freely from the aesthetics of club culture pounding beats, strobing lights, ecstatic middle of the night exhaustion. Despite of all its physical intensity, she is not interested in dismantling structure but in inhabiting it, learning its contours well enough to move through them on her own terms, which she describes as “a decentering gesture.” 

Her latest piece, Shout Twice, which premiered in April 2026 at the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne with performer Mélissa Guet, is a short piece halfway between a vocal concert and a choreographed solo. “Melissa, who had previously danced in my piece Bless This Mess, is from a different world compared to mine, but we share a common performance language, a desire to make space for noise, sound and voice, without going towards musical performance,” she analyzes. “And it is also a woman’s gesture, to go towards another woman with the desire to mutually empower each other.”

If dance is her “main residence,” music is also part of her home base: Andreou started learning the piano at the age of five and knew her scales before she could read and write. With this instrument that was “so big for such a small child,” melody was first a matter of vibration. This physical relationship to sound would forever be part of her creative universe, because vibration keeps animating her “body, imagination and emotions.” Today, the artist has made music a “space of freestyle exploration.” 

Beside the piano, Andreou taught herself to play other wind or string instruments and has dabbled in composing software to add sonic material to her pieces. Rhythm and sound are never only relegated to the set and ambiance, they’re proper dramaturgical elements that reinforce her works’ visual quality. If the intensity of some of her sound loops can put the audience in a quasi-hypnotic state, she refuses to call it a trance: “yes, dopamine and the endorphins released by such active physical movement can generate an altered state, but the clarity of the reflection remains unaltered.” Her performance center virtuoso “working bodies” that are fully present and aware. 

What will her next steps be? Passing on knowledge and “everything that pertains to dialogue” are important to Andreou, who regularly teaches workshops and is on the faculty of the Master’s program at the National Center for Choreography in Montpellier. She has developed a pedagogy that aims to connect theory with practice. Writing, thinking, analyzing, and moving are all combined in one approach, which is drawn from her own experience as a Master’s student at the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers. 

Her ambitions for the future also include further interrogating the relationship with dance audiences, deepening the performative dimension of her work, and continuing to collaborate with others. For a long time, she was the sole performer in her shows, but she now hopes to experiment with choreographing for other dancers. She first experienced this with Bless This Mess in 2024: “I was tired of being the only vehicle for my message, it felt like a short circuit.” 

The following year, she directed fourteen performers and moved to the other side of the stage for the first time with How Romantic, a commission from the Norwegian company Carte Blanche. She was delighted with this experience, which she feels allowed her to “let go.” “I’d already found silence within noise: now I’d found stability in numbers.” If she once found creative growth by moving abroad, Andreou is now exploring and finding opportunities in a new kind of foreign territory.

Copélia Mainardi is a journalist. She has worked with several big publications such as Télérama, Libération, Le Monde diplomatique and France Culture, reporting, investigating and making documentaries. She studied French literature and now follows closely what is happening on the cultural scene, in the performing arts and literature.

HOW ROMANTIC
choreography: Katerina Andreou
July 13 to 16 2026 at the Festival d’Avignon
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Café des Idées
La Matinale of July 13 at the Festival d’Avignon
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SHOUT TWICE
choreography: Katerina Andreou & Mélissa Guex
September 18 & 19 at La Commune, centre dramatique national d’Auberviliers
September 25 & 26 at the Fondation Fiminco
within the Festival d’Automne à Paris
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HOW ROMANTIC
choreography: Katerina Andreou
November 7 & 8 at the Teatro Vascello
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Mourn baby Mourn
Katerina Andreou, Maison Trouble Editions, 2024