cie. toula limnaios

oh, eternal recurrence!

The company of Toula Limnaios shines with a sense of reconciliatory lightness. In *Momentum*, it confronts rigid everyday routines and material excess with black humour, slapstick, and acrobatic interludes. Yet despite its lighter touch, the work loses none of its intensity.

The stage design at the performance venue of the company of Toula Limnaios appears unusually bright and uncluttered on this evening. No piles of earth, no leaves, no drifting mist, and no ropes. Instead: white silk ruffles hanging from the ceiling, a light-coloured designer dining table, a white glass-fronted refrigerator, and a bearskin rug. Yet this immaculate minimalist setting reveals inconsistencies upon closer inspection: from the bearskin rug, which is in fact a fur coat, protrude the hands and feet of a woman; and within the claustrophobic confines of the display fridge, another exhibit in what resembles an exclusive furniture showroom, a beautifully formed female alabaster body writhes and stretches.

Conceived like a chamber play, Toula Limnaios’s *Momentum* tells not “a coherent story, but a series of episodes”. At the centre of this choreographic mosaic of relationships, suspended somewhere between dream and reality and created for eight dancers, stands a well-to-do yet resigned man, thoroughly sated by the routines of his luxurious life. (This mood is also wonderfully reflected in the sparse piano music of Ralf R. Ollertz, which echoes as though through an empty house.) …