IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE

Chara Kotsali

In “IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE”, three female dancers portray a world marked by exhaustion, conflicting emotions, and disappointed hopes. The piece explores what remains when the promises of the past and the future cannot be fulfilled.History is mostly narrated as a linear process towards progress. Chara Kotsali, however, tells a more complex story of discontinuities and disappointments, in which exhausted bodies and drained emotions take centre stage. “IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” is set up as a cacophonic dance marathon, infused with high-pitched guitar chords, relentless drumming, and merciless rapping. Like a nauseating carousel of feelings, facts, and images, three women attempt to embody the present’s emotional history. If the promises of the past were not fulfilled and the future has abandoned us – what is left for us now? 

TicketsFull 25 / 20 € Reduced 16 / 12 €Additional service fees for online booking with Reservix apply.

Artist's Note by Chara Kotsali Broadcasting from a place in the South that never sent a rocket into Space and grew old with slow internet, I attempted to compose a messy kinetic and sonic chronology of the collective feeling created by launching into Space and simultaneously diving into cyberspace, for bodies floating like space debris, for spectacle as the most durable fetish. I was interested in engaging with the much- discussed crisis of futurity by placing the dancing body at its center. What concerned me was the persistent sense of a foreclosed future, coupled with a silenced or rendered invisible past and an increasing inability to conceive ourselves as part of a historical continuum. Through choreography, I wanted to explore the tension between hope and disappointment as it has been inscribed upon both individual and collective bodies.Central to this research was the relationship between microhistories and grand historical narratives, and the ways in which personal and collective experiences intersect with, resist, or disappear within dominant accounts of history. The great anxietyThe entrenched sense of defeatDoes the future make you horny? Is it killing your sleep?The vast fatigueHer birthday and the fall of the WallSpaghetti with minced meat after school, and the Twin Towers fallingDrawing on the dialectical relationship between continuity and discontinuity in the ways history is represented, narrated, and experienced, we experimented with both linear forms—such as the single-camera cinematic setup, the musical drone, and the timeline—and strategies of rupture, including collage, mashup, and medley.Dance has borne witness to history. It has shaped, and been shaped by, prevailing notions of beauty, desire, and entertainment, while also serving national, ideological, and political narratives. By creating an uninterrupted continuum of dance that persists even beyond the limits of physical and emotional exhaustion, we sought to revisit the intertwined histories of enthusiasm and disappointment, spectacle and sorrow that  followed the satellitization of everyday life and the collapse of progress as a dominant historical horizon.The Macarena, the jitterbug, Bob Fosse, and the cheerleadersKoula Pratsika and MetaxasLaban and GoebbelsThe dances in the packed stadiums drunk on nationalismThat parade with the face of the “Leader”Dancing in line, dancing against all oddsWas I the dancing queen or dancing for the queen?Nevertheless, “IT'S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” is not another eschatology for use, nor another declaration of nostalgia for an exoticized past, but rather an acknowledgement that the experiment has (thankfully) failed. The end of the world has not yet come, and certainly not the end of history. The poetics of vertigo emerges as the most tender gesture in this hour of the fall.

00 h 45 min

Artists/Collaborators: Chara Kotsali (Konzept & Choreografie), Chara Kotsali (Text & Video), Sofia Pouchtou (Von & mit), Christina Skoutela (Von & mit), Chara Kotsali (Von & mit), Vassia Zorbali (Assistenz Choreografie), Clara Aguilar (Assistenz Choreografie), Anna Maria Rammou (Sound & Musik), Chara Kotsali (Sound & Musik), Periklis Pravitas (Bühne & Kostüm), Eliza Alexandropoulou (Licht), Ioanna Athanasiou (Licht), Dimitra Mitropoulou (Dramaturgische Beratung), Κοnstantina Georgelou (Künstlerische Beratung), TooFarEast (Produktionsleitung), Chara Kotsali (Produktions- & Tourmanagement), Korina Vasileiadou (Produktions- & Tourmanagement)

With the kind support of the Onassis Stegi Touring Programme.

Next date:

• Date Friday, 14/August/2026 17:00 bis 17:45 ( 2 more dates )
• Venue Hebbel am Ufer - HAU2
• Address Hallesches Ufer 32, 10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg
• Price from €22.00

Book tickets for this date

Order online