An interview with Aliki Germanou and Nikoleta Xenariou on the occasion of their performance Kiki et Colette — The Age of Time | Butoh Trilogy.
1. Butoh is a physical poetry of the unconscious. What personal or collective need led you to express yourselves through this form?
Aliki Germanou: Butoh entered my life after a long journey through classical dance. It came at a moment when my body was asking for a more existential form of expression — rawer and more truthful. Through Butoh I found a space in which movement serves and expresses essence, as I understand it.
Nikoleta Xenariou: Despite my Western education — and I do not mean only my training in dance — I understand the Butoh approach as the only way for bodies to exist on stage. I mean an understanding of the body as a vessel for experience, memory and imagination.
2. What does “The Age of Time” mean to you? Is it an era or a trap? Does time operate as a linear narrative or as a cyclical trauma?
Aliki Germanou: In The Age of Time, the narrative is circular, like life itself. It is a return to the body, to memory, play and imagination. Time comes back like a pulse rather than moving in a straight line. It is the moment when past and future meet in the body’s present. Through this performance I return again and again to questions that can never be fully answered; they can only be experienced each time. Something changes, something returns, something is revealed.
Nikoleta Xenariou: It is both. Time exists. If it had a shape, it would be a spiral, moving endlessly. Measuring it by human standards becomes a trap — the trap of life.
3. What are the central axes of the trilogy? What kind of inner landscape does each part map?
Aliki Germanou: The first part, The Illusion, is like a first attempt to deceive Time. The two personas meet here and now — something we do not even know whether it truly happened. Our bodies become the vessels. We become these women, carrying the full weight of our ancestors. In the second part we enter deeper, more intimate paths: dreams, where the unconscious takes form. In the third part, The Gift is revealed as an act of stripping away, of liberation. All the transgenerational traumas collapse like houses of cards. It is the only passage towards what lies beyond.
4. What is the relationship between Kiki and Colette? Are they two voices of the same body, or two bodies carrying a shared past?
Aliki Germanou: Both. This dual nature of their relationship is precisely one of the elements that define the work.
Nikoleta Xenariou: They lived then. They carried whatever they had to carry. They are a point of departure. What did they encounter? What did they experience? What did they leave behind? The same questions are now put to us — and to you, the audience.
5. Butoh often speaks of the “dissolution of the self”. How personal is exposure on stage, and where does lived experience end and ritual begin?
Aliki Germanou: In Butoh, personal material and collective ritual coexist. Where the dancer’s experience ends, the power of the body itself emerges: the body as a vessel of time, witness and agent. The body becomes a recording medium for experiences that cannot be expressed in words.
Nikoleta Xenariou: Exposure is entirely personal, in an unconventional way. Every transformation reveals — or should reveal — the totality of our existence. We stand there transparent, with the generosity of our vulnerable nature.
6. How do you choreograph silence? Is there a movement that does not speak, but remembers?
Aliki Germanou: The vulnerability we bring into the performance space is deeply personal. We transform our lives on stage, using as raw material our experiences, memories, traumas and moments of release.
Nikoleta Xenariou: Silence can be heard. So yes, it can be choreographed. It speaks while it remembers.
7. Aegina, and especially Mikro Studio, seems like a setting for withdrawal. What connects you to this place, and how does it influence the energy of the performance?
Aliki Germanou: The idea for the trilogy was born in Aegina. I moved to the island during the pandemic, when I met Nikoleta. At Mikro Studio, which is a shared teaching space for both of us, the trilogy took shape and was introduced to the audience. I spent most of my life in central Athens, but the time came to live close to my other great love: the sea. Nature and the island’s very lively artistic community make Aegina an ideal place for this period of my life.
Nikoleta Xenariou: I am here in order to live better. Here I accept my human condition with greater courage. If you allow it, the rhythm of this place can become a pulse — organic, connected. Nature, the horizon, water, wind, community, the absence of unnecessary fears, a certain freedom… The influence is clear.
8. How do you understand the spectator’s gaze in Butoh? Are they a fellow traveller, an observer or a witness?
Aliki Germanou: All three at once. The spectator becomes an inseparable part of the action. They experience, speak and connect with us through their own universe of experiences and emotions.
Nikoleta Xenariou: The point is to give the spectator “the keys” to open up a space within themselves and travel with us. That is what every work of art should seek to do.
9. Was there a particular archetype or image at the core of the work?
Yes. We would say that the central archetypal image that nourished the work is that of the elusive, spontaneous, bohemian woman of the Parisian Années folles. The muse who overturns conventions, liberating her voice and body. The play on our names, Aliki and Nikoleta, points directly to Kiki de Montparnasse and the great French writer Colette: two legendary women of the 1920s who embodied daring, spirit and independence, making art a way of life.
10. What is movement that endures through time — the movement that remains when everything else has been stripped away?
Aliki Germanou: It is the psychic imprint that remains when the space has emptied and the memory of the stage action persists without the body. It is the psychic vibration left behind by the recollection of the event.
Nikoleta Xenariou: The movement of life that contains death. The cycle, the endless succession.
11. Will you bring the performance to Athens?
Yes, of course. We hope to announce dates soon. We will also seek to present the performance at festivals in Greece and abroad.
12. What are your plans for the future?
Our artistic collaboration is grounded in a continuous search and investigation into how Art, in all its forms, can remain alive and present within life. In the future, we aim to create artistic works and workshops that pursue precisely this. Through our newly established company, Common Era, based in Aegina, we hope to create, to teach and to learn, and to deepen our practice while opening the field to other art forms.
Originally published in Greek. Interview with Aliki Germanou and Nikoleta Xenariou.
