History is timeless, but what drives it? Conflicts, doctrines, power. Science, culture, progress. Choreographer Chara Kotsali flies through the whirlwind of the past with a dance marathon on the edge of emotional and physical exhaustion. Because history does not follow a straight line. It meanders to the present day, which could have been different because the promised revolutions did not fully happen. 

Kotsali shows the contradictory relationship between the individual and the collective with history, progress, and destruction. Her performance IT'S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE presents the dances of pleasure, propaganda, and resistance that echo through time, complemented by poetic fragments and sound. Three women move across the stage through the complex terrain of the past that awaits us and the future we have left behind. 

The performance unfolds with a fragmented chronology, similar to our understanding of history. It consists of smooth and abrupt movements that alternate and interrupt each other, like golden ages and crises, ups and downs. It becomes a journey through breathtaking leaps in time, accompanied by music that gathers the world’s sounds—macarena and parade, demonstration and aerobics, ritual dances and cheerleaders.

In the soundscape of the show, the rhythmic power of words spoken and reaching us at the onset of major revolutions for societies, and hence for individuals, is highly impressive. Kotsali creates an alternative chronicle of movements, reminding us that history is not linear, but that we set its trajectory with twists, turns, and leaps forward. 

IT'S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE does not borrow theories about the end of the world or religious doctrines such as redemption and the afterlife. The performance is not a vision of apocalypse. It is neither a longing for an idealized, unrealized past nor a present in which the promised fruits of technological and social change have failed to ripen. It is a reminder that the world continues to turn, and the poetics of this constant whirlwind is a way for us to feel, remember, and move forward. The end of the world has not yet come, and even less so the end of history.

I draw inspiration from the dialectical relationship between continuity and discontinuity in how history is portrayed, discussed, and experienced. I experiment with both forms of linear flow (the cinematic single-cam setup, the musical ison, timeline) and discontinuity (collage, mashup, and medley). 

I wish 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.

- Chara Kotsali 

“IT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE” is a bitter and sarcastic commentary on the flimsiness of Western culture and capitalism. “Go West, fuck the rest”, one of the mottos you manage to grasp during Kochali’s merciless rapping. The modern individual’s heavy grief for a present that has no future becomes an angry and, ragingly energetic, choreography by three dancers (in addition to Kotsali, Sophia Pouchtou and Christina Skoutela), a historical monument to the dystopia that passes us by. A performance that has all the guarantees to find its way to stages abroad, especially at this time of global chaos.”

- Stella Charami, www.monopoli.gr

“Here, along with electrifying performers Sofia Pouchtou and Christina Skoutela, Kotsali not only charges the stage with an inventory of dance-steps and video clip moves (one soon recognises references from Bob Fosse to Trisha Brown and Beyoncé that become a mélange of body automatisms) but creates an aurally dense performance, with high pitch guitar chords and drummings that mess with your heartbeats. Kostali’s choreography feels like a capsule rocketed in time, from a complicated past straight into a vast unimaginable future. A carousel of feelings, facts, images, parade on stage, at times marching to their ridiculous glory, at times defeated yet withstanding, making the performers look like uber-marionettes in this puppetry of absurdity.”

Anastasio Koukoutas, Springback Magazine

Chara Kotsali is a dance maker, performer, and teacher based in Greece. She graduated from Rallou Manou Professional School of Dance, where she currently works as a teacher of contemporary dance, along with Marmarinou Professional Dance School, while she has been a guest teacher and choreographer at Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD). She also holds a bachelor’s degree in Theater Studies and a master’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology, and she is trained in music.

She explores choreography and performance through an expanded approach, attempting to involve methodologies from anthropology, documentary art, music, and other performing languages while being particularly concerned with the politics of sound and movement. Her practice includes writing, field recordings, and DIY sound composition. Her work has been presented in venues in Greece and abroad, and she has been selected as one of the Twenty24 and Twenty26 artists, as well as for the Moving Balkans Platform 2026.

The presentation of the performance during the One Dance Festival 2026 is supported by Onassis Stegi Touring Program