Cypriot performer Elena Antoniou closes this year’s Dance Umbrella Festival with LANDSCAPE — a fearless solo work that turns the gaze back on its audience. Through a choreography that blurs pleasure, trauma, and resistance, Antoniou explores how the body can exist as both subject and object, fragile yet defiant. The performance becomes a dialogue between vulnerability and control, politics and emotion. We caught up with Elena Antoniou to talk about self-objectification, gaze, and the radical freedom of owning one’s body on stage.
Interview with Elena Antoniou
LANDSCAPE closes this year’s Dance Umbrella Festival with an intimate and daring statement. What inspired you to create a work that so directly confronts the gaze and the politics of looking?
A free body, in a free and just society, can — and has the right to — engage in self-objectification. It holds the right to transcend itself in whatever way it chooses. If our bodies were truly free to exist in any form they wished, that wouldn’t be a daring act. It would simply be a body exploring the limits of its own existence.
The object-images I employ are recognizable and therefore accessible, inviting anyone to see and to experience them. Yet the crucial point is that I decide how far, how, and when self-objectification begins and ends. That agency is what renders the act radical.
Usually, others decide for us. But within LANDSCAPE, I remain sovereign over what happens to me. I have chosen to be the one seen — to invite all those gazes — on my own terms.
You describe LANDSCAPE as both deeply personal and political. How did your own experiences and identity as a Cypriot woman shape this piece?
As a woman I have experienced all levels of sexism, aggression, devaluation, etc. This is not something new. It’s a discussion that feminists have been talking about since the 60s and the 70s. But now I feel that feminism is more inclusive. Patriarchy attacks femininity wherever it’s being spotted. On trans people, on gay people and of course women of color.
In Cyprus, a small island in the Mediterranean, patriarchy and the male gaze are so deeply rooted that even we, as women, sometimes struggle to recognize them. We grew up with this lens, filtering everything through the male gaze, because that’s how we were raised.
The idea of being a woman that can be explicitly sexual, looking straight in the eyes of the beholder and at the same time extremely vulnerable is what it’s all about. To be free to be anything without being judged as this and that but to be able to experience life as a multifaceted individual and not to play the parts that patriarchy asked from you.
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The performance oscillates between pleasure and pain, exposure and resistance. How do you navigate those emotional extremes in your body while performing?
Let’s say that I’m exploring both physical and emotional limits. Drawing from my experience in durational performance, I use this practice as an exercise and a tool — to make it real, to transform it, and to turn it into something else.
I am interested in how time and duration reshape form and space. I work with daily movements, gestures, and images that the viewer can relate to — like a memory, something they have seen or experienced before. Long pauses, repetitive movements, giving full attention to a single action. In all of this, the gaze is my most important element. All of this takes place on a platform positioned at the center of the space, elevated above the audience. The visual composition of the environment is therefore inseparable from the physicality that emerges — they were conceived and developed together throughout the creative process. It would be entirely different if I performed all this on a traditional stage while the audience sat quietly in their seats. Inevitably, the architecture of each venue becomes part of an architectural narrative — one that the audience has the opportunity to experience as a 360-degree encounter.
I explore the boundaries of actions and images — for example, gestures that might appear violent or torturous yet emerge as pleasurable, and others that seem pleasurable but conceal deep discomfort and pain. The balance between trauma and pleasure is never fixed; it shifts, following my here and now each time I perform. The truth is that even though I have performed Landscape several times, the memory of the trauma it engages with is not easy to carry. The fragility remains. But that is the work: exploring how the fragility of trauma can create space for pleasure.
Your work often challenges traditional ideas of femininity and sexuality. What does “hypersexualising” the body mean to you in a performative and artistic sense?
The performance ultimately seeks to function as a mirror for anyone who witnesses it. The difference lies in the gaze. The spectators see a sexualized body — but in our work, it is the body that looks back at them. At the same time, they are aware that another spectator — perhaps a friend, a neighbor — is watching them as they watch this body, in a setting of full light where nothing and no one can hide. That is what generates the sense of unease, a discomfort that seems to recur almost everywhere.
As an artist, my aim is to reach that other gaze — the one uncorrupted by social stereotypes, collective trauma, violence, or abuse. A gaze capable of seeing a body simply as it is, and of appreciating the situation without filtering it through its own references.
If I wanted to be provocative, I suppose I would perform naked. What we are doing instead is creating the conditions to expose the audience’s hypersexualization mindset. The entire setup — the lighting environment, the fact that the audience is allowed to take photos or videos — is part of a framework that enables them to reveal and project their own perceptions of the female body that stands before them: sexualized, yes, but also vulnerable.
Of course, I feed, ignite, and highlight all the actions and projections that each viewer directs toward me. I look straight into their camera lens while they film me on all fours. Yet all of this originates from the audience — I merely respond. The transformation you mention is both a political and a deeply personal act. What we offer is a ground, a first stimulus for someone to ask themselves: “How do I feel now, facing this body performing these gestures before me? How do I see this?”
LANDSCAPE invites the audience into a vulnerable and charged space. How do you hope viewers respond — are you seeking empathy, discomfort, or something else entirely?
I cannot know what each person takes away from the performance, nor do I wish to guide it. What I do know is that we have opened the doors and said: “Now you are free to move through this space as you wish, to engage with this body from near or far, to photograph or film it. The choice is entirely yours.” From that point on, each person takes responsibility for their own experience.
It is deeply interesting to observe how each audience perceives the work differently — how my gaze encounters, in turn, each local gaze and its history. The female and queer audiences experience the performance — and me within it — in another way. It is a different kind of connection, one that I assume emerges from shared experience or perhaps from shared trauma. Queer people, trans people, femmes, and women can relate to the wounded landscape. It is there that we meet and connect. I believe that when my gaze encounters these individuals, a different kind of connection and understanding emerges — both from them toward me and from me toward them. They know what it takes for someone to expose themselves in the way I do in that moment; they can recognize the journey and appreciate it, which is why they observe every movement of mine with such care and attention. They make up the majority of the audience willing to step close. It is as if they create a protective circle around me.