Dublin Dance Festival 2026: My Fierce Ignorant Step (by Emily Aoibheann McDonnell)

My Fierce Ignorant Step by Christos Papadopoulos. Image, Pinelopi Gerasimou

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The back-up dancers have broken free and are making their own cosmopolitan art show, here amid the remnants of twentieth century pop-dream nostalgia. Madonna has been abandoned on a stage somewhere, wondering where her young, Greek and beautiful ensemble have escaped to, with their headsets, plastic bag pants and sparkling slenderness all in tow.

In Christos Papadopoulos' My Fierce Ignorant Step, a face emerges from the crowd before the image blurs in the constant cross-stepping of a human shoal. Another face pops: pleasing, familiar, briefly open, quickly turning machine, then animal, then digital glitch, then human again; constantly shifting, up-beat, off-beat, on-beat. Hitting fractional punctuation in quick and animated phrasing that travels across, forwards and back as the music generates and ascends over the course of an hour. Here we are, watching, lucky to arrive at the perfect moment, as the peacock fully opens his elaborate tail and performs his extravagant show. The cultivated wild opens towards us.

My Fierce Ignorant Step by Christos Papadopoulos. Image, Pinelopi Gerasimou

The dancing crowd uniformly swarms and counter-swarms. Walking, strutting actually, in continuous, detailed action. What unfolds is a vibrant spectacle in which we gaze upon a glamourised heyday memory: you just had to be there. Those were the days. Do you remember? Yes, we all lived together in that shimmering blue-purple reverie. That was us. The true us! The eternal us! Perfectly recollected and exact, down to our matching shoes. Blue is the thematic colour, both in Maria Panourgia's costumes and later in Stefanos Drousiotis’ lighting design, where moments of amethyst wash suggest the seventh chakra: a violet light rising from the top of the head, perhaps an incidental nod towards a symbol of enlightenment.

The dancers use the full scope of a conventional stage space, supported by the beautifully contained and considered set of Clio Boboti. An ambisonic-like set-up of six or more speakers mounted above low panels establishes the boundary early, and indicates the centrality of sound. The music is treated physically, both through the speaker array and amplified live action, as voice and breath escape from the dance, captured by select dancers wearing headsets: sounds of enthusiastic exertion accumulate as the performance energy blooms. Voice and breath are cleverly replicated within Kornilios Selamsis’ recorded score, producing echoes that shift and multiply, sending sounds darting in multiple directions.

My Fierce Ignorant Step by Christos Papadopoulos. Image, Pinelopi Gerasimou

The ensemble’s camp styling and headset microphones recall pop-stars with their back-up dancers: a sentimental euphoria of collective performance where everyone moves together in perfect cohesion. Yet within this idealised togetherness, the inevitable hierarchy of the ensemble goes oddly un-negotiated. Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Sotiria Koutsopetrou and Georgios Kotsifakis deliberately dominate the group, remaining heads to the tail of citizenry from some imaginary continental city, with a largely anonymous populous. In My Fierce Ignorant Step, the back-up dancers have back-up dancers, with some poised to become the show's stars.

Kotsifakis, in particular, begins to resemble a kind of show-host or charismatic social conductor. Though the work proposes euphoric togetherness, focus still orients around certain bodies. Yet the surrounding ensemble never fully dissolves into backdrop. Whether it is the whip of Amalia Kosma’s ponytail, the slightly sardonic expression of Maria Bregianni, or the elegant length of Adonis Vais, each performer, subtle or pronounced, contributes to the pleasure of watching a group merging so fluently in movement.

My Fierce Ignorant Step by Christos Papadopoulos. Image, Pinelopi Gerasimou

We are encouraged to enjoy the ease that conformity of action brings. In this world, togetherness is a biological impulse that transcends thought, oscillating between elevated civilisational possibility and the strange logic of animal life. The dance presents order within the throng of nature, curating a harmonious shared space. The phenomenon of human life is rendered as a soft non-collision of fantasy-driven reality, where society has its way with us, free from disruption and dissent. Though profoundly tactile and spatial, the work points towards an intellectual and highly composed social ideal, where uniform flow, and precise, disciplined execution, are wrought through the eye of the choreographer.

Drousiotis’ lighting, also spatially conceived, remains purposeful and pointed throughout, composed with the same precision as the choreography’s reassuring rhythmic neatness. Gradually it builds towards lightning strike as the music swells into a familiar-sounding military march, as if hearing a misremembered Bolero played in a lift at civilisation's end. At its pinnacle, the spectacle retreats from the edge of transcendence. It is precisely as excitement and frenzy grows that the work abandons the uncanny precipice, and fully relaxes into a sit-com or rom-com world of Glee: musical theatre leaps, struts, skits and prancing, maybe even jazz hands; with a satisfying flutter of arching elbows flowing and counter-flowing through the crowd. The earlier confusion of machine, animal and landscape gives way to pure gay spectacle. Papadopoulos’ squeaky-camp optimism recalls the glossy dream-world of Betty Elms in Mulholland Drive: a radiant ascent towards glamour, performance and the purity of fantasy. It is not the fractured reality of Diane Selwyn once the Hollywood hallucination collapses beneath its aesthetic surfaces.

My Fierce Ignorant Step by Christos Papadopoulos. Image, Panos Kefalos

It must be fun to match those movements so fluently across ten dancers. The ensemble is a perfected, fabricated community, dancing through an episode of Quantum Leap where references blend, blur and shape-shift. No one touches, yet everyone is the same: sanitary, respectful and coherent. When physical contact is finally made, it is disconcerting. That heyday memory hits again: you had to be there, we grew so close. Touch, and also gaze between dancers, when it happens, appears like a daytime television re-enactment, a romantic affectation of intimacy and love. No dirty contamination of human togetherness, just the youthful and flamboyant aspirations of optimistic artifice and sparkling theatricality. We, the young, the bisexual, the beautiful, are like this! Look how our assertion and cohesiveness carries us all along. No doubts! No resistance! No filthy difficulty! Just human city-animals holding on to hope at the tail end of Western Art. Presented as resistance in the face of decay, this dance reads more as an assertion of collective consensus, a juvenile rendering of our primal need to belong.

Fierce and ignorant. How could they ever be set apart? There is no doubt and no outsider view. Everything is cohesive and proper, blessed with establishment accolades. Except a natural hierarchy inevitably dictates the performance outcome. This is togetherness TM, where no one ever dies and all the stray cats of Athens are successfully rehomed. Here, in Papadopoulos’ meticulously composed world, the European dream might still be believed despite its crumbling edifice. It is simply important that we hold on to the vision. The dream! Of dance, and friends, and endless snappy, clever steps. The vision! Of perfection. The product of a significant team of artists working across mediums, and with commendations that speak to its impact, Christos Papadopoulos’ My Fierce Ignorant Step is an impeccably composed and extraordinarily precise spectacle whose flamboyant positivity and elegant stagecraft make for a beautiful, generous and playful dance experience.

Interested in dance? Catch it if you can!

Christos Papadopoulos' My Fierce Ignorant Step runs from 7 - 9 May at the Abbey Theatre, as part of Dublin Dance Festival, 2026.

For more information Dublin Dance Festival, 2026

Emily Aoibheann McDonnell is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Dublin.