Kat Válastur  is a Greek choreographer who lives and works in Berlin and Athens. Her works bring to the stage the ruins of a world considered obsolete. The archaic elements of the Mediterranean region such as spirituality, magic, mysticism and rituals – still active mainly in rural life – as well as the soundscapes of the wild Mediterranean  landscapes are elements that permeate her works. Válastur brings these elements as fragments of a world of rhythms, sounds and voices into the contemporary techno-capitalist era, in a field of forces where the contemporary  technological world and the archaic coexist outside the framework of linear time. Through a mythical construction that abolishes the linearity of time between past and future, Válastur translates the force field of this coexistence into a hybrid choreographic and visual language between archaic and science fiction. Rhythm, sound and musicality are catalysts in her works, meticulously interwoven with her detailed kinetic language and orchestrated as if always on the threshold between a dance piece and a concert. She often uses special sculptures or constructions inspired by archaic idiophonic instruments, which the dancers interactively activate through movement, creating sound and musical scores. Poetic, mesmerising,, seductive yet  raw, her works convey  a sense of urgency and function as contemporary rituals that carry a potential for healing and spirituality.

MoonJar is a collaborative performance by choreographer and performer Kat Válastur and musician Aho Ssan, in a close partnership with designer and ceramist Latika Nehra. Together, they transform the theatre into a resonant vessel, a space where sound, movement, and myth converge. Within this space, the performer Kat Válastur herself, like an exhumer, retrieves ceramic relics from the mud that resemble bones, fragile, magical objects shaped by Nehra’s hand. As these sculptural forms emerge, so too do primal stories and creation myths, where death and birth follow the cyclical rhythm of time, echoing the phases
of the moon.

She tenderly cleanses and interacts with these ceramic “bones.” This physical engagement generates shifting forms, where her body and the ceramics merge, revealing a new body. Like a womb-like entity, the choreography becomes a primal vessel from which a new body, and potentially a new world, is born. MoonJar is a piece with a strong ritualistic character, like all Válastur’s works, marked by musical nuances and vocals inspired by folk lamentation songs, by sounds from ceramics and clay as foundational sonic materials, and by a circular, vibrating, metallic instrument that defines cyclical time. Alongside Aho Ssan’s immersive music and Kat Válastur’s instinctive choreographic language, which weaves together the archaic and the contemporary— MoonJar yearns for a new beginning, resonating within the nocturnal space of the vessel and echoing a scream for a better world.

Concept, Choreography, Performance and Vocals: Kat Válastur / Music / composer : Aho Ssan / Sound Design: Davide Luciani / Lighting Design & Technical Direction: Martin Beeretz  /Lighting Assistance: : Raoul 2000 / Choreographic and Dramaturgical Assistance: Michalis Angelidis / Stage Design: Nadja Sofie Eller / Platform Manufacture: Alex Felder / Vocal Coach: Marie Gailey / Production Management: Saskia Schoenmaker / Vocal Recordings at Morphine Raum

In the performance Dive Into You, choreographer and performer Kat Válastur hybridises the function of female oracles with the processes of photosynthesis and tree growth. Válastur creates a mythical correlation between the way in which female oracles transmit the divine by entering an ecstatic state and the way in which, in nature, the tree converts light into energy and oxygen through photosynthesis. The transposition of this analogy as a condition into the theatrical space creates a fascinating solo that manifests the quantum and temporal dimensions and aspects of this condition through rhythm, voice and elements of primordial energy such as vibration, spiral, cyclicity. Inspired by the deep, repetitive sounds of a wooden percussion instrument, the semantron  which the choreographer brings on stage through the creation of a wooden construction that she activates through her movements, she creates a dance piece on the threshold of a concert, accompanied by the musical composition of musician Aho Ssan and the vocals of Válastur herself. Dive into you emerges as an oracle that seeks to connect us with our most mysterious and tender part.

a production by Kat Válastur / Co-produktion  HAU Hebbel am Ufer / Centre Chorégraphique National de Grenoble.  Supported by O ESPAÇO DO TEMPO. Funded by Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ Coproduction Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.