My Fierce Ignorant Step, a celebration of collective energy and the courage to hope
October 27, 2026 • WestmountMag.ca
Danse Danse welcomes Christos Papadopoulos’ My Fierce Ignorant Step, a celebration of collective energy and the courage to hope. Carried by an original score by Kornilios Selamsis, the production explores how individual impulses become collective momentum.
Bodies, voices and breath contribute to an expanding soundscape, turning the simple act of moving together into an affirmation of life.
What does it mean to choose joy when the world offers so many reasons for despair? For Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos, the question is neither abstract nor naïve. It is the starting point for My Fierce Ignorant Step, a work for ten dancers that Danse Danse brings to Théâtre Maisonneuve at Place des Arts from October 28 to 31.
Bodies, voices and breath contribute to an expanding soundscape, turning the simple act of moving together into an affirmation of life. This engagement marks both the company’s first appearance at Danse Danse and the presenter’s first invitation to a Greek company.
Hope as an act of resistance
Papadopoulos began the work by reflecting on the distance between youthful confidence and present anxieties. He recalls a time when the future seemed open, and action felt possible, before experience introduced caution, disappointment and doubt. Yet his return to that fearlessness is not nostalgia. Against a backdrop of war, environmental destruction and political extremism, he asks whether optimism can be recovered as a resource for living rather than dismissed as innocence.
“I have to remind myself that hoping is already an act of resistance,” he writes in his production note. The statement gives the work its emotional and political foundation: hope is not an escape from reality, but a refusal to surrender to it. Rather than illustrating contemporary crises, Papadopoulos seeks the energy that lets people face them. The stage becomes a place to test what connection can make possible.
A shared musical memory
An important source of inspiration is Axion Esti, Mikis Theodorakis’s monumental setting of poetry by Nobel laureate Odysseas Elytis. Deeply embedded in Papadopoulos’s childhood memories, the work joins personal experience to a wider Greek cultural consciousness. Its confrontation between suffering and beauty resonates throughout My Fierce Ignorant Step. According to the production’s press release, Axion Esti also inspired Selamsis’s original score.
This is not, however, a choreographic adaptation of Theodorakis’s composition. What matters is the shared landscape music can awaken: remembered voices, emotional associations and the recognition that others carry something of the same experience. As the company’s text explains, “The subject is not the music itself but the shared landscape it evokes.”
From small gestures to collective force
Papadopoulos has developed a distinctive movement language through repetition, precision and close attention to group dynamics. A modest gesture can acquire unexpected power when sustained, altered or passed between performers.
In My Fierce Ignorant Step, that approach becomes increasingly expansive. Reviewing the Athens production for Springback, critic Iris Kotsou describes rhythmic steps, shoulder movements and head movements accumulating alongside the score’s instrumental layers. Stomping, diagonal crossings and sudden changes of direction intensify the ensemble’s physical energy.
The effect depends not simply on uniformity, but on the relationship between individual dancers and the group. Personal qualities remain visible within the shared patterns. The production’s own formulation captures the distinction: “We do not dance together because we are synchronized, but we synchronize because we are together.”
An international voice arrives in Montreal
Papadopoulos studied dance and choreography at Amsterdam’s School for New Dance Development, theatre at the National Theatre of Greece’s drama school, and political science at Panteion University in Athens. He gained international recognition with Elvedon and Opus, followed by Ion and Larsen C.
For Montreal audiences, this introduction offers more than a display of ensemble precision, a way of looking at solidarity.
In 2025, Larsen C earned him the inaugural Rose International Dance Prize at Sadler’s Wells in London, recognition that preceded the creation of My Fierce Ignorant Step. Premiered in 2025, the new work has travelled internationally, with engagements including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Marseille. It was also nominated for the FEDORA – Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Prize.
For Montreal audiences, this introduction offers more than a display of ensemble precision: it proposes a way of looking at solidarity, not as an abstract ideal, but as something practised through attention, rhythm and the willingness to move with others.
About Danse Danse
Danse Danse, an associate presenter at Montreal’s Place des Arts, invites you to discover the best of contemporary dance from here and abroad in the heart of the Quartier des spectacles. Since its founding in 1998, Danse Danse has offered a diverse, 21st-century program of new creations and landmark works from the contemporary repertoire. Danse Danse proudly contributes to Montreal’s international outreach as the capital of dance and a metropolis of movement.
My Fierce Ignorant Step
Théâtre Maisonneuve, Place des Arts.
Duration: 65 minutes, without intermission. Tickets start at $49.
Images courtesy of Danse Danse
