Hystory

Playful, fragile, uncertain, mood swings... everything that was once held against women and girls turns into celebration. Choreographer Patricia Apergi dives into centuries of women's history and lifts it onto the iconic downstairs stage of Grand Theatre. The title says it all: ‘hystera’, the Greek word for uterus that lies at the root of the concept of hysteria, and history. Two words that should never have touched, and yet have always been entangled.

Hystory is the feminine answer to Apergi's earlier work Planites, in which men wandered through cities in search of a better world. Now women dance through fields of flowers, through memories, through what was attributed to them and what they chose for themselves. Soft and hypnotic. Harsh and violent.

They dig, hide and preserve what is of value: knowledge, seeds, stories, dreams. A dreamscape that shows what moves when what has long been held is finally let go.

Patricia Apergi is a Greek choreographer born in Athens. She studied dance, theater, and choreography at institutions including the University of Athens, the Niki Kotaxaki Dance School, the Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, and Middlesex University in London. In 2006, she founded Aerites Dance Company in Athens, through which she developed her own contemporary dance language, inspired by Greek traditions and combined with theater and movement.

With the Aerites dance company, she created works including The House of Trouble (2023), U(R)TOPIAS (2021), Hero (2020), Polittes (2018), and TANZheimer (2014), which were presented at major European festivals and venues. Apergi has also created works for theater and opera and has collaborated with leading Greek and international artists. She has taught at various institutions in Europe, served on the board of the Athens & Epidaurus Festival (2020–2022), and founded Greece’s first choreography academy in 2021 as part of her project U(R)TOPIAS.