God banished Cain after the murder of his brother Abell

Two men meet by chance. They wear the same clothes, inhabit the same body, perhaps even share the same past. Their encounter becomes the point of departure for a choreographic drift in which their synchronised movements – at times insistently repeated – begin to falter and mutate, generating a subtle disorientation; steps collapse into falls, embraces turn into struggles, gestures warp into desperate configurations. What emerges is a reckoning with the limits of proximity and distance, where even the costumes they wear become instruments in this volatile tug-of-war.

Nod, or the Land of Nod, is the place to which, according to the Book of Genesis, God banished Cain after the murder of his brother Abel – one of the earliest recorded acts of fratricide in human history. Beyond even the reach of the divine gaze, it is imagined as the threshold of humanity’s darker wandering, a realm suspended between dream and oblivion. Anonymous and unmoored from memory, the two men who meet in this land lay bare the relentless – and at times bleak – cycle of human existence: from love to violence, from closeness to rupture, from union to murder, from Cain and Abel to us.

The sonic fabric of the performance relies inventively on Requiem by Alfred Schnittke, interweaving instrumental and vocal textures, fixed and live electronics, and absorbing the ambiguities of its heterogeneous materials – from lyricism and melody to abrasion and noise. Through digital processing, the musical substance is distorted, and – mirroring the choreographic vocabulary – amplifies the sense of a fractured, disfigured reality.

In NOD, the thorns and harsh terrain of coexistence are confronted head-on, through a choreography unafraid to tread barefoot across this merciless ground once inhabited by Cain. In doing so, it reveals something elemental: the fragile, fierce beauty at the heart of human connection.

Photo: Christos Symeonides

CREDITS

Choreography Alexandros Vardaxoglou

Music Yannis Angelakis

Set design Evangelia Bakogianni

Costume Design Christina Lardikou

Costume production Francesco Infante

Set construction ROKANI collective, Evangelia Bakogianni

Lighting Design Vangelis Mountrichas

Assistant to the choreographer Vasia Bakogianni

Photography Christos Symeonides

Production Ars Nova Experimentalis Non-profit Arts and Culture Company

Performed by Alexandros Vardaxoglou, Nontas Damopoulos

Special thanks to Katerina Metaxopoulou, Nikos Salvaras, Thanos Karagiannis

Duration 50΄

Athens Epidaurus Festival
Peiraios 260 (B)
21/06/2026 at 20:00
22/06/2026 at 22:00

NOD is supported by the 2025 ARTWORKS Grants programme, which is funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) and other individual donors.

Nodas Damopoulos is a dance ARTWORKS Fellow.