Ioannis Mandafounis

Ioannis Mandafounis (also spelled Yannis Mandafounis or Mantafounis) was born in Athens in 1981. He studied dance first in Athens and then at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse in Paris. In 2002 he received a dance award from the Greek Ministry of Culture. He danced with the Gothenburg Opera’s dance company and with Nederlands Dans Theater II, and from 2005 to 2009 he was a member of the Forsythe Company in Frankfurt, the ensemble of the American choreographer William Forsythe.

He began choreographing in 2004. In Athens he formed the Lemurius company, whose pieces included Anthropines Diastasis (Human Dimensions, 2007), and in 2007 he made a new version of L’Après-midi d’un faune for the Greek National Opera. In 2009, with Fabrice Mazliah and May Zarhy, he founded the collective mamaza in Frankfurt and a company in Geneva, Cie Projet 11, which was later renamed Cie Ioannis Mandafounis. In 2015 he won the Swiss Dance Awards prize for Outstanding Male Dancer.

In 2022 it was announced that he would succeed Jacopo Godani as artistic director of the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, the ensemble that grew out of the Forsythe Company. He took up the post with the 2023/24 season, so he now leads the company tradition in which he once danced.

Improvisation is Mandafounis’s central tool. In his performances the structure is agreed, but the movement is not fixed: each performer listens to the space, watches what is happening and decides how to move, so the piece changes from moment to moment. He also teaches improvisation workshops and classes that look at ballet through budo, the Japanese martial art.

Greek audiences have seen this method in several forms. Sing the Positions (2017), made with Manon Parent, mixes dance with songs and sounds created live; it came to the Athens Festival in 2018. In January 2018 he staged MayaBuff for the National Theatre of Greece, based on Mayakovsky’s play Mystery-Bouffe; no performer kept one fixed role. In 2019 the Athens Festival presented One One One in an open space near Thissio: two spectators sat on chairs while two dancers performed only for them. For the Greek National Opera Ballet he created Point of No Return (2020) to music by Giorgos Koumendakis.

His first work for the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, À la carte (2023), works like a restaurant menu. Its scenes have no fixed order, and the dancers choose props, music and dance styles on the spot, in conversation with the audience. It earned a nomination for Germany’s DER FAUST theatre award in 2024 and was performed at the Athens Festival in June 2024.

Mandafounis works mainly abroad, but he keeps returning to Greek stages: the Greek National Opera, the National Theatre and the Athens Epidaurus Festival, which brought his Dresden Frankfurt company to Peiraios 260 in 2024. A 2018 Greek newspaper article describes his method with a precise verb: the performer αφουγκράζεται (listens closely to) the space. Try this: find the article «Μπούφα και επανάσταση» (Bouffe and Revolution) in the Greek daily Εφημερίδα των Συντακτών (16 January 2018) and underline its verbs of movement and perception. Then write three instructions for a partner exercise in your own Greek, for example Εσύ οδηγείς, εγώ ακολουθώ (You lead, I follow) or Άκου τον χώρο πριν κινηθείς (Listen to the space before you move). These are our own practice sentences, not instructions from his workshops.

• The company he now directs was founded in 2005 as the Forsythe Company, the same year he joined it as a dancer.
• In One One One the whole audience was two people at a time, and admission in Athens was free.
• He teaches ballet from the point of view of budo, the Japanese martial art.
• He accepted MayaBuff because, as he told a Greek newspaper, Mayakovsky’s text is very rhythmic, close to what he could offer as a choreographer.