Lenio Kaklea

Lenio Kaklea was born in Athens; the Geneva festival Dance First Think Later gives her year of birth as 1985. She trained at the national conservatory of contemporary dance in Athens, where she studied classical ballet as well as American modern techniques and repertoires such as those of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and José Limón. In 2005 she received the prize of the Pratsika Foundation and moved to France. There she continued her studies at the Centre national de danse contemporaine (CNDC) in Angers, then directed by the choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh, and in 2008 she held a danceWEB scholarship at the ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna.

As a performer she danced in works by Alexandra Bachzetsis, Boris Charmatz, Claudia Triozzi, and François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea. In 2011 she completed SPEAP, the master’s programme in arts and politics led by the philosopher Bruno Latour at Sciences Po in Paris. Since 2009 she has made her own pieces, using choreography, text and video, and her festival biographies describe her work as informed by feminism and postcolonial critique.

Recognition followed in the late 2010s. In 2019 she received the dance prize of the Hermès Italia Foundation and the Triennale Milano. In 2024 she was one of seven artists who jointly received the 25th Prix Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris, the first time the prize went to all its nominees. Her works have often been presented in Athens, at the Onassis Stegi and the Athens Epidaurus Festival.

Her early pieces were mostly solos and duets. In deux • l, shown at the Onassis Stegi in February 2014, she choreographed herself to sound by Ryoji Ikeda, exploring the female body as a place of communication and thought; the project grew from a 2013 collaboration with the American choreographer Lucinda Childs. Margin Release f/f (2015), a duet with Kerem Gelebek at the Centre Pompidou, was built around the idea of the imprint. A Hand’s Turn (2017), at Peiraios 260 in Athens, was a private encounter of about 25 minutes.

In 2016 she began the Practical Encyclopaedia. Working with writers and analysts, she conducted about 600 interviews in Athens, Aubervilliers, Poitiers, Nyon, Essen and other places, collecting accounts of people’s habits, rituals, exercises and trades. The material became performances, a series of portraits and the book Πρακτική εγκυκλοπαίδεια, Αποκλίσεις (Practical Encyclopaedia, Detours, 2019) in Greek, French, English and German. The stage version, with three other women performers, came to the Onassis Stegi in January 2020.

Later works turned to memory, music and the body. Ballad (2019) is an autobiographical solo. Age of Crime (2021), commissioned by the Athens Epidaurus Festival for the bicentenary of the 1821 Revolution, used vampire figures and first-person Ottoman accounts of the revolution to question official national memory. In Sonatas and Interludes, she set John Cage’s music for prepared piano, played by Orlando Bass, in the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. The Birds (2025), for seven performers, draws on Vinciane Despret’s essay about how birds inhabit their territory.

Kaklea treats dance as a way of reading everyday life, which makes her a good guide to precise Greek. In a 2025 interview with the Athens magazine LiFO, about the hand gestures she choreographed for a fashion campaign, the reporter noted that she speaks of dance with words such as πρακτική (practice) and τριβή (friction) rather than as a show. For a Greek task, choose one gesture you repeat every morning, such as making coffee or tying your shoes. Write one sentence about the habit with Κάθε πρωί συνηθίζω να… (Every morning I usually…). Then write three sentences that describe only the movement, with exact verbs such as σηκώνω (I lift), στρίβω (I turn) and πιέζω (I press). Finally, say what the gesture shows about you: Η χειρονομία δείχνει ότι… (The gesture shows that…).

• In Athens she trained not only in classical ballet but also in the techniques of Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and José Limón.
• The text of Age of Crime was based on a 2019 book of Ottoman narratives about the Greek Revolution by the historians Sofia Laiou and Marinos Sarigiannis.
• A Hand’s Turn was performed every half hour, and afterwards visitors could take away a record of the choreography in book form.
• In 2025 she choreographed the hand gestures of a campaign filmed by the photographer Jack Davison.