Upcoming Seminar (11/18): The Stains Queers Leave Behind: Dance-Theater, Poetry, and Archival Reimaginings

[Dimitris Antoniou]

Dear list members,    

The University Seminar in Modern Greek, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI), and the Program in Hellenic Studies at Columbia University are organizing the online seminar The Stains Queers Leave Behind: Dance-Theater, Poetry, and Archival Reimaginings, which will take place this coming Thursday (11/18) at 14:10 ET. Billie Mitsikakos (University of Oxford) will bring into dialogue the dance-theater of Dimitris Papaioannou and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy, with Chloe Tsolakoglou (Columbia University) as discussant. Click here to register and receive the link for the seminar. See below for the full description and details. We look forward to seeing you!  

With all good wishes,    
Dimitris

Dimitris Antoniou

Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Hellenic Studies, 

Department of Classics

Associate Director, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative

Columbia University

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The Stains Queers Leave Behind: Dance-Theater, Poetry, and Archival Reimaginings

Billie Mitsikakos (DPhil candidate, Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford) and Chloe Tsolakoglou (discussant, PhD candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University)

November 18, 2025

14:10-15:30 ET

Online

This paper takes its cue from the dialogue between the art of Dimitris Papaioannou and the oeuvre of C. P. Cavafy, focusing on a performance piece selected as a response to the poet during a commemorative event. I propose that what emerges as a common trope from the intersection between dance-theatre and poetry is an emphasis on the traces queer bodies leave behind through movement and contact: imprints of limbs and blotched cloths that are neither disposed of nor archived in the conventional sense but nonetheless kept close in counterintuitive ways. What alternative insights into knowing and registering queer beings does the insistence on such remains offer? Moreover, how might the staging of their preservation revise our normative conceptualisations of the archival?

Through Papaioannou and Cavafy, I frame the existence of these stains in queer minoritarian cultural production as an intensified use of semiotic deixis, which involves touch, impression, and indication. Indexicality, I argue, serves as a counter hegemonic strategy, particularly at times of crisis, to signify and secure queer presence and interconnection in an unmediated, intimate, and affirmative fashion. By privileging embodiment and relationality over scrutiny and rigid classifications, indexical stains disrupt dominant archival norms and radically reimagine the archive as non-authoritative, participatory, and inclusive.