The Greek choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou has a hazy childhood memory. It’s of a fisherman pounding an octopus on the rocks and recurs in his work like, he says, “a sexual act of death.” It returns in INK, his latest production, just one of the stage pictures that are at once arresting and queasy.
Papaioannou is an artist who works in surreal scenes touched by nightmare. The Olivier-nominated Transverse Orientation, his last show to visit London, was dominated by a life-size bull. In INK, he himself appears, alongside several octopi (fake, I fervently hope), a mostly naked younger man and gallons of water. Water sprays from a tap, sloshes from a perspex globe, mists the air and arcs across the stage.
