The future is dark which is the best thing a future can be is a performance-board game that seeks critical ways of connecting with today's reality and activates alternative speculations about the future. Starting from the question 'What am I doing/ are we doing now?' as a trigger for identifying collective urgencies, each performance explores a new theme. Three performers, different each time, move as pawns across a floored landscape of stations of knowledge/notions such as The Palace of Feminist Governance, The Rock of Responsibility, The Cavern of Care, charting their own personal journey, while supporting each other and empowering their journey, in order to reach the Beginning/End of the World all together and win. While the threat Dark times are coming lurks constantly to subvert the game and interrupt their course, the rules of the game guide the performers through choreographic and dramaturgical scores in the production of poetic manifestos, speculative narratives, critical questions and embodied landscapes.

The project is shaped by the choreographic and dramaturgical practice of its two creators, Petros Konnaris and Rodia Vomvolou, and explores the connection between the logic of a board game and choreographic thinking, blurring the line between performing arts and everyday life. The board game as an imaginary performative stage proposes a horizontal redistribution of agency and power hierarchies, an open, vulnerable and playful space that hosts critical thinking, dialogue and reflection drawn by dance, bodily practices and dramaturgy. A landscape in which a collective thinking body can be activated as an exercise in connectivity and ultimately perhaps even action.

On 13, 14, 20 and 21 June, the audience witnesses the game-performance and participates in the choice of the topic. In addition, between 16 and 19 June, the audience has the opportunity to play the game with other people, discussing their own concerns about today's reality and experiencing from within the activation of a collective, critical atmosphere and the negotiation that emerges while playing.

*The title is borrowed from a quote that Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1915, in view of the beginning of the First World War, as an attempt to preserve hope.

Participatory game – Come to play with us: 16th, 19th of June at 18:00 and 17th , 18th of June at 10:00 and 18:00 (Booking required: https://forms.gle/PCzCRe7QAXPLjvAn9) 

Duration: 180’

In the frame of Terpsichori 2025 of the Department of Contemporary Culture - Deputy Ministry of Culture Cyprus.

Short Bio:

Petros Konnaris is a performance artist working between the fields of dance, live art and participatory art. Rodia Vomvolou is a dramaturg and researcher working in the field of choreography. Their collaboration as choreographer and dramaturg started in 2020 with the piece The only thing that matters is how much you love as part of the Moving the New Residency programme of Dance House Lemesos and continued independently in the creation of Performing Silence (2021) and Feel free to take a nap (2023). The Future is dark which is the best thing a future can be is the first piece they co-create.