‘I realised sci-fi horror was the language I was speaking’: Dimitris Papaioannou on how Alien spawned his show Ink

He has staged Greece’s Olympic opening ceremony and scenes evoking myths and old masters. Now, the unclassifiable choreographer is taking his cue from Ridley Scott

In the 1980s, Dimitris Papaioannou was showing his performances in a squat in Athens. By 2004, he was choreographing Greece’s Olympic opening ceremony in the city. Ten years ago, at the age of 50, he suddenly found himself the darling of the international arts scene. It’s not a journey Papaioannou could have predicted when he ran away from home at 18 to train as a painter, but it’s led him to create a genre of performance unlike anything else you’ll see on stage.

“It’s not dance and it’s not theatre, and it’s not performance. I don’t know what the hell it is,” he says, over a video call from Greece. In his works The Great Tamer and Transverse Orientation, both previously seen in London, bodies transform in shifting shapes and images, often referencing fine art or figures from Greek myth: a scene might coalesce to reveal Botticelli’s Venus, or the Minotaur, or Jesus on the cross, or Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. But there’s also humour, illusion and flights of fancy, all modelled with care, craft and precision.