Vertebra Theatre, bursting onto the scene in 2012 under the Artistic Direction of Mayra Stergiou, is an Award-Winning Ensemble of neurodivergent, non neurodivergent and Queer artists from all walks of life.
Our team, hailing from diverse backgrounds and artistic disciplines, is dedicated to crafting contemporary Choreographic Theatre that thrives on Experimentation. With al blend of the Absurd and the Surreal we look at the live body in relation to space, architecture and myth.
Through expanded scenography and physical dramaturgy, our work dissolves the boundaries between theatre, dance, opera and visual art, creating performances that are at once architectural, corporeal and poetic.
Projects such as Electra Untitled and Medusa Opera exemplify our commitment to creating immersive works that question how bodies, spaces and myths interact in performance ecologies.
At the centre of our art and research is the belief that space choreographs the body as much as the body choreographs space. Each project becomes a laboratory where scenographic structures, soundscapes and corporeal vocabularies generate new dramaturgies. Mythological and archetypal narratives serve as resonant frameworks, reimagined through contemporary movement languages and collaborative processes.
Influenced by the physical theatre of Jacques Lecoq, the theatrical radicalism of Antonin Artaud, the embodied poetics of Pina Bausch, the visual worlds of Tadeusz Kantor and the ritualistic theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos, we approach performance as a moving architecture of human experience.
Philosophically, our practice draws upon existentialism, feminist and queer theory, and the politics of embodied knowledge. From Nietzsche’s interrogation of established values to postdramatic theatre, expressionism and Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performative, we are interested in how bodies become sites of transformation. We aim to challenge conventional hierarchies between text and movement and actor and spectator. Through devising, intercultural exchange and neurodiversity-affirming approaches, we seek to create work that embraces diversity, ambiguity and multiple ways of perceiving the world.
Our practice is informed by dramatherapy and trauma-informed creative methodologies, recognising artistic creation as a potential space for care, critical reflection and social transformation.
We return to myth, tragedy and archetypal narratives not to preserve them, but to disturb them: to question their contemporary political urgency and re-imagine alternative futures. We believe the stage is a place where the personal becomes political and the invisible becomes tangible. Our performances unfold as spatial landscapes of movement where performers and audiences inhabit environments that blur the distinction between stage design, choreography and storytelling. Vertebra Theatre positions itself in between the fields of contemporary dance and choreographic theatre, contributing to international discourse on expanded scenography and performance design.
