What do a coin for Charon and a prison escape in Montevideo have in common? How are the detention cells at 4 Korai Street (Kommandantur) connected to an African traditional dance?
What do mines have to do with punk?

The dance company Prolet OCD, in collaboration with Alex Kalofolias of The Last Drive, presents Tanko Down. Picking up the thread from last year’s sold-out performance Underthumbs, choreographic duo Margarita Trikka and Katerina Gevetzi continue their exploration of the underground and bring their new work “down” into the legendary basement concert venue An Club for six performances in May 2026.

Drawing inspiration from the Japanese Tanko Bushi and the South African Gumboots, two miners’ dances that once functioned as underground languages of communication, the creators carve out their own subterranean route. Moving through mines, sewers, punk clubs, and detention cells, they compose a mosaic that explores human activity beneath the surface.

From punk culture, with its raw and unpolished expressiveness, to the rhythmic percussions of Gumboots and clandestine underground gatherings, an underground cartography of bodies emerges — bodies attempting to stage their own concert, to cry out wordlessly their invisible existence.

Sound becomes distorted, silences impose themselves, light sources fade away, while the bodies continue to move

/exhausted/

       /possessed/ 

                     /persistent/

searching for an answer to the question:

How do we exist beneath the earth?

Tanko Down is a choreographic descent. A work moving between the reality of underground existence and the mythology of the underground. A tribute to all those who exist “below ground” — the unseen, the fragile, the forgotten, who remain invisible yet keep the world in motion.

Beneath the asphalt there is… another world. A hidden, dark, persistent world, filled with bodies that work, celebrate, endure, and continue.