Zeibekiko

Anna Sokolova

12 minutes ago

3 min read

Presented by red_zebra_productions

Sydney Fringe 2026

22-26 September

The review

“Zeibekiko”, as it describes itself, is “an intimate exploration of the echoes that remain in a trans body: of culture, masculinity and femininity”.

Zeibekiko is a Greek dance traditionally performed over centuries only by men (nowadays the requirement is softened, but let’s set that aside for now). There are no fixed steps; instead, it is a dance of men who know how to face all sides of life with dignity, enduring pain and suffering without a moan, with only moves expressing otherwise hidden feelings.

Solo performance by Theo Carroll, a mix of dancing and a story, set up on a bare black square stage in a corner of a small room, with black curtains at the back. There are several tall, waist-height, skinny color-changing lamps, which can be arranged standing up, like a fence or swords stuck into soil, and if they are on the floor, they look like strange strikes, fracturing the space. They are half shielded in length, so one can turn them to light up or darken the stage.

The show is perfectly synchronised with a soundscape by Milo McLaughlin, who is right there, at the edge of the stage, closely watching Theo’s moves, controlling a pitch-perfect music score and sound modulations.

Theo is slipping, sliding, stomping, moving fast and slowing down, lunging, touching the floor, spreading arms like wings. The dance is shaping the story; it started from it and concluded with it too. The magic of this dance is that the same moves which are gentle and soft at first are soaked in anger and frustration then.

It is the story of a trans man, a constant search, adjustment, and justifying the ways to fit in not into a particular society but in his own ‘me’, linking happy and weird memories, all assembled from excellently written, vivid fragments.

The opening part is about a trivial everyday experience of using a public toilet. It is a hilarious one, yet a bit unsettling because of underlying anxiety, threat, and danger, and easily avoiding low-level jokes, it felt like a smart, detailed, slightly clinical psychological essay about men’s nature.

Swinging time and time again into the past filled with the hot air of Greek summer, there are sweet, tender, carefully brought up memories of the days spent with Papoa. Recollections of his worked, big, strong hands fixing things in a workshop, or shaving, or cracking nuts with a hummer are so vivid that one can nearly hear a whole palette of smells of a road, cars, a bathroom.

A memory trip to a fortnight-long female etiquette camp is an anthology of all possible shades of embarrassment, rebellion, joy of being an outcast, hopelessness of attempts to be feminine, or hating even trying to be so.

And suddenly, like something like a pagan move in a sacred ritual, all wraps itself into a dark funnel of a hurricane, throwing the story into a crying scream of catharsis. Violence and cruelty hitting an unguarded one is scary, and the transition was not foreseeable. The summit of a play is rough and strong; if only I could distinguish what was said there a bit more clearly, but emotions were covering the speech, at the end taken over by a heavy, powerful dance of a hurt but strong and spirited man.

Theo Carroll's writing and performing are exceptional. It blows out the time/space continuum, bursting itself far beyond a tight hour.

This is work in development, and it is already a solid, well-shaped, powerful production.

Please keep a front-row spot for me for the next season. Cannot wait.