The solo improvisation piece “the move” deals with our kinetic habits and the way they relate to thought. By carefully studying her personal everyday motions and the way these are transcribed into art work, choreographer/performer Nandy Gogoulou reflects on literality and metaphor in order to discover new mechanisms of consideration, of moving from one position to another. As she notes, “The result of my research is a solo that is constantly developing, shifting. The aim is to understand that one does not necessarily need to change his/her thoughts but possibly to see these very thoughts through another perspective.”

Concept/Performance/Sound Design: Nandy Gogoulou
Costume: Niki Psychogiou
Photos: Dimitris Mamaloukos
Video teaser: Nandy Gogoulou
Residency/Support: KID Residency (Malmö, Sweden)

Duration: 10′

The solo piece of Alexandra Kostopoulou is inspired by the great Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656) and especially from one of her best known works titled “Susanna and the Elders”. The work depicts the sexual harassment that a young woman suffers from two old men, and handles the personal traumatic experience as a universal event of historical proportions. Gentileschi’s rape at a young age and her courageous, unusual fight for justice against her assailant are facts that have been connected to her paintings and career in many different ways. Kostopoulou turns to this strong female figure, who has painted the sufferings and rage of many like her, in order to develop her own contemporary dance story against patriarchy and its ever-recurring violence.

Choreography & Performance: Alexandra Kostopoulou
Original Music Composition: Lazaros Papageorgiou, Alexandra Kostopoulou
Costume: Olga Evangelidou
Light Design: Nikos Vlasopoulos
Promo Photos: Alexandros Christidis

Duration: 10′

“About disappearing” is a solo in progress originally created by choreographer/dancer Alexandra Rogovska as a tribute to Japanese choreographer and regenerator of the tradition of Butoh, Ko Murobushi.

In reference to her conceptual context as it involves notions of identity, disappearance, and the drive to change, Elie Pragout notes of the artist’s work: “Contrary to her mythological counterpart, the entomologist’s nymph is nothing but the promise of the butterfly, the link between two metamorphoses. What ultimately connects the two is, primarily, the notion of disappearance. Being the absolute vision, the nymph of myths disappears from view; the one of biology completely changes its form. They are both fleeting, transitory. They both leave the ruins of form in their wake: here the remnants of a shed cocoon, there a piece of clothing or the memory of a scent – the imprint of desire.”

Drawing on Ovid, the myth of Persephone, and Balzac, Rogovska investigates the agitation of form to the limits of no-recognition. She examines the problems of representation and (dis)similarity; the image of death in East and West; the inappropriate, funny, even grotesque movements of bodies that are reborn as something other, hidden and un-recognizable.

Creation & Performance: Alexandra Rogovska
Music: Ryoji Ikeda, Mika Vainio, Alva Noto, Philip Jeck

Duration: 20′