Eleonora Siarava
Choreographer, performer, artistic director
About
Eleonora Siarava is a choreographer, performer and artistic director of Per_Dance Platform of Choreographic Research. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2022.
She graduated with Distinction from Coventry University (UK) acquiring an MA in “Dance Making and Performance” with a focus on reflective methods of dance composition (2010). She has attended classes at the Choreographic Centre of La Rochelle (France) and she completed the program of the California Institute of Arts “Creating Site-Specific Dance and Performance Works”. She holds a BA in Psychology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. As a choreographer she has presented her work internationally in various festivals and venues such as Make > Shift Festival (Coventry 2010), Moving Out Festival (Coventry 2010), Espacio 3-Kodra Festival (Thessaloniki 2011), Dance Days Festival (Chania 2012), 11th and 13th Festival of Greek Choreographers (Athens 2012, Thessaloniki 2014), Blackbox Theatre (Thessaloniki 2015), Megaron Concert Hall of Thessaloniki (2016), 51st Festival of Dimitria (Thessaloniki 2016), stART, Warehouse C, a commission by Goethe Institut of Thessaloniki and Robert Bosch Stiftung (Thessaloniki 2017).
Her video dance Co-topia on screen was presented at the Off Borders Festival/MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts/Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (2018), Wicklow Screendance Laboratory (Ireland, 2018), 1st International Screendance Festival Freiburg (Germany, 2019), 28 Quinzena de Dança de Almada –International Dance Festival-Video Dance Showcase at the Goethe-Institut Lisbon in a special session for artists & productions from Germany including screening and project presentation (Portugal 2020).
Experience
She worked as a performing artist for the project of Marina Abramović ‘A different way of hearing’ presented at Alte Oper of Frankfurt (2019) and she was a resident choreographer at SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographing Development for Interdisciplinary Incubator 2019 (Prague) and at Perform[d]ance Institut with the support of START, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Goethe Institut Thessaloniki (Βerlin-Stralsund-Stuttgart, 2015). In this framework she presented the piece Co-topia at the 13th century St. Nikolai Church (2015).
She was part of Moving Digits project (2018-2020), a partnership between Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Hochschule Düsseldorf, Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (Estonia), Tanzhaus NRW and University of Greenwich.
She is a PhD candidate at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki-Department of Theatre researching “The multiple meaning in Abstract Dance: The choreographic synthesis and the possibilities provided by perception theories” and made part of her doctoral research at the Institut for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen University – MA in Choreography under the direction of Bojana Kunst and the Academy for Music and Performing Arts of Frankfurt (2016-2018, Erasmus+ Program & guest researcher).
Collaborations
As a dancer she has collaborated with Meghan Flanigan / Making Space Festival (Coventry, 2010), Cathy Washbrooke-…’scape (Bedfordshire, 2010), Adrastia DanceTheater / 2nd Contemporary Dance Festival of Thessaloniki (2012), Ariadne Mikou & Future Mellon-UNSUNG / 2nd Lazaristes Dance Festival (2012) and performed for “Site Echoes” of Coventry School of Art and Design / Inside Out Festival (Birmingham, 2010) and the movie of the internationally awarded film director Theo Angelopoulos “The Weeping Meadow”.
She has offered classes at the Higher Professional Dance School of Thessaloniki, Das Plateau-Frankfurt, Tanznetz | Freiburg – Professional Training / E-WERK, National Centre for Youth of Greece, as a guest lecturer at the Theatre Studies Department of the University of Peloponnese, Centre for Dance Research / Coventry University, Plymouth University et.al.
She has participated at the international Festival Ruhrtriennale in {Hello World} project of ArtEZ University of the Arts Arnhem (Bochum, Germany 2017) and attended the ‘Resources Lab of Motion Bank’ (Academy for Music and Performing Arts, Frankfurt, 2017). Motion bank is an on-line platform about Documentation and On-line Digital Scores of Dance initiated by choreographer William Forsythe.
She was a member of ColLaboratoire / CogNovo project for the interdisciplinary study of dance improvisation / kinesthetic empathy / instant composition (Plymouth University, 2016).
Awards
Her site & time specific choreographic installation Step-in was awarded by Megaron Concert Hall of Thessaloniki and presented in the framework of Enclosures | Pass-throughs Project.
For her work The Body and the Other~ (2020) she was awarded with the artistic mobility grant i-Portunus / Creative Europe Programme (2019), supported from the program “Transfer International” of KULTURsekretariat – Nordrhein-Westfalen of Germany, Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW and Tanzhaus NRW and collaborated with the Mixed Reality and Visualization Institut (MIREVI, Düsseldorf) for the use of digital technology. The piece premiered at Temps d’ Images Festival, Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf after a 2 months residency in the context of the festival.
Since 2020 her work is continually supported by the Ministry of Culture of Greece. During that time she created the pieces Who knows where the time goes – potential destination #1 and BLUE BEYOND (National Theatre of Northern Greece) and developed the choreographic research ‘UnderScore, Choreographic Objects and more’.